My previous experience with Cormac McCarthy was with All the Pretty Horses, and Blood Meridian. But nothing could have prepared me for this monster of a tale. There’s no point in detailing the plot because the plot isn’t nearly as important as his relentless commitment to illustrating the hopelessness and inevitability of death and violence and how the pervasiveness of pitiless violence will eventually destroy us all. Along the way he drops breadcrumbs of hope by sharing the wisdom of old men and the occasional act of kindness. Every now and then there will be a sentence that speaks to you as if through a megaphone: …It’s a life’s work to see yourself for what you really are and even then you might be wrong….It’s takes very little to govern good people. Bad people can’t be governed at all. Or if they could, I never heard of it.
Writers like McCarthy are hard to read for several reasons. First, The dude uses very little punctuation, and sometimes it’s hard to follow his dialogue because of his allergy to quotation marks. (How ironic that he won a Pulitzer!!) There is a sparse quality to his work, which I love, but it can be challenging. The hardest part of his work is his brutal honesty about the human condition. While there’s a part of you that nods in agreement at the disappointing conclusions he comes to in his work, there’s also a part of your heart that desperately wants none of it to be true. You want to believe that humanity is better than this, despite the overwhelming evidence that McCarthy might be right.
As a writer, McCarthy isn’t my style. I am much more optimistic about the future, much more convinced of the possibility for redemption, the miracles that forgiveness and grace can bring into being. But as a writer, when I read this guy part of me wants to never write another word. What’s the point? I will never be that good. Ever.
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