Cormac McCarthy

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It still bothers me greatly that David Foster Wallace fabricated huge sections of his so-called non-fiction pieces. I don’t think his great talent made that okay. But it’s difficult to discuss such things sensitively considering the unhappiness of his life and the sadness of his death.

I just came across a 1999 article Wallace wrote for Salon about the five most unappreciated American novels since 1960. I’ve read the titles on his list, so I thought I would give my take on them.

Omensetter’s Luck (William H. Gass, 1966): I’ve never really connected to Gass’ work, even his short fiction, but this one, his first novel, is his best. That said, I didn’t really enjoy this Faulkner-esque story, which concerns a preacher obsessed with the good fortune of a seemingly undeserving man, until the final third. What’s amusing is that my edition contains an essay by the author about how his OL manuscript was stolen by a colleague. It’s straightforward, filled with rich metaphor and emotion. After reading it, I though that perhaps Gass has been trying his whole career to write with someone else’s strengths instead of his own.

Steps (Jerzy Kosinski, 1968): Not so much a novel as a collection of nightmarish stories linked by theme and tone. Like Kafka, but with the lurid eroticism and violence above the surface. Kosinski’s sexual politics could be gross, but this is a very brisk read and some of the stories will remain lodged in your brain, unforgettable for their paranoia and horror.

Angels (Denis Johnson, 1983): Bruising, heartbreaking novel about a single mom toting her at-risk family through the underbelly of America. It does not have the lightness of tone that Jesus’ Son has. Not at all. But it’s the second-best fiction Johnson has written after JS.

•Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West (Cormac McCarthy, 1985): This insane, brilliant and unsentimental novel set in the Old West is one of my absolute favorites. A story about innocence devoured in the belly of the beast, it’s the book that Herman Melville tried and failed to create in Moby Dick. 

•Wittgenstein’s Mistress (David Markson, 1988): The best of the author’s typically avant-garde anti-novels, it follows the (repetitive) thought process of a woman who may be the last person on Earth. Philosophical and challenging, you will love it or quickly put it down.•

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Werner Herzog, profilin'. (Image by erinc salor.)

Physicist Lawrence Krauss probes the nexus between art and science in a conversation with one of my favorite novelists, Cormac McCarthy, and one of my favorite filmmakers, Werner Herzog. Listen here. (Thanks Open Culture.)

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From Herzog’s look at the dark side of revolution, Even Dwarfs Started Small:

 

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Mortensen and McPhee look to one another for strength.

The monsters in our heads are often worse than the ones in our eyes, and the novelist enjoys that advantage over the filmmaker. Cormac McCarthy’s novel, The Road, imagines a post-apocalyptic nightmare world in which an ailing father and his young son desperately trod dangerous miles over destroyed earth in the hope of finding some humanity–and of staying one step ahead of thieves, murderers and cannibals. And the reader’s imagination is just as paramount as the author’s. Although McCarthy provides descriptions in his mythopoetic prose, every sentence is aimed at awakening the darkest corners of the imagination, corridors several shades blacker than bleak. And without fleshed-out visuals to anchor us to one uniform vision, the story can keep us in thrall not only because of our universal fears but also because of personal ones.

The adaptation of The Road by director John Hillcoat and screenwriter Joe Penhall, while very loyal and sometimes moving, can’t match the deep chill of its source material. As in the book, dust covers the ruined earth and dirt covers the father and son as they seek some unknown refuge in a strange land they used to call their own. The casting is superb: Viggo Mortensen, as the determined, dying father whose sole mission is to prepare his child for life without him; Kodi Smit-McPhee as the frightened boy burdened by “carrying the fire” of humanity; Robert Duvall as the ancient wanderer almost magically clinging to life; and Guy Pearce as a scary stranger, who may provide a safe haven or may not. But unlike with the novel, the movie never makes you forget that you are watching their world from a safe distance.

What both book and film do very well is play upon the very real anxieties of parents for their children in our relatively saner, pre-apocalyptic world: that they not be harmed, that they know the difference between good and bad and that they carry within them “the fire,” an inextinguishable light, that we all need to sustain us across the many roads of life. (Available as a rental via Netflix and other outlets.)

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