No Country for Old Men, Young Men, Women, Dogs, Or Most Microbes

You probably know the story of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road —a man and a boy wandering through a post-apocalyptic America, although “post-apocalyptic” is a little sunny. The world is decimated, toxic, post-altruistic, subhuman, subcanine,  quasi-Martian, and perhaps post-biological.   

Fortunately, McCarthy pins this world down with a startlingly good, audacious style, which is all the better for not being original. This is not to say that McCarthy doesn’t have his own thoughts, many of them brilliant. But he doesn’t really have his own sound or slant of prose. Reading The Road  is like reading Hemingway, the Bible, and Shakespeare and imitating those three styles is, I’d contend, superior to coming up with your own.   

I hear Hemingway in the laconic dialog, affectless descriptions linked with “and” and the image of a trout stream as a stand-in for all that is good. (You could do worse.)

The Bible whispers in sentences such as “She said that the breath of God was his breath yet though it pass from man to man through all time.”

And Shakespeare lives in the collisions of adjective and noun: “autistic cities,”   “the intestate earth.”

Comments

[keith]

I usually jump on the McCarthy jock, but I didn't much care for The Road.

I like your interpretation of his influences, though. He does tend to use "and" a lot. Blood Meridian seemed peppered with it.

[K]

I had serious trouble getting into it. Th opening especially I thought kept slipping into vagueness, too many greys and dismals, too little specific jeopardy. I may try some of his earlier writing.

[amy]

Okay! Okay! I'm reading it. I've been assured it's a quick read, so I think it's worth it to satisfy my McCarthy curiosity.

[K]

But be warned. You will want to kill yourself.

[minnesotaj]

Haven't read The Road, but Blood Meridian is a masterpiece: just finished reading it for a third (or fourth?) time. It's true that at times McCarthy seems like a contestant in the Bulwer-Lytton Writing Contest, but he surpasses what could be taken as mere pastiche of the influences you point out (plus: the Western and Faulkner and so on).

Why? Quickly: I think it's the fact that his rhythms are so obviously under control, that his melodramas are grounded in the blood of his characters, that his riffs are not rife but rather within my old mentor Bill Kittredge's "you only get 10% of a book for bullshit," in short: the style is its own organic thing, and you trust it. The Judge is also one of my favorite literary characters--just a classic.