For Cormac McCarthy, it was the books themselves that mattered
“Why did you make us read that?” This comment from a student in my general education literature course at Clemson University circa 2008 is the first thing that pops into mind when I think about the work of Cormac McCarthy.
As part of a semester-long theme around apocalypses and the end of the world, I’d had them read McCarthy’s 2007 novel, “The Road,” a book about a father and son trying to survive in the aftermath of a civilization-ending event, and the student had been disturbed by some of the scenes of what happens when the world breaks down. I don’t recall what I said to the student at the time, but with hindsight I wish it was something like, “Because I want you to read something you’re never going to forget.”
McCarthy died June 13, at the age of 89, having published his final two books, the paired novels, “The Passenger” and “Stella Maris,” last year.
While “The Road” is McCarthy’s most overtly apocalyptic novel, in many ways it is his most hopeful work, the story of a father dedicated to keeping his son safe, trying to maintain life as one of the “good guys.” In many of his other works, while the veneer of civilization may still be present, McCarthy is determined to show us how fragile one’s hold on a world that makes sense can be.
His novel “No Country for Old Men,” memorably rendered on film by the Coen brothers, is a kind of fable about the randomness of evil, as personified by Anton Chigurh, a human hunter who allows the flip of a coin to determine individual fates.
It is tempting to call these books morality tales, but it’s not clear to me that morality has ever been one of McCarthy’s chief concerns. He had a later-in-life fascination with physics, which manifested itself in those final novels. In much of his work it’s as if the characters are similarly bound by rules of the universe over which they have little control, free will and choice an illusion we use to soothe ourselves.
If this makes McCarthy’s work sound bleak, well ... it often was. His early works, ending with 1979’s “Suttree,” are Faulknerian fables of his birth territory of Appalachia. Once he moved past what occasionally read like mimicry of Faulkner, he wrote what is perhaps his darkest and best book, 1985’s “Blood Meridian,” his first attempt at really making sense of the evil that seems endemic to the world.
When “Blood Meridian” published, McCarthy had sold very few copies of any of his books, but his publishers at Random House continued to believe that these were books worth putting into the world. McCarthy lived a famously Spartan existence at the time, dedicating 100% to making the next book.
There is precisely zero chance today that a writer with McCarthy’s sales track record would continue to have their books released by a major publisher over a couple of decades. We are worse off for that reality. McCarthy seized the freedom provided by knowing his books would make it into the world.
Eventually, accolades came — a MacArthur Foundation grant, National Book Award (“All the Pretty Horses”), and a Pulitzer Prize and even an Oprah Winfrey Book Club pick for “The Road” — but McCarthy appeared largely unchanged. He is perhaps among the last of the generation of writers who did not have to become brands or be concerned with the production of “content” to feed a public that needs to be connected to its heroes.
We have the books, which is all we need.