Cormac McCarthy: Worlds of dread and horror

Sam Bankman-Fried, the crypto guy whose business model just blew up, said he figured that anyone who ever wrote a book failed. If they had something to say, they should have done it in a six-paragraph blog post.

Sometimes I figure he’s right.

The market for literary fiction has never been robust, and there have always been more efficient means of delivery to an audience than the doorstop novel. But more efficient isn’t what everyone wants.

In his just-released book “Novelist as a Vocation,” Haruki Murakami makes the interesting (and disingenuous) argument that some people are simply too smart to write (or, the insinuation is, to read) novels. They see things with such clarity that they go directly to the heart of the matter.

Meanwhile, the novel, like a slow math student, needs to go over and over the same material to manage even cursory and provisional understanding.

There’s a lot in Murakami’s book that I don’t agree with — writing, he contends, is or at least should be easy. (“To tell the truth, I have never found writing painful,” he writes. Shut up, Haruki.)

But he’s onto something with his notion that the novelist (and the reader of novels) is a kind of obsessive grinder, an anachronism in the world of Twitter and Snapchat. (It’s touching that anyone is even allowed to write about books anymore.)

And if the novel is an archaic form, there may be no American novelist more archaic than

Cormac McCarthy, who will turn 90 next year and has published two new novels, “The Passenger” and “Stella Maris.”

These come 16 years after his last novel, 2006’s post-apocalyptic travelogue “The Road,” which spawned a literal-minded, earnest and somewhat dumb movie and was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2007.

This despite that “The Road” feels like McCarthy Lite, or a cash-out for the grand eminence. After the book was chosen by Oprah Winfrey for her reading club, MCarthy submitted to his first ever television interview and seemed to agree with her when she suggested the book was, at base, a love story between a father and his son.

Actually, “The Road” felt like a distillation of McCarthy’s pet themes of dark travellers and blasted landscapes — more of his Murakami-esque worrying of material that had fascinated him from the beginning.

There is an accessibility to “The Road” — which could pass as a tale of environmental horror — that is absent from such early work as 1968’s “Outer Dark,” the story of an Appalachian woman, Rinthy, who is raped by her brother and bears his child. The brother abandons the child in the woods and tells his sister the baby boy has died. She doesn’t believe him, and sets out on a quest to find the child. She finds the man who took her son in, but he will not give the child up.

Later — years? months? — she’s living in a comfortable farmhouse with an unnamed man (her brother?) but feels compelled to flee: “And she waited again at the front door with it open, poised between the maw of the dead and loveless house and the outer dark like a frail thief.”

Rinthy is on the road again. Everyone in the world is a stranger to her.

“Outer Dark” is bleak and difficult — McCarthy withholds a lot from his readers, presumably on the grounds that GPS coordinates and calendars don’t really matter.

One of his central notions is the irredeemability of the human animal, and the immutability of our dull instincts. In “Child of God” (1973), an old man is asked if people have become “meaner” over the years. He answers, “I think people are the same from the day God first made one.”

In 1985’s “Blood Meridian,” Judge Holden, a highly educated professional scalp-hunter with a philosophical turn-ofmind (allegedly based on a historic figure), is asked what he thinks of war:

“War endures. As well ask men what they think of stone. War was always here.”

The argument might be made that if you’ve read one Cormac McCarthy novel you’ve read enough Cormac McCarthy. That’s probably true unless you are among those who enjoy Cormac McCarthy novels.

I positively love 2005’s “No Country for Old Men,” an outlier among his books in that it was originally written as a screenplay.

For me, McCarthy’s golden age began in 1992, when he made a conscious decision to pare back the rhetorical biblical thunder that marked his earlier work in favor of direct, declarative sentences. From 1992 to 2006 he published five excellent novels: “All the Pretty Horses,” “The Crossing,” “Cities of the Plain,” “No Country for Old Men” and the aforementioned “The Road.”

The central character of “The Passenger” is Bobby Western, a salvage diver based in New Orleans, who is haunted by the Christmas Day suicide of his sister, a math prodigy and maybe a genius, and by his scientist father’s contributions to the development of the atomic bomb.

After making a salvage dive to recover the bodies on a plane that’s crashed into the Gulf of Mexico, Western notices that the pilot’s flight bag and a data box are missing from the cockpit. Shadowy figures show up at his apartment to ask about the job.

Western is spooked when the IRS seizes his car and freezes his bank accounts, ostensibly for tax evasion. He goes on the road, visiting his grandmother in Tennessee, and learns that her house has been ransacked and his father’s research papers stolen. He drifts around the country, destitute. Eventually he ends up in Ibiza, writing a long letter to his dead sister.

Every other chapter is an italicized excursion into the fantasy world of that sister, Alicia, in the last year of her life as she entertains demons and hallucinations. This is not “No Country for Old Men,” but it is McCarthy country.

I meant to read “Stella Maris,” the sister novel to “The Passenger” by now, but “The Passenger” is slow going and I haven’t gotten around to the second novel yet. You can understand what McCarthy is doing with all those “ands” — he uses them to slow down and accentuate the rhythm of his prose; he long ago decided to eschew most punctuation (“weird marks,” he calls it) in his work. He hates semicolons; he sees no reason for quotation marks.

You might think this is a way that he calls attention to his style. You would not be wrong.

But it’s also effective. McCarthy is, for a certain kind of reader, a kind of drug dragging us into his worlds of dread and horror where women and men are what they are and nothing finer, though they be doped with hope and smitten with sunsets. Where everything is as it has always been and will be until the long arc of history is outrun by what is unnameable and timeless.

You could say as much in a six-paragraph blog post. But how would you spend the rest of your day?