Why Cormac McCarthy Stands Alone Among Novelists

FPR Books has a new title out from Will Hoyt called Fear and Trembling in Las Vegas: An Unintended Journey to the Heart of America’s Promise.Those who have been following FPR for a few years will remember Will’s previous book, The Seven Ranges: Ground Zero for the Staging of America. Bill Kauffman sings the praises of this new title as follows: “Will Hoyt, the Berkeley carpenter now working as an Appalachian boniface, calls this book ‘a time-lapse photograph of civilizational collapse,’ but his photograph dazzles with rays of light, fulgent gifts. Whether writing about John Muir, Elmore Leonard, Cormac McCarthy, Bob Dylan, or the spectacularly fertile decade of Thoreau, Hawthorne, and Melville, Fear and Trembling in Las Vegas brims with fresh and unexpected insights on every page. Hell, now I even want to visit Las Vegas—because the smart money is on Will Hoyt.” Here’s an excerpt to read while you’re waiting for your copy to show up in the mail.

I came late to McCarthy, probably because, having fallen under the spell of Robert Stone in my early twenties after reading Dog Soldiers (Stone’s 1971 novel about a war correspondent in Vietnam running afoul of a drug cartel after trying to smuggle Asian heroin into Oakland, California), I was predisposed to doubt and then, after reading follow-up prose in A Flag for Sunrise (1981) and Children of Light (1986), flat-out dismiss claims that any current-day writer could be as good as Stone. Moreover, when publishers aggressively promoted Stone’s fifth novel, Outerbridge Reach (1992) by comparing him to Melville, I assented, at which point I quit reading novels altogether for about ten years while doing historical research for a book about eastern Ohio and the trans-Allegheny West.

Upon completing that writing project, though, I started to read novels again—chiefly as a means for blowing off steam, but also because I had begun to wonder whether the American mind, so called, could continue to support the production of great novels, given what I’d learned over the course of writing my book—and came across McCarthy’s “Border Trilogy.” Which I marveled at. These tales starring John Grady in Mexico and, in particular, Billy Parham under a freeway overpass somewhere west of Albuquerque didn’t just nail the west Texas cowboy myth; they actually elevated that myth to a level customarily reserved for three thousand-year-old myths commemorating Greek gods. And then along came McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic father-son novel The Road, a tale of light shining in darkness. Where had I been all these years, while bemoaning the loss of word-based knowledge as a default cultural position? What with Richard Ford and, now, Cormac McCarthy in addition to Robert Stone, we were going to be fine, for America had produced not just one but three superbly talented novelists who could stand with Saul Bellow, John Updike, and Philip Roth. But then McCarthy died, and suddenly I was looking at a whole new set of what seemed to be preposterously adulatory claims occasioned by the posthumous publication (in 2023) of two long-awaited novels about physics, the atom bomb, and the existence of God called The Passenger and Stella Maris. So, I read those two books. And was ri-vet-ed.

The Passenger opens with its main character, Bobby Western, wrapped in an emergency blanket and sipping hot tea at 3:00 am in an inflatable raft anchored near a submerged plane a couple miles south of New Orleans. There’s a Coast Guard cutter at anchor one hundred yards to the west, and in the seat next to him there’s a tender in radio conversation with a diver twenty feet down who is cutting his way into the plane’s fuselage with an acetylene torch. To the north, lights on trucks headed east on Interstate 90 toward Pass Christian move “like beads of moisture on a string,” and the air smells of oil mixed with “the rich tidal funk of mangrove and salt grass from the islands.” How deep can you use acetylene? the tender asks. Thirty, thirty-five feet, Bobby explains. And after that it’s oxyarc? Yes. At that Bobby pulls on his weight belt, fits a regulator to his mouth, and steps off the raft to join the welder who has just swum into the plane. It’s a small private jet. Co-pilot and passengers seem to have died calmly in their seats, and in the cockpit the avionic board with vertical speed indicators has been ripped out of the instrument panel. The flight bag? Missing.

Welding tradecraft, steadily rising suspense, attention to the natural world, hints of deep water on metaphysical as well as literal levels—all that is established in a mere thirty pages. And that’s before even meeting the cast of characters who expertly “do” Borscht Belt comedy and Shakespearean monologues when it comes time to convey the book’s chief themes.

I got a little worried when, two-thirds of the way through The Passenger, McCarthy appears to turn from the mystery of the submerged jet and a related, highly suspenseful episode on an offshore oil rig during a hurricane to focus instead on an extended trip from Texas to Montana during which, penniless, Western survives hunger and extreme cold by trapping small animals, sleeping in abandoned farmhouses, and protecting coals from each and every cookfire. Upon going back, though, to an italicized introductory chapter told from the point of view of Western’s sister, Alice, I realized that Western’s journey north was not a detour. Rather, it was bringing to fruition a carefully planted seed that, upon ripening, could function as the end toward which all action in The Passenger was pointing. In short, McCarthy appeared to know what he was doing. And when I read Stella Maris, the transcript of taped conversations between Alice and a psychiatrist employed by a clinic she’d committed herself to, I had proof that McCarthy knew what he was doing.

All told, these last two crucially linked novels by McCarthy comprise a stunning achievement. Sustained attention to how manual laborers work, the history of Oppenheimer’s Manhattan project, views of bollarded Libyan freighters along the shore of the Mississippi River beneath New Orleans, partitas by Bach, what it’s like to drive a race car, and, particularly, a field of mathematics called topo theory through which reality itself becomes a subject—these seemingly incommensurable jigsaw-puzzle pieces wind up fitting together perfectly, owing to an overarching story about what it means to carry another’s pain.

Okay, I thought. McCarthy really might have been America’s best novelist during the second half of the twentieth century, and if that’s the case, I ought to revise my yardstick for determining greatness. Then something funny happened on the way to the forum where American matters of importance are settled. Upon studying reviews of McCarthy’s work, I discovered that the avalanche of praise attending the posthumous publication of his final two books wasn’t really generated by those last two books at all. Rather, it was generated by Blood Meridian, a book McCarthy had written almost forty years earlier, just prior to his Border Trilogy project.

According to critics, Blood Meridian was McCarthy’s masterpiece.

I was skeptical, and even a little annoyed, given that the book turned out, once again, to be about men on horseback, albeit the bad kind—scalphunters—as opposed to cowboys proper with codes of honor. Yet, determined as I was to see this adventure through, I fast-tracked Blood Meridian to the top of my to-read pile and quickly discovered that, despite spectacular payoffs owing to a clear debt to Herman Melville, the book did not deserve the praise it got, owing (partially) to an equally clear debt to William Faulkner, whose grandiose sentences with seven, eleven—heck, sometimes even thirteen—clauses are often lengthy simply to disguise the fact that, at bottom, the “thought” being expressed is incoherent and doesn’t say anything. In the main, though, McCarthy’s problem in Blood Meridian isn’t his penchant for long sentences with almost zero punctuation. Rather, it’s that his attention to cobbled prose and landscape often gets in the way of plot and character development. Indeed, many of the characters in Blood Meridian (the “Kid” excepted) arrive fully drawn and then depart unchanged, and here I think especially of Judge Holden, the Ahab-like figure who assembles the team of bounty-hunter “renegades” so as to “federate” them along “one keel” to the point where, with the desert floor beneath their horses’ hooves “humming like a snare drum,” the company can effectively mock a world made by a Creator who didn’t ask the judge’s permission before bringing it into being.

It took me a while to figure out exactly why reviewers were stretching when assessing Blood Meridian, but eventually—like a guy getting a joke one day late—this blockhead “got it.” Reviewers were stretching not because they were hucksters or had sensed an opportunity to jump on a bandwagon actually going somewhere, but because they had correctly intuited greatness without having access to the right hermeneutic. What is the right hermeneutic? It’s that McCarthy, a little before the rest of us, had caught a glimpse of Western Civilization’s end. Hence, his interest in how things look in this novel, rather than narrative suspense: ruined churches and violated sanctuaries, Orion rising in the east “like an electric kite,” aspen leaves lying on black dirt in the trail like “golden disclets,” and (upon arrival at the Pacific) “tidepools bright as smelter pots” near a horse on the beach looking west “past men’s knowing” toward whales that “ferry their vast souls through the black and seamless sea.” Blood Meridian, it turns out, was primarily a painting rather than a novel proper, but owing to McCarthy’s skills as a novelist, this was hard to see.

Was it right for reviewers to single out Blood Meridian as crucially important?

In order to answer this question, we need to look again at the writer mentioned at the beginning of this reflection, namely, Robert Stone.

McCarthy and Stone have a lot in common. They were born in eastern cities within four years of each other (McCarthy in Providence, Rhode Island, in 1933, Stone in Brooklyn, New York, in 1937), they attended Catholic parochial schools, they went straight into the military after graduating from high school (McCarthy to the Air Force, Stone to the Navy), and they wrote their first books in New Orleans (McCarthy arrived in 1962, Stone in 1960) before then emigrating west—in McCarthy’s case to Texas by way of Ibiza, Spain, and in Stone’s case to California by way of Vietnam. Note, too, that their first books (Outer Dark, in McCarthy’s case, Hall of Mirrors in Stone’s) feature main characters who hail from east Tennessee hill country, just as later books (The Passenger in McCarthy’s case and Flag for Sunrise in Stone’s) feature crucial visionary moments cued by divers getting a sense of the depths beneath them as they work close to, or over, the Cayman Trench in the Caribbean Sea. And, lastly, note that in all their books McCarthy and Stone are as comfortable “speaking” Catholic tropes as they are gifted at discerning cultural trends destined to key the age we live in now.

Here (in this latter sense) I think especially of how they spot the arrival of conspiracy thinking as a default position through extended talk about the assassination of JFK in McCarthy’s The Passenger, on the one hand, and a sustained depiction of a MAGA-type rally circa 1962 in Stone’s Hall of Mirrors, on the other. (Stone’s glimpse of Trump’s coming appeal is surreal in its accuracy and brimming with insight. Think patriots, eagles with lightning bolts in their talons, states’ rights, and free enterprise vs. atheistic communism—all set to the 1960 instrumental surf-riff hit “Walk Don’t Run,” by The Ventures.)

Yet, despite this dizzyingly extensive list of what McCarthy and Stone have in common, these two writers inhabit radically different worlds. You might think this is because Stone (who spent his entire career teaching, either at an Ivy League school or at a prestigious writing workshop) is a progressive—that is to say, a person who believes that people who try to separate reason from faith are in an important sense enlightened and (to that narrow extent) licensed to act in a patronizing manner toward benighted people who, naturally, require wake-up calls regarding an allegedly natural disposition toward bigotry—whereas McCarthy (who never even once taught at an institution) isn’t. But that conclusion would be wrong, for Stone is familiar with hatred and consistently trains razorsharp, ultra-logical eyes on how we all make rational decisions to behave in self-destructive ways. No, the real reason Stone and McCarthy inhabit different worlds is that the Judeo-Christian civilization otherwise known as “the West” is for Stone in full swing as a force to be reckoned with and battled against, whereas for McCarthy it is already past.

What, then, did McCarthy see after catching a glimpse of the evening aspect to the West? What did he see that Stone couldn’t see, given that he (McCarthy) was standing in a world quite different from the “new” one unwittingly established by Columbus that Stone still resided in?

Quite simply and completely without irony or apology, it is the enduring presence of Christ—or, more exactly, Jesus and Mary, star of the sea—and the reliability of the promise implicit in the Incarnation, the Passion, and Mary’s Assumption.

You can see this bias taking shape in No Country For Old Men, but it wasn’t until McCarthy conceived The Road, a book where the plot’s pretext is seemingly complete darkness ensuing after a nuclear holocaust, that the wave this bias comprises was able to break with full force on the shores of McCarthy’s imagination. In 2012, when I first read The Road, that pretext seemed like a clever dystopian device, but now when you read the novel you see that McCarthy was playing for keeps, because the book turns out not only to be about the importance of “carrying fire” in a world where gray snowflakes expire like “the last host of Christendom” and the ocean itself “heaves like a vat of slag.” In addition, The Road is laced with realist emphases relating to the importance of names and what it might mean to lose them as well as the things they signify.

And then along comes The Passenger and Stella Maris.

The tuning fork for both these novels is a scene in the preface to The Passenger where a hunter in Wisconsin comes across a dead woman in woods filling with snow. The hunter doesn’t know how to pray but he knows he must, so he stogs his gun in the snow and gets down on his knees. “Tower of ivory,” he says. “House of gold.” He kneels for a long time, and

then, upon rising, he sees a splash of red owing to a bright scarf that he hadn’t noted when he first found the woman, at which point McCarthy adds, “Some bit of color in the scrupulous desolation. On this . . . cold and barely spoken Christmas day.” Barely spoken! After that stunner, there is no let-up: Alice dreaming about the importance of “keeping the train in view” rather than just following the tracks; Bobby Western looking from the inflatable raft toward trucks driving east toward Pass Christian; chapters further in where the reader is reminded again and again of Mary’s status as tabernacle and her christening as the new Eve; chapters near the end where there is sustained philosophical attention to reality concluding with “if you sound everything to its source you have to come to an intention”; and, at the end of Stella Maris, “I will be their eucharist.”

The bottom line here is that, despite McCarthy’s self-generated “last pagan on earth” ID tag, he is the best, most reliably Catholic literary artist this country has produced since Flannery O’Connor.