Are there any Cormac McCarthy fans out there?

I saw one of McCarthy's plays last week at the Steppenwolf called The Sunset Ltd. I was less impressed by this than by his books. Part of this was the acting - there was a lot of line flubbing that was very obvious and painful in the tiny theater. There was also a lot of yelling, and I got a suffocating sense of being in a tiny room with two people I didn't like who were being very unpleasant, which might have been the intended effect but still, I can sit in a tiny room with people I don’t like being unpleasant to each other for free if I patronize the right bars or go visit my family. My favorite part of the entire play was the end, when one of the characters launched into a soliloquy about pain and death and the worthlessness of living and the dreadfulness of mankind which was lovely and lyrical and very similar to the style of his novels.

I realized then pretty much what steve ketchup says - I'm deeply impressed by his pyrotechnics. I don’t know about his books not having much substance, though. I thought Child of God had an incredible story, and I think Blood Meridian has a story, too, albeit a lofty, not necessarily plot-driven one.

I'm liking All The Pretty Horses. Don't find it to be a bore at all - fairly gripping, actually. Great dialogue - I enjoy that more than the poetic description really. So far I'd almost compare it to Jack London - fairly traditional adventure narrative but with finer writing.

He can be sorta tedious, no?

i'm three quarters or more through blood meridian, and if it didn't have cormac mccarthy's name on the cover then i could just as easily mistake it for one of my grandad's old western books i once found in a bag in the attic and read through one summer when i was about 15- the laboured prose style and the glee taken in the lurid violence reminds me of the 'edge' series of books in particular. i'm not at all sure where the critical acclaim has come from.

Cities on the Plain is fantastic.

don't get me wrong- i've enjoyed both of the books of his that i've read so far. in fact, i have no country for old men waiting and i'm looking forward to it, but, i dunno, he just seems to get an awful lot of credit for what he does.

i love blood meridian but vahid kinda has a point.

this is code for glorifying and romanticizing the conditions (the cult, really) of hetero white male isolation ... if you enjoy reification you will be happy to know that you will find yourself, as reader, grinding through endless references to leather and rawhide and denim and shaving and black coffee and whiskey and rusty metal, sort of like reading GQ or Esquire in those months when ralph lauren or tom ford are showing strong collections.

― vahid (vahid), Tuesday, March 23, 2004 6:28 PM (4 years ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

love this, megaroffles.

i think of blood meridian as having a lot in common thematically with a history of violence (i mean you could even pretty much interchange their titles). they're both about the violence inherent to civilization or society or human relations or however narrowly you wanna draw the net. and not just that it's there, but that it's exciting and addictive and seductive. an old story i guess, but for me it works in the telling.

(it's also a real reactionary view of the world, and mccarthy is an unapologetic reactionary. which should make me sort of hate him, but doesn't.)

well i read no country for old men since and enjoyed it very much. blood meridian didn't get any better though, the stream-of-consciousness style just didn't bring me with it.

boy i really didn't like no country. i think it's the phoniest book of his i read. (didn't like the movie much either.)

i think i was just relieved to read something a little more pleasant than blood meridian, tbh

And I thought everyone else had read all of McC. I finished Blood Meridian in the last week or so and was on the yea side. Okay, I am susceptible to the romanticism of male isolation, but what goes on between me and the book I'm reading is my business, right.

It was a strange book: you know there's no story, and that it's really just a relentless machine repeating a stock set of 3 or 4 scenes, but I found it compulsive material. If anything I liked it more when it stuck to its unpicturesque picaresque than when it got all mytho-allegorical at the end with the judge and the retard. In one way, it felt less like reading and more like observing a wave of something like insects swarming over a field, destroying what came into their path, getting involved in inscrutable scrapes, etc. That makes me sound like a sci-fi fan, which I'm not intending, moreso nature doco. Which is perhaps more embarrassing than the violence/male isolation admission, but there you go.

Judging from the above, I think I'll go Suttree next. Not much mention here of The Road, which is a bit funny, no? (Not that I've read it either, but my wife had it on her bedside table and I'd sneak guilty peeks when she was out of the room. Well, they were less guilt than the revulsion/fascination thing)

When hes not getting bogged down in his weird little philosophical debates between characters (Blood Meridian and the coda of Cities of the Plain feature doozies) he often seems to me to be some sort of crazed genius. His writing - for atmosphere and description of action and landscape in particular - is unmatched in America today.

The chapter where they're trying to make gunpowder to fight off the Indians was pretty exciting, though.

if it didn't have cormac mccarthy's name on the cover then i could just as easily mistake it for one of my grandad's old western books

this boggles my mind. I mean, I've read enough Louis L'Amour (care of MY grandad) to know that Blood Meridian is leagues ahead of the average western potboiler. Ahead in terms of the writing and characterization. Whatever you want to say about the characters in Blood Meridian, almost wholly despicable human beings, at least they're not cookie cutter cowboys n indians. Also in terms of the storytelling, the approach is quite different. Blood Meridian is much more episodic and less propulsive than the average good guy/bad guy gunfight.

Do McCarthy fans like Hall's "Warlock"?

i loved loved loved Warlock

the "cookie cutter cowboys'n'indians" of a men's adventure novel probably have more resemblance to actual people living or dead than most of cormac mccarthy's characters.

yes, but i don't agree with the implied value judgment that realist characters are necessarily better.

"a men's adventure novel" = should be a movie title.

or a book by michael chabon

yes, but i don't agree with the implied value judgment that realist characters are necessarily better

that's an interesting line of argument

really

Pound's statement “fundamental accuracy of statement is the one sole morality of writing”

stolen from the raymond carver thread on ILE, for reference

whoops somehow the word statement got doubled up there

In response to Pound (I assume we're talking Unc Ez here?) All this realism hokum is overrated. That 'accuracy of statement' phooey doesn't really mean anything, does it, at least not for fiction? I mean, the great advantage of fiction over factual writing is the problem of selection doesn't really come up - you're not leaving anything out, what is written is part of that fictional reality, what isn't written, doesn't exist. No, the problem in fiction is one of emphasis.

Certainly an overemphasis on exploration of character can be extremely disruptive to tone in some genres - science fiction and horror spring immediately to mind. I'm not saying it can't be done, just that thin two-dimensional, rather everyman, possibly even cliched characters can be an advantage in those forms.

what is written is part of that fictional reality, what isn't written, doesn't exist

that sounds more like the attitude of a particularly decadent 21st century reader than that of a writer

Hmmm, not sure about that. It maybe came across as more abstract than I intended. It's just a way of saying that, say, in writing a biography, part of the problem is knowing what to leave out as much as what to put in, it's to do with selection (although bloody try telling that to modern biographers, everything bar the kitchen bloody sink), in fiction that's not an issue. Although in terms of writing you inevitably edit and leave vast chunks that you've written out, the finished product is just that, it is sufficient unto itself.

I'm not sure I feel particularly decadent saying that. I don't know really, because I'm lying in bed dreadfully tired after a curry induced sleepless night.

Anyway, I don't really think it affects the central premise that characters and fiction need not be realistic, that's a relatively recent thing isn't it? Is Jeeves realistic? Is Sherlock Holmes? They're just very well drawn characters.

Christ, listen to me. What a boring git. I've woken up now and want not to have written these things on this thread in the way that I writ em.

"the "cookie cutter cowboys'n'indians" of a men's adventure novel probably have more resemblance to actual people living or dead than most of cormac mccarthy's characters.

― moonship journey to baja, 21 September 2008 18:42 (1 week ago) Bookmark "

totally. the campfire philosophical debates between the judge and the priest seemed forced and out of place, even if the characters (especially the judge) were entertaining.

suttree is fantastic

outer dark was teh only book i was able to finish. it was good, like climbing a mountain is good. child of god is the one i want to read.

suttree appears to be a very high mountain.

child of god is the one i want to read next

getting through blood meridian felt more like digging a hole

digging a hole to bury someone in

i tried to get through blood meridian three times

\;_;/

Should've stuck with reading it once first.

it took you fifteen minutes to come up with that??

Yup

cormac could've written a chapter killing off an entire village in that space of time.

I'm a fan. Enjoyed reading "Blood Meridian". But I wonder if his allusions to Melville, Milton, and Wordsworth add more weight to the novel than it deserves. Some parts are overwritten, and I don't know what I'm supposed to do with all that blood.

michael chabon on mccarthy & apocalyptic fiction: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/19856

wow, great article

agreed.

this part of that new yorker review seems relevant to how i feel about how this stuff gets fetishized and reading it was probably the point where i realized i am not going to bother

But this only returns us to the problem. Why are Bobby and Alicia written up as mathematicians rather than, respectively, as a race-car driver and a violinist? If neither character can be caught in the act of uttering or creating an original mathematical idea, then, curiously enough, these are merely novels about the idea of mathematical ideas. Practically speaking, this means that Bobby and Alicia must sound like “geniuses” while delivering clever and diligently knowing reports (full of famous names, and so on) on twentieth-century developments in physics and mathematics aimed at ordinary, non-mathematical readers. These are novels in love with the idea of scientific and musical genius. And how do geniuses sound? They speak rapidly and gnomically, impatient with their sluggish interlocutors. They are willful, eccentric, solitary. They are in mental crisis, close to breakdown and suicide. They are imperious around success and failure: they announce that they stopped playing the violin because it was impossible to be in the world’s top ten. They are obsessed with intelligence, their own and other people’s. Of Robert Oppenheimer, Bobby says, “A lot of very smart people thought he was possibly the smartest man God ever made,” while Alicia says, “People who knew Einstein, Dirac, von Neumann, said that he was the smartest man they’d ever met.”

Do geniuses actually sound like this? Well, people who are fixated on the idea of genius perhaps sound like this.

i think that ny criticiam ia basically accurate, the siblings are cormackian superheroes for sure. but since the book is floaty and plotless it didn't bug me too much.

there's also a big piece in the xmas LRB but it's sadly by christian lorentzen

I thought the lrb piece was broadly fine (and not that big compared to eg ten pages on the history of Birmingham)?!

it's ok i guess but it's by christian lorentzen and i was reading it on my phone so it seemed big

by contrast ten pages on birmingham is not enough pages

The Birmingham piece was great don’t get me wrong. Would love to read cormac on Birmingham.

RIP. First time reading Blood Meridian I was in a queue at an airport and during the first battle scene my knees gave out on me. Time to read Suttree, I guess.

That's the one people have been mentioning a bit rn, so..

Big fan of the border trilogy. Incredible epilogue.

yes these are the ones

i think no country is great, a seventies airport novel that leaps off the page into the movie- i think its criticised for what it isnt, which is never valid ofc

I really liked NCFOM, maybe not quite as much as the film, but it's good stuff.

When death isn't enough to cancel the guy

look i'm not a big literary brain or a contributor to the new left review or anything, but i do think poverty *is* bad? no-one should *have* to eat only beans or bathe in lakes and if i was married to a v successful writer and having to do that i'd prob be a bit salty about it https://t.co/97oOnpadgA

— fish tit supremacy (@tubbsOreally) June 14, 2023

The very notion of artistic principles is passing along with writers like McCarthy.

oddly Pretty Horses was on tv last night. i don't remember having seen it before.

I never saw it but it was yet another one where people later griped that Weinstein butchered the director's cut.

I wish The Road was a better movie. The book remains my favorite of his.

Quite an arc.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/19/opinion/cormac-mccarthy-publishing.html

Did Suttree and Blood Meridian really go out of print before 1992 and get saved by All the Pretty Horses? I seem to recall buying and reading them before AtPH was published. Maybe they went back into publication immediately beforehand.

Shortly before, as in early in 1992.

Thinking there was a build-up, a run-up.

before 1992 blood meridian existed without my knowledge and therefore without my consent

Suttree had a nice yuppie Vintage Contemporaries edition in the mid/late 1980s.

Thanks! The ones I had were Vintage Internationals of a later, um, vintage, do u see? They had kind of a mostly black and white layout with some Guy Maddin smeared blur of a few other colors in the background overlaid by a kind of gold paint lettering design.

Which vintage did indeed seem to be early 1992.

The punctuation in Blood Meridian versus the punctuation in Absalom, Absalom! pic.twitter.com/bv0MjfwKNu

— Claudia Durastanti (@CDurastanti) June 14, 2023