Cormac McCarthHe is the most famous lone wolf in American literature. Though not reclusive or reclusive, he is a private person and avoids publicity – the number of interviews he has given to reporters during a six-decade career can be counted on one hand, and no Which of these interviews would cause you to be described as talkative. . He kept it to himself, and he wrote accordingly: The brutal landscape and the people there he surveyed in his novels, first in the American South and then in the West. America, which bears little resemblance to the reality that attracted his contemporaries. “If there were darker awakenings he could have found them,” he once wrote of one of his more fearsome characters, and at least as far as his novels are concerned, he may have written about himself.
But perhaps the most confusing fact about McCarthy is that there seem to be two of them. Yes McCarthy grew up in the South and has written four critically acclaimed novels about the region in language as rich and vivid as any prose work since Faulkner. Indeed, that is the measure of McCarthy’s talent as he ventures into comparison and doesn’t have to put up with it. (Flannery O’Connor once said, when asked how she compares herself to Faulkner, “You don’t want to sit on the rails with your little carriage when the Dixie Special passes.” McCarthy seemed to be the one. one would ‘have just hijacked the train.)
Then, in the middle of his career, he shined for the territory, although not in the same good spirits as Huck. McCarthy headed out West like a man anxious to track down Original Sin, and along the way he took no prisoners. The first fruits of this migration were vascular meridians, a novel of 19th-century Western daredevils as dark as they come and as good as they come, emerges — bearable indeed — in as beautiful baroque prose as any written in the last century. And sometimes unbearable. After all, this is a novel with a small scale in it.
At that point in his career, McCarthy was more of a man to be admired than read. All of his works of fiction are appreciated, and none of his books make it to the first edition. That changed in 1992, when the author got a new editor, a new agent, and a new style. The editor put some publishing mechanism behind the output of McCarthy, the agent arranged timely—and luck is very beautiful—file IN New York Timesand McCarthy wrote All the beautiful horses.
Alike vascular meridians, All the beautiful horses set in the West and in Mexico but timed back to the 20th Century. And while the previous book was written in prose so rich it can give you tooth decay, the language of the new book is crystal-clear. like water: “They rode out of the river among the willow trees and rode in rows upstream through the shallows to a long stretch of pebbled beach where they took off their hats and turned back to look at the country. they left. Nobody said anything. Then suddenly they galloped across the beach and turned around, fanning their hats and laughing and pulling up and patting the horses on the shoulders.”
vascular meridians language, like that in all McCarthy’s novels up to that point, is something to ponder, to ponder, to marvel at. With All the beautiful horses and all the novels that came after it, McCarthy’s purpose seemed to be to get you to skip the prose and focus on the story. It’s as if Faulkner and Hemingway met and decided to swap styles. No matter how you describe it, it’s one of the more astonishing variations in American letters. Perhaps even more strikingly, the two halves of a career do not cancel each other out. You can appreciate one or the other or both without any trouble at all.
You certainly can’t consider the latter style, the latter to be a bestseller, because the text, though more readable, still caters to an uncompromisingly complex and dark genius. But there are notable differences: the new novel has a love story that, although not exactly the kind of happy ending, doesn’t at least cross paths, like the previous romance. by McCarthy, with gangrene or watermelon. And there’s more humour. Or more unforced humor—cypress tree there are funny moments, but it always seems to be too reserved for Rabelasia. IN All the beautiful horses, the humorous parts seem to flow from the characters. Jimmy Blevins, the muscular teenager the main characters meet first in the novel, is a character that Twain was happy to create.
Those main characters, John Grady Cole and Lacey Rawlings, are only slightly older than Blevins when All the beautiful horses beginning, but by the end of the trilogy of novels that outline their fates have come to an end, immaturity and innocence are in short supply. However, with an unflinching love for the Western landscape and a celebration of friendship, fleeting or fleeting, All the beautiful horses made McCarthy’s bleak outlook a lot more bearable – compelling enough nonetheless that it became a bestseller for the first time in his life.
Then he became a great American Novelist who needed little or no introduction. His books have become hit movies. He won the Pulitzer Prize. He has appeared on Oprah.
However, it is worth noting that the quality of the novel remains at a high level. Shelby Foote talks about All the beautiful horses, “The novel’s hero, as in the previous five books, is the English language – or perhaps I should say the American language.” That was true in 1992, and it never changes. There are glitches—the Borders trilogy falters in the footage, and Road is, at least compared to vascular meridians, mildly post-apocalyptic — but toward the end, his uncompromising vision of a world where civilization and violence combine and his almost magical knack for making words say do as you like never wavering. He’s been compared to Hawthorne and Faulkner, Melville and O’Connor, and even within that company he has his own place.
