Cormac McCarthy Died

 Thanks to Joel C, I began reading Cormac McCarthy while in prison, and I read everything contained in the prison’s leisure library. He was a great writer, not an easy one. You may have heard of No Country for Old Men. That is McCarthy. If you a tender-hearted reader of Reader's Digest, pass him by.

From The Washington Post: A guide to Cormac McCarthy’s bloody, brutal fiction 

Cormac McCarthy, who died on Tuesday at 89, was a great American novelist who tackled what he regarded as great American themes: history, violence, the nature of evil, the myth of the West. His 12 novels, which remodeled the cheap set pieces of genre — especially the Western and the crime thriller — were exceptionally bloody. He wrote in two stylistic modes, per New Yorker critic James Wood: His prose could be flat or ornate, terse or maximalist. (In all cases, he tended to eschew commas.)

From Counter Craft: The Loquacious Precision of Cormac McCarthy 

If you haven’t read much McCarthy, or only know him as the author of the novels that the films No Country for Old Men and The Road were adapted from, you might not be aware that McCarthy underwent a profound stylistic shift halfway through his career. His early novels (mostly set in the South) are written in a dense and lovely Southern Gothic style. His later and not coincidentally better-selling novels like All the Pretty Horses and The Road (mostly set in the West) are written in a stripped down and spare style. Those later novels have their merits but, for my tastes, they don’t hold a candle—a wax cylinder whose blackened wick flickered on the filthy table in strobic flashes like the last vestige of hope in unknowable void of gloom and misery that is the final fate of all mankind—to his early novels.

McCarthy’s early style is part Faulkner, part Biblical, darkly comic, and frankly often a bit absurd. It’s hard not to want to immediately parody it even as you revere it. But really what’s wrong with a little absurdity? His sentences are over-the-top sometimes yet this is exactly what allows them to climb to transcendent heights.

 

Some obits:

Cormac McCarthy, Author of The Road, Has Died at 89 (Book Riot)  (Which has a link to the USA Today obit.)

From The Literary Saloon, links to other obits.

sch