Cormac McCarthy (1933 - 2023)

[Big Ben]

Cormac McCarthy

[therewillbeblus]

Cormac McCarthy

Wow, glad he was able to get two more novels out before he went

[Mr Sausage]

Crazy for two such big names in publishing as McCarthy and Amis to go within a month of each other. I was never a big fan of Amis, but McCarthy held a fascination for me in my mid-20s. I haven't read his recent diptych (both because he's no longer so urgent for me and because they don't sound particularly good) and won't any time soon, but I did re-read Blood Meridian a couple years back, and its apocalyptic power and sheer strangeness hit me all over again.

[colinr0380]

It does seem a shame that he did not live long enough to see his fiction play out in reality. He was so close, too!

I have veered away from reading Cormac McCarthy for now because, well, things are bleak enough at the moment. And somehow I have managed to not see No Country For Old Men or The Road either, although they are both trapped in my 'to watch' pile. Though I have seen The Counselor, which I quite enjoyed for its brutally pitch black humour (does that mean that McCarthy was working in similar territory to a writer like Flannery O'Connor?), and because I enjoy Wendigoon's videos about religiously-tinged literature, I did use his Blood Meridian video to have the story read to me over a few evenings like a bedtime story a little while ago, which was quite the experience!

[Mr Sausage]

His earlier, Tennessee-set stuff like Outer Dark or Suttree has a bit of Flannery O'Connor's bleak-but-comic southern gothic style I guess, but really the bigger comparison is Faulkner.

But if you want to give McCarthy a shot without enduring the bleakness, go for All the Pretty Horses. It's great and leaves aside his taste for apocalyptic or degraded landscapes and people.

[beamish14]

Suttree is the one that really grabbed me. David Foster Wallace studied it very closely in preparation for writing his own novels

[bdsweeney]

Sad to read of Cormac McCarthy’s death. The last paragraph of The Road is probably my favourite ever. I think of it often when I’m fearful of the future and of the world my son will be living in.

[therewillbeblus]

But if you want to give McCarthy a shot without enduring the bleakness, go for All the Pretty Horses. It's great and leaves aside his taste for apocalyptic or degraded landscapes and people.

It's my favorite Cormac, but I've only made my way through half his work (I was planning to read Suttree and Outer Dark last year, but never got around to them). The only book of his I actively dislike is The Road, and I'm pretty sure my detest has less to do with traumatic conditions of consuming it in one sitting during my first week of sobriety and more to do with it being an overrated, rote-depressing dilution of what makes him a great author, but we'll never know because I'd rather reread Child of God's ugliness

[Mr Sausage]

McCarthy’s powers started to wane after All the Pretty Horses. The two sequels progressively decline in quality, with The Crossing unable to find a balance between its brilliant moments and its aimless bloat, and Cities of the Plain being a dull collection of hollywood cliches. No Country for Old Men was fine, but much improved by the Coens. I did like The Road, tho’. I’d say McCarthy’s major period was from Outer Dark to All the Pretty Horses.

[therewillbeblus]

I used to spend a lot of time with a friend who was going through a Cormac phase, and he used to bring the two sequels to meetings around Boston and share highlighted passages of rich prose, so I feel like I've read a lot of what works about them without mulling through the narratives themselves. I never felt the need to read No Country all the way through, because I've skimmed through it and it just feels like I'm reading the screenplay for the Coens movie (did they change a single thing?) I do want to read his two recent novels though. They seem to strongly appeal to my interests and I already have them sitting on my dresser, but that probably means I'll get to them in like ten years

[knives]

They changed a few things particularly at the end which while hardly noticeable does make a significant change in impact.

[therewillbeblus]

Interesting, aside from skimming the bulk of the book I deliberately read the last twenty pages and didn't notice anything, but that was like ten years ago so I'll take your word for it

[Mr Sausage]

I’m pretty sure both Cities of the Plain and No Country For Old Men were written first as screenplays, then turned into novels when McCarthy couldn’t get them produced. They certainly read that way.

[hearthesilence]

Salon reviewed the book when the film was still being made and published one crucial part from the ending that would have tempered the film’s nihilism:

SpoilerShow

"There's no such thing as life without bloodshed," McCarthy said 13 years ago in a rare interview. And like his character Moss, McCarthy can't help peeking. The constant question underlying his fiction is how we are to live on in the face of this knowledge. At the end of "No Country for Old Men," in the last of his ruminations that punctuate the book, Sheriff Bell poses a version of this question as he ponders the unknown mason of an old water trough:

"That country had not had a time of peace of any length at all that I knew of ... But this man had set down with a hammer and chisel and carved out a stone water trough to last ten thousand years. Why was that?"

Bell's answer surely echoes McCarthy's own project as a writer:

"And I have to say that the only thing I can think is that there was some sort of promise in his heart. And I dont have no intentions of carving a stone water trough. But I would like to be able to make that kind of promise."

[therewillbeblus]

That seems akin to what I get from the end of the film though.. I think it postures at nihilism, like a lot of McCarthy’s work, but that’s partially from the sobriety away from an egocentric worldview rather than a godlike awareness of what objectively ‘is’ meaningless, because that would be vanity too. The final lines of “waking up” can signify a portal into a new phase. It’s partly tragic, like all transitions / confrontations of our limitations / emergences from fantasy are, but there’s still very much a point to living. Sitting around and pondering and feeling strong feelings around it all is evidence of that, and Tommy Lee Jones emotes wonderfully in that final shot, far more than he does in the rest of the film. One could even argue that his life will take on greater, deeper meaning now

[beamish14]

I’m still pining for Billy Bob Thornton’s original 3-hour cut of All the Pretty Horses, which was victim to one of the most vicious Miramax re-edits ever

[SeizureMilk]

I’m pretty sure both Cities of the Plain and No Country For Old Men were written first as screenplays, then turned into novels when McCarthy couldn’t get them produced. They certainly read that way.

From thescriptlab.com:

In fact, McCarthy himself originally wrote No Country for Old Men as a screenplay before rewriting it as a novel when it failed to catch on in Hollywood. Before its publication, it drew the attention of the Coen Brothers, who adapted the book themselves before directing what is widely considered to be one of the best crime films of the new millennium.

And per johnpistelli.com:

Cities of the Plain began life as a screenplay, and it shows. For most of its length, it is bare description and dialogue. While its scene-setting is often concisely vivid and its cowboy conversations laconically witty, it lacks either the lived-in quality of a successful realistic novel or sufficient stylization to justify such mimesis’s absence.

[Mr Sausage]

I don't think McCarthy postured at nihilism; I think he had an authentic apocalyptic vision of the world. But he avoided giving in fully to despair. The most obvious example (and the thing that his ending of No Country for Old Men is an inferior imitation of) is the strange final chapter of Blood Meridian, the one everyone forgets where the man crosses the wasteland charging fire into the rock as some Promethean quest to...redeem humanity? Reignite the dying world? Hard to say, but it does stop the novel's final image from being the naked Judge fiddling and dancing for eternity.

[therewillbeblus]

I agree completely. Sorry, sometimes I use the behavioral definition of posture from my days in residential institutions. I meant it can be interpreted by the reader as testing the waters, but I don’t think McCarthy ever embraces it