Most of the news notifications and obit-lites so far have led with Pulitzer Prize-winning author, but The Road was not my favorite book of his, nor do I think it’s Cormac McCarthy’s best. Or, rather, I don’t think it’s the one that represented the man at his apotheosis, at the very height of his powers, the version of him that had unlocked all eight gates, that had killed whatever he’d needed to kill to unlock his Mangekyo Sharingan.
It’s not an unpopular opinion to say that Blood Meridian is the Thing. In hindsight, it’s easy to craft a narrative out of American Letters, to trace a progression, to note watershed moments, to put together a genealogy of sorts. So-and-so begat so-and-so begat so-and-so, and before long you have the King James Version of 1 Chronicles Chapter 2. And it’s tempting to look at the magisterial grotesquerie presented in that book and say “oh look, Faulkner, and, oh, is that Hemingway I see over there, oh I just spotted a Melville.” We do build on what’s come before, that’s part of the reading-writing process, even if we operate in revenge against what’s come before. But Blood Meridian did Something, and what that Something is in the context of American Letters I know less about than the Something it did to me.
I read it in 2009, during the fall after I’d graduated college. I was working at a Staples Copy Center about an 11-minute drive from my house and saving up for an unpaid internship in Atlanta to begin that following January. Living out the stereotype of the Victim of the Great Recession, I was in the midst of my training arc. I’d read somewhere the four dudes the esteemed Harold Bloom had crowned as the greatest living American writers,1 and so I had my study materials ready. I’d peep something from Philip Roth (bounced like hell off of Goodbye, Columbus), something from Don DeLillo (White Noise felt a little too antiseptic for me at the time), something from Pynchon (it’d be at least a decade until I’d tackle and greatly enjoy Mason & Dixon or Gravity’s Rainbow), and something from McCarthy. I think I’d started with Child of God or another of his earlier works, and from the beginning, I was ensnared.2 No one was doing what he was doing, which was perhaps the most important thing to me. No one had done or seemed even to be attempting what he was doing. Perhaps it was because none of us had the stomach for it.
Anyway, 2009 comes and during my break time, I’m in my family’s van reading this book and by the time I get to the end, I look out the window and the sky is several shades darker than it had been before. This isn’t the normal passage of time. This is something more permanent. Adumbration had infused the entirety of my world. I’d seen some shit.
I’d never had a book affect me or my view of things, of human capability, the way this one did. He’d done something with the Western, to the Western. I think it was the first time I truly noticed the way a writer can take a genre and rip it open to expose the corroded heart of an emotionally-blighted country. Now, crime novels do this often enough. But to read a book, look at the world around me, and murmur beneath my breath with an air of stricken awe, “this is a horrible place,” feeling as though it were revelation, that was such an intoxicating and intoxicatingly new experience. From about 2010 to 2012, there was a book I worked on that will likely never see the light of a Barnes & Noble, though a piece of it did make its way into Goliath, all of which is to say the man left indelible fingerprints on my soul.3
A couple years back, after having read All the Pretty Horses, I tackled the rest of the Border Trilogy and this is perhaps where the greater lesson lies.
The thing I’m currently fighting against is this idea of a writer’s lane. Them doing over and over, because of market dictates, the thing that they’re known for. Domestic dramas, math-heavy space operas, courtroom dramas. When an identitarian mandate gets layered onto it (you’re Black, so we’ll only publish your Race shit), the gild flakes with a quickness off the cage’s bars. It’s the trap you don’t realize you’ve walked into until you try to take those first few steps out of the quicksand. So maybe you try for the littler victories. Sure, all your protags are Black, but here, watch them do different things than they did last time. I gave you a protag in a literal prison, how ‘bout a protag in a metaphorical one, created by environment in every sense of the word? That sort of thing. Or you take the plot structure you’re known for and you set it in a different country or, better yet, on a different planet. This spunky heroine has spiky hair and a hammer whereas the last one was a curly-haired witch. But in The Border Trilogy, which features recurring protagonists, the thing I observed with wonder was McCarthy’s range. These were romantic novels, even The Crossing, which is arguably the darkest of the bunch. You can hear the music on the breeze. The set pieces, the bullfighting, even that tragic, climactic knife fight at the end, it’s so Romanticist! And I remembered this was the same guy who gave us Suttree, which, after The Sellout, might still be the funniest book I’ve ever read.
Sure, he’s known for the apocalypse stuff, particularly the apocalypse stuff that’s minus the nuclear fallout, the more personal apocalypse stuff, the dirty, messy, intimate apocalypse stuff. But, man, he made me laugh. And he made me cheer. The man had range, even if it may not look like it at first glance. Another thing you might miss if you’re too dazzled by the grisliness and the lack of punctuation and the combined words and the archaic diction is the man’s fascination with quantum physics, that place where the terrestrial and the celestial meet. It’s there in so much of the work, and that was cool to watch too. The world really was bigger than it appeared in the rearview. So much bigger. The Judge would tell you as much.
I don’t know what makes a Great American Writer to critics, what the metrics are or by what standards such are judged, whether it be lyrical innovation or the subject matter or the depth or seriousness with which they treat it. But the Great Ones in my personal canon all feel like they give me permission. They did a wild, unpredictable thing, all of them. A dangerous thing. A thing market dictates are in place to keep you from doing. A thing you probably won’t be able to earn enough to make a living out of doing. But they did it anyway. So maybe I can do it too.
Thanks, Big Mac. For giving me permission.
Currently reading: The Recognitions - William Gaddis
Currently listening: Chernobyl - Oliver Francis
John Crowley, a professor of mine, gets a very deserved honorable mention. Little, Big is a feat.
Actually, my point of entry was No Country for Old Men, after having been blown away by the Coen Bros. adaptation. Child of God was next up.
I Kakashi’d the hell outta that man.
I will definitely take a look at The Road and other works.
Also....your work on Captain America #750 was Master Class!