Content-Free Book Report Ahead
Well, I promised Dick and Kathy that I would expand on Joyce Carol Oates’ review of Cormac McCarthy’s latest book but, really, I’ve read so little McCarthy that I have nothing worthwhile to add. I sort of feel like this one time I signed up to sing Frankie Avalon’s “Venus” for some grade school pageant. Then, a few days before the performance, I cued up the 45, stood in front of a mirror and realized there was no way in hell I was going to sing that song in front of anyone. I ended up playing Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star on my ocarina/tonette, and badly. Mrs. McGuffin, the music teacher, was not amused, but then she never was.
Anyway, here’s the skinny on the review. First of all, I didn’t realize McCarthy had a 4-novel Tennessee period after attending, then dropping out of, University of Tennessee:
the dreamlike opacity of Faulkner’s prose pervades The Orchard Keeper (1965)and Outer Dark (1968). These are slow-moving novels in which backcountry natives drift like somnambulists in tragic/farcical dramas
Blood Meridian (1985) was his fifth novel, and
marks the author’s reinvention of himself as a writer of the West: a visionary of vast, inhuman distances … (and) is the author’s most challenging work of fiction.
…Admirers of Blood Meridian invariably dislike and disparage McCarthy’s “accessible” best-selling Border Trilogy as if these novels were a betrayal of the solemn rites of macho sadism and impacted fury of Blood Meridian, for which the ideal cover art would be a Hieronymus Bosch rendering of some scenes of Zane Grey.
So, that’s the crux of the “fault line” I described in the previous post. Looks like I’m committed, now, to finishing the Trilogy and Blood Meridian to satisfy the solemn rites of macho faux-literary blogging.
Toward the end of the article, Oates gets around to commenting on the book she’s reviewing, No Country For Old Men. It’s set in contemporary Texas instead of the dying frontier of the Border Trilogy, and “reads like a prose film by Quentin Tarantino.”
Shorn of the brooding lyricism and poetic descriptive passages that have become McCarthy’s signature style, No Country For Old Men is a variant of one of the oldest of formula suspense tales: a man discovers a treasure and unwisely decides to take it and run, bringing upon himself and others a string of calamities…
So, there you have it. This proves nothing about my literary self except that I can type while reclined on a Hilton hotel bed. I mean, they put 5 pillows and an upholstered bolster on this sucker for purposes that are lost on me. I’m supposed to be the West Coaster visiting flyover country. Wonder if I could get them to take two of them back and install a trapeze. Just so they’d put it on the secret part of my HHonors profile for other hoteliers to ponder when I make a reservation.
