A guide to Cormac Mccarthy’
Cormac Mccarthy, who died on Tuesday at the age of 89, was renowned for stark and violent novels of the American South and West that were distinguished by a merciless vision and nearly biblical prose. From the start, his writing drew comparisons to William Faulkner and Mark Twain, but his themes were always and recognizably his own: justice, despair, the futile but urgent need for hope in a fallen world.
These seven novels comprise the best of Mccarthy’s work.
“Suttree” ( 1979): Many scholars consider this to be Mccarthy’s greatest Southern novel. It traces the title character’s life along the Tennessee River in the spirit of a “doomed Huckleberry Finn,” as the Times wrote of the book. Having left behind a life of privilege, Suttree spends his days fishing, trawling Knoxville’s seedy underbelly, and mingling with drunks, grifters and misfits. His attempts to connect more meaningfully with others invariably end in disaster.
“Blood Meridian” ( 1985): This scorched- earth epic is widely hailed as Mccarthy’s masterpiece, a challenging ( some might say impenetrable) and breathtakingly violent tale of a teenage wanderer known as “the kid,” who heads across the American South and into Mexico in the mid19th century. Along the way, he joins the psychotic Gl anton gang, scalp hunter s who were originally committed to fending off Apache attacks but turned instead to indiscriminately murdering nearly every Indian or Mexican they met.
“All the Pretty Horses” ( 1992): This first installment of Mccarthy’s Border trilogy — which includes “The Crossing” ( 1994) and “Cities of the Plain” ( 1998) — was his breakthrough novel, commercially. The story of a 16- year- old boy who rides to Mexico with a friend after being evicted from the Texas ranch where he grew up, it has an elegiac quality and a plain- spokenness that his earlier, thornier fiction mostly lacked. It is a moving but unsentimental novel about human consciousness, about landscape, about horses and about the displacements involved in America’s movement westward.
“No Country For Old Men” ( 2005): Mccarthy’s novel was turned into an indelible film by the Coen Brothers, but get past that: The book, a piece of bravura storytelling, is well worth revisiting. It’s about drug deal gone wrong and an average Joe who stumbles upon more than $ 2 million in a leather satchel. It’s also about a meditative small- town sheriff and a brutal killer, Anton Chigurh, who dispatches his victims with a pneumatic cattle gun. It’s Mccarthy at his most compulsively readable.
“The Road” ( 2006): This brooding postapocalyptic novel details the journey of a father and his young son in the wake of an unspecified cataclysm. They encounter horror after horror, but the novel is also heartbreaking in its humanity. “My job is to take care of you,” the man tells the boy. This pared- down novel, which was awarded a Pulitzer, is as humane as it harrowing.
“The Passenger” and “Stella Maris” ( 2022): These new novels were vastly different from anything he’d ever published. The intertwined works explore arcane scientific and metaphysical fields of study that Mccarthy had long been obsessed with: quantum physics, the philosophy of mathematics and theories about the nature of consciousness. In “The Passenger,” Mccarthy tells the tragic story of Bobby Western, a salvage diver, who is haunted by the loss of his sister Alicia, a beautiful and troubled mathematical genius who died by suicide.
A companion novel, “Stella Maris,” focuses on Alicia, with a narrative that unfolds as dialogue between Alicia and her doctors at a psychiatric hospital in Wisconsin in 1972. In their conversations, Alicia reveals how her pursuit of revolutionary mathematical theories made her question the nature of reality and drove her to insanity.