Where to start with Cormac McCarthy

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Have you heard about Cormac McCarthy?

Whether you believe he needs an introduction or not is immaterial because he was one of the greatest whose life overlapped with mine. He only published twelve books during his lifetime which led the good man

Jayson Young

at Calm to dedicate himself to reading one book of his per month for this year. I hopped in and decided to do the same thing, though I am a bit impulsive and compulsive so I finished all twelve by the end of June, I think.

And I enjoyed writing about Kazuo Ishiguro earlier this year and have been meaning to do more of these career retrospectives, so I thought I may as well do McCarthy, since I’m dedicating the year to his books, which is something I do sometimes with different writers.

Little did I know that McCarthy would die while I was on this little journey. It’s the first time someone has died while I’ve been neckdeep in their work, thinking about it almost daily, and so his passing hit me in surprising ways. He died a few hours after I finished reading The Crossing, for example. The day before that, I read All the Pretty Horses. Earlier that week, I reread Blood Meridian. The next day, I hopped into Cities of the Plain.

Anyway, let’s jump into it.

Where to Start

We’ll get to the All-Timers that people will tell you are must reads, but this is for the completionist, yeah? We’re all big boys and girls and we want to gobble up an oeuvre, not just a book or three. And while with Ishiguro, I suggested starting at the beginning of his career, I’m going to go two unusual paths.

No Country for Old Men

McCarthy has two periods of his career: early and late. After Blood Meridian he became, in very specific ways, a completely new writer. No Country for Old Men is, in some ways, the best summation of this turn in his career.

It is a lean and mean book that’ll cook your insides. Not as stripped down as Stella Maris and not as rich and bountiful as All the Pretty Horses, it is instead a novel near picked clean by vultures, leaving only the bones and enough sinew and cartilage to keep it ambulatory.

Also, you’ve probably seen the movie, which is better than the novel in a very unique way. But I think it’s a very good introduction to McCarthy’s later period. From here, you can dive into a number of similarly stark novels.

Outer Dark

If you’d rather see what this early McCarthy period was all about, this is, I think, the perfect place to begin. His second novel really captures much of who he will become over his career. It’s unusual to have such a mature style for so early a book, but Outer Dark does everything McCarthy will eventually do. In some places, he does this better, but I think this works as a seed for all that will come after.

It’s not as opaque as The Orchard Keeper or as sprawling as Suttree or as lean as No Country for Old Men, but we have a hallucinatory road novel about a brother who abandons the child he had with his sister, which leads to a strange and quixotic quest by her sister to find him. He, instead of looking for the child, goes on his own strange, purposeless journey to nowhere.

The novel is dark but also hilarious. There’s a scene about 2/3rds the way through that manages to be among McCarthy’s funniest and darkest moments simultaneously. It is a harrowing and hallowed kind of style we find here in McCarthy. Lush and beautiful and dark and deranged, but not as lush and not as funny and not as dark as some later books.

If You’re Only Going to Read One

McCarthy wrote, in my view, three masterpieces. And these are the ones I’ll tell you to read. You can pick which one sounds most like the only one you want to read.

All the Pretty Horses

Favorite is a difficult way to describe anything by McCarthy, but I think this is my favorite of his novels. After the bonechilling verbosity of Blood Meridian, All the Pretty Horses feels light as air. It’s the first novel in his late period, where he pulls back the language but it’s still beautifully written. McCarthy has always been a landscape writer and the landscapes here are some of his best. More than that, it might be his most compelling and focused novel.

McCarthy’s protagonists are often opaque in their motivations and they shield their heart from everyone, including the reader, but All the Pretty Horses might be his most openhearted and emotionally resonant book. And maybe this is just because the kind of kid I was, but I feel much of myself in John Grady Cole. Now, I never went to a Mexican prison and killed someone, but I was a teenager who could not be told no, could not be controlled, and had, I think, a strange singularity of purpose.

There’s great beauty in this novel. Great sorrow as well. And it’s not without its wide ranging narrative digression—which, at the time, was a real hallmark of McCarthy’s writing—but it always feels very tightly focused on its protagonist. And though John Grady Cole is resourceful and reserved and shares almost none of his feelings with others or with the reader, you feel the largeness of his heart, the hollowing need and desire for love, and it made me hurt in many ways.

Hurt for John Grady and hurt for the boy I was when I, too, believed I was a man.

The Road

This was the first McCarthy novel I ever read. I believe I read it in a single sitting in 2008 while back from Ireland for the holidays. This novel made me cry when I was 21 in its final few pages. All that built up emotion and inescapable prose about a father and son in a postapocalyptic wasteland led me to the moment when he punched a hole right through my chest.

When I read this novel earlier this summer, I started crying in the first ten pages. And I kept on crying for many, many more scattered moments throughout the novel.

I’ll always remember a red truck the boy picks up.

I’ll remember the way he stopped laughing. Stopped smiling.

I read this for the first time when I was caught between childhood and fatherhood. I read it the second time a year after my second child was born.

Both times, it hit me hard but it hit me much harder the second. Possibly because I see my children in a rotting, decaying world and I think about the mass extinction hollowing out the natural world. I think about the poisoning of the skies, the waters, the soil. I think about the ways my children may grow old in a dead world.

But also I think of the impending death of my father and all the things between us. All the things unsaid, that we’ll never say, even though we’re nearly out of time.

I do think this is his best novel. Too, I think it is McCarthy at his McCarthyest. The language is lean but glorious. It’s dark and brutal but then he brushes you with softness that makes you shudder.

If you must read one, this is probably the one to read, honestly. I think all of McCarthy is found here in the devastated wasteland of our future. Of a father and son carrying the secret flame within.

Suttree

When I read this earlier, I wasn’t sure how I felt about it. In some ways, it was my least favorite. But it keeps growing on me the further out I get from it.

It is, by far, the funniest of his novels. Humor is rarely discussed when people talk about McCarthy, but I think McCarthy is possibly one of the funniest writers I’ve ever encountered. And this novel is laugh out loud funny. Uproariously so. When reading it, you can almost hear McCarthy cackling to himself while he clacked on his typewriter.

Suttree is the backwoods Ulysses of Tennessee. It is wild and weird and hallucinogenic and kind of a bummer but so consistently funny and the writing is so consistently jawdroppingly good that you gape blankeyed three months later when a moment from this novel strikes you again. The sheer awesome power of McCarthy’s prose here is unparalleled by anyone I can think of. And so if you love language, the limits of language, and you love to laugh, then this is certainly the book for you.

I did not entirely like it while I read it but I think it may be the most important book McCarthy wrote.

Those You Can Skip

The Crossing

I actually quite like this book. It’s brutal and weird and borderline senseless, which is why it feels so authentically true to life. Life is weird and dumb and senseless and we are who we are primarily because we choose to not yet die.

Billy Parham keeps choosing not to die, even when he seems to have lost the taste for living. He may actually be my favorite of McCarthy’s protagonists because I see myself in him in ways that are not always gentle with the person I am.

But I also think that all that’s done here has been done better elsewhere by McCarthy. You can find it in Outer Dark or All the Pretty Horses or even No Country for Old Men.

Cities of the Plain

John Grady from All the Pretty Horses and Billy from The Crossing meet up in this novel and have what passes for a friendship in McCarthy’s novels. This is one of the least essential McCarthy novels. It’s not a bad novel, but it does feel like he wrote it more because he wanted to keep writing about John Grady and Billy than anything else.

And it just never really feels right. Never adds up to much. Not funny enough to recommend it and not vicious enough to be unpalatable. It’s just a very average work. A novel that could’ve been written by almost anyone, which may be the greatest insult possible to someone like McCarthy.

The Orchard Keeper

McCarthy’s first novel is very good but it’s also very diffuse and sort of difficult to hold in your head, in your hands. It’s often very funny, often haunting, but, I think, more about a place and a time than any single person in particular, which makes it a bit difficult to recommend.

But if you want the full McCarthy experience, this debut is definitely interesting.

The Bad Ones

Child of God

This was the second novel I read by McCarthy and though it’s only, like, 150 pages, it feels endless. It is a slog. It’s brutal viciousness feels almost like a parody of what he would later do with similar themes.

It is interesting in that it feels like Takashi Miike’s Audition. Both begin like comedies. And they work as comedies! Child of God, especially. But then they twist abruptly into horror.

Where Miike’s movie becomes glorious at this turn, McCarthy’s novel kind of breaks in half for me.

The Passenger

This may be my second hottest take (can you spot the first?¹), but this long awaited and hoped for novel just isn’t that good. It is McCarthy at his chattiest and perhaps his most digressive since Suttree, but it’s not funny enough to hold the weight of those digressions or emotionally resonant enough.

It reminds me of Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman, which often reminded me of what it felt like talking to people at nursing homes. Just the elderly babbling endlessly.

There are interesting morsels in this novel but it ultimately feels like a huge miss. Which is interesting, because Stella Maris feels essential.

Extra Credit

These are the novels you should read if you check out more than one but don’t go the whole completionist route.

Stella Maris

This is, I think, McCarthy pushing his late period style to its absolute limit. A handful of dialogues between a mental patient and her psychiatrist.

Every minute, this novel threatens to fall apart and collapse under the weight of its conceit, and yet instead of breaking in half, it shines all the brighter. Stripped of nearly everything except the words spoken by these characters in a single room over several conversations, this is a gargantuan achievement from one of our very best.

If you’ve ever wondered what makes for good dialogue, flip through this book and begin reading anywhere at random and you will be hooked by how effortless this dialogue is.

Blood Meridian

Initially, I was going to leave this out entirely but I figured someone in the comments would yell at me, completely missing the joke. And so I’ll put it here.

Ever since Harold Bloom called this The Great American Novel, dorks have been falling over themselves to babble inanely at anyone who might be impressed by the fact that they read a dang book.

Don’t get me wrong: this book is good. It’s even great! But I do think writing about it is nearly pointless, now. Lauding it is boring and obvious. Attacking its merit is tedious trolling. And so I choose to leave it all together.

I’ve read it twice now. While Suttree is, to me, the apex of McCarthy’s early period, this is the beautiful transition between early and late. It’s stark and brutal and vicious and mean but it is also quite funny. The language is gourgeable. The action is shattering. The scenery is caustic and gorgeous.

If you’ve heard of McCarthy at all, you’ve probably picked this up at a library or bookstore. Anyone reading this now has probably already read it (which was what would have been funny about leaving it off entirely) or owns a copy of it that they keep on their nightstand because “One day” or “Someday.”

But despite its reputation, I do think it’s a book you don’t need.

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Hopefully this gives you a method for tackling a titan of literature.

I’d love to hear what you think of McCarthy so feel free to open up discussion below. And please feel free to tell me I’m an idiot.

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My novels:

• Glossolalia - A Le Guinian fantasy novel about an anarchic community dealing with a disaster

• Sing, Behemoth, Sing - Deadwood meets Neon Genesis Evangelion

• Howl - Vampire Hunter D meets The Book of the New Sun in this lofi cyberpunk/solarpunk monster hunting adventure

• Colony Collapse - Star Trek meets Firefly in the opening episode of this space opera

• The Blood Dancers - The standalone sequel to Colony Collapse.

• Iron Wolf - Sequel to Howl. Out today!

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• Dark was the Night

• Midsummer Fantasy Bash

• Awesome Outlaws in SFF

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1. I hear you shrieking with bloodshot eyes, “But where’s Blood Meridian??!?!?!”