Nathaniel

Shockey

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May 13, 2009

Cormac McCarthy: The Latest, Greatest American Writer

I recently read Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. McCarthy also authored All the Pretty Horses and No Country for Old Men, which have been turned into movies. He has also written several other novels which have not. The Road has been adapted and will hit the big screen on October 16.

Like so many movies, this one has been pushed back and pushed back, but the October release date is apparently pretty safe. The director is John Hillcoat, who also directed a wonderful movie about wild, savage, late-19th Century Australia called The Proposition, which starred Guy Pearce and Ray Winstone, among other notables. The Road will star Viggo Mortensen and co-star Robert Duvall, Charlize Theron and Guy Pearce.

There is clearly good reason to be excited about this movie. But the best reason is McCarthy’s incredible novel. I loved it. It inspired me to be a better writer.

His command of the English language is absurdly good. The majority of the sentences in the novel could be cut and pasted as poetry, and good poetry at that. A mark of any good writer is word efficiency. McCarthy never wastes words or even punctuation marks.

So many times, I found myself setting the book down and simply remarking to myself, “This guy can write.” While he disregards quotation marks, and literally about half of his sentences are fragments, it is perfectly clear that he knows the rules, could use them if he wanted, and has chosen the ones he finds useful. At the very least, he barely ever ends a sentence with a preposition.

One passage summarizes the theme of the novel wonderfully well:

Darkness implacable. The blind dogs of the sun in their running. The crushing black vacuum of the universe. And somewhere two hunted animals trembling like ground-foxes in their cover. Borrowed time and borrowed world and borrowed eyes with which to sorrow it.

The story is set in a post-apocalyptic world with no explanation. Almost everything is burnt and most of it is dead. Stuck behind are scattered humans, most of them bad like the choirboys turned evil in Lord of the Flies. Featured in The Road are a father and his young son scavenging to survive. Throughout the novel, the boy wrestles with the many difficult choices with which they are faced, and his father tries with great difficulty to explain them. But how can he explain decisions about which he himself is not sure? As we are introduced to a world without rules or society, we learn that questions of morality and family are not easily answered. When one can barely survive, to what else can he possibly be held accountable?

McCarthy brings to mind another great American writer: Ernest Hemingway. What I love about Hemingway is the subtle wisdom laced throughout his novels, his command of the language and the immensely believable and riveting plots. Although I have only read one of McCarthy’s books, it would come as no surprise to me if he were ultimately remembered as one of the best American writers. The Road is overwhelming with its profundity, unbelievably effective English and plot that is strung out by so much emotion that every event seems central and important.

I’d read it again, but I think I had better start by catching up on his other novels. And when we’re all done with that, we can look forward together to the release of what could be as good a movie as the highly acclaimed No Country.

Actually, I wonder if this movie won’t be better.

© 2009 North Star Writers Group. May not be republished without permission.

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