![]() He has made the fabulous real, the ordinary mysterious. “Cormac McCarthy’s second novel, The Outer Dark, combines the mythic and the actual in a perfectly executed work of the imagination. ![]() I’ve seen the meanness of humans till I don’t know why god ain’t put out the sun and gone away – Orville Prescott, The New York Times, May 12, 1965 But he does write with torrential power.” He may leave some doubt as to what is going on now. He may neglect the motivation of some of his characters. McCarthy is expert in generating an emotional climate, in suggesting instead of in stating, in creating a long succession of brief, dramatic scenes described with flashing visual impact. But the wonder is that in spite of them it is also an impressive book. There are no marathon sentences in these pages, but most of Faulkner’s other famous characteristics are present: the wandering pronouns with no visible antecedents the recondite vocabulary and coined words the dense prose packed with elaborate figures of speech the deliberate ambiguity, the hints and withheld information the confusion in time and place, and the flashbacks that fall to shed much light into the intermittent gloom.Īll these factors insure that The Orchard Keeper is an exasperating book. “In his The Orchard Keeper he has his own story to tell but he tells it with so many of Faulkner’s literary devices and mannerisms that he half submerges his own talents beneath a flood of imitation. Cormac McCarthy, author of The Orchard Keeper, is one of these. Some novelists can write with brilliance and a fresh point of view about such familiar matters…Others, although they are highly gifted too, are sorely handicapped by their humble and excessive admiration for William Faulkner. Traditional folkways and folk speech, the sounds and smells of the natural world, and the violent behavior of men not yet truly civilized are irresistibly appealing as material for fiction. “Woods and fields, mountains and cabins, isolation and cranky independence, these seem good to the literary mind and especially good if the writer in childhood had a fleeting glimpse of some last outpost of rural America. Fled, banished in death or exile, lost, undone. ![]() ![]() To mark what would have been McCarthy’s 90th birthday, here’s a look back at what the critics wrote about each of his twelve novels. For over half a century the famously aloof novelist, playwright, and screenwriter, who died last month at the age of 89, plunged into the dark, arid subconscious of the American west and surfaced with a series of bleak and terrifying visions. If you answered “yes” to any of these, you probably are, or should be, a Cormac McCarthy fan. The crushing black vacuum of the universe The blind dogs of the sun in their running. The cold relentless circling of the intestate earth. ![]() He walked out in the gray light and stood and he saw for a brief moment the absolute truth of the world. They were watching, out there past men’s knowing, where stars are drowning and whales ferry their vast souls through the black and seamless sea. But the dead do not remember and nothingness is not a curse. A state of dread, like some uncanny foretaste of a bitter memory. Death is what the living carry with them. ![]()
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