Cormac McCarthy

Faulkner Lite for Kids Who Can’t Write🤠

“*Rears back and spits an ungodly hunk of chaw into a dingy spittoon, unzips fly with a creaking sound such as dying insects might make before the very same brass pot where lay pooled the still piss and spit of all the men and specters passed through this damn room a waystation nearest to hell*

I rightly reckon it’s high time to poke and perhaps skewer the sacred cowboy of American letters, Cormac McCarthy.

In a more intellectual culture, McCarthy would likely be viewed as a mannered and eccentric writer of genre fiction. In our situation, he’s positively thought of as a titan of literature on par with Melville and Faulkner, and negatively as an absolutely disgusting how dare you sex pest wife neglector who wrote gore porn without characters we could care about, pretentiously eschewing punctuation and quotation marks for the purpose of sowing confusion and giving an otherwise plain text and poor story the appearance of an awesome rune of some ancient scribbler in grim redrawing of bloodbaths long since drained. But from my vantage point in the middle of everything, I’d say McCarthy is at times compelling but just as often dull, and that his affectations are as likely to amuse as they are to impress.

Really, I can’t improve much on that old Atlantic article by B.R. Myers, where he critically examined some lauded prose of the twentieth century and found it largely specious and affected, mocking McCarthy for his red river hokum and archaisms, suggesting that pseudo Biblical diction automatically qualifies as high style in the minds of critics and readers whose desperation for a sense of distinction overrules their taste and literacy, an article that to this day you can see on Twitter such important *coughs for ten minutes* critics like Christian Lorentzen grumbling about, taking daily assperin for the butthurt it gave him. Early in Blood Meridian, the line about the kid’s mother, who did incubate in her bosom the creature who would carry her off, strikes me as a little silly, do people really read lines like that and think it’s just like King James; as well I recall the kind of vaporous imagery of describing two crouched figures as forms pulled from a bog, which sounds like the idea of an image more so than a detailed picture or an interesting comparison.

You find it frequently in McCarthy, a gesture of an image evoking a vague sense of evocation, a fill in the blank of grave and gothic scenery, often out of proportion to the moment, describing an overalled yokel loping through a field in terms of the apocalypse, writing a Comanche massacre with the same torrential pace as a man sitting and getting up and going about the room and scratching his balls and spitting and looking this way and that and drinking and adjusting his hat and scowling. The violence and quirks of punctuation seem to distract many readers from the absolute plodding nature and wooden cadence of half his narratives, where tedious sequencing of mundane movements links grindhouse horror montages and solemn arch philosophizing on how before man was war awaited him; when he’s not talking about skulls and spilled intestines or the noose that determines the length of a man’s reach, he’s just flat out recounting a guy grabbing a drink, drinking it, looking around, walking around, riding here and there, making a fire, not making a fire, bivouacking, eating beans and goat giblets; there’s always at least one moron spitting illiteracies and an evil genius talking like Sephiroth, bumbling and venal authorities, grim pronouncements from the voice of a pitiless surveyor and back porch wistful homilies about no ways no hows in particular.

Do we even know if Cormac McCarthy is his real name?¹ It sounds like a character in one of his novels, which names tend to sound like crosses between cornball country music stars and serial killers. Could we admit that his whole operation is a little hammy, a little stiff, a bit starchy? He should’ve changed his name to Grant for all the money foundations gave him, there’s some lore on his life that also sounds like a bit from one of his novels about how his poor wife had to wash their infant son in rain puddles in the mud fields outside their tin shack because he wouldn’t accept lecture money but less often reported is how much he got from awards and foundations so he could really ham it up and soak in the local atmosphere for his vivid descriptions, such as when he wrote Outer Dark, a story about incestuous Appalachian troglodytes, while vacationing on a Spanish island.

And good for him, truly, I surely don’t begrudge the man anything he earned by his honest to god toiling and forehead furrowing, the money, the accolades, what have you; far worse and less talented people have enjoyed greater comforts and acclaim, but we can admit that his maverick attitude and gruff reluctances had plenty of institutional support, and that his self-image as a man who didn’t have time for nonsense like thoughts and feelings in literature was perhaps protesting too much. Fair enough, not everyone will care about the hyper refined observations of aristocratic mating rituals and social jockeying in fin de siècle Europe; thanks to Cormac we can cut straight to the chase with stories about sodomizing corpses with chainsaws.

In the latest edition of Blood Meridian, Marlon James fatuously repeats the canard about how the book is unfilmable, and I know I’ll never win a Rockefeller fellership but nothing could be further from the case, the book is pretty much an 8 hour movie already, every visual cue and move and piece of action is laid right out, you wouldn’t even need a director. His novels are basically novelizations of screenplays, and their extreme violence and wooden macho mythos are perfectly aligned with mainstream American culture to this day even with all the supposed deconstruction of masculinity, which is how you get the image of a cranky recluse brooding on the violence at the heart of man translated into the reality of an interview with Oprah.”
—Caleb Caudell

“It’s always difficult to evaluate early burns. Joyce’s Portrait was panned in numerous early reviews (‘…a clever novelist, but we feel he would be really at his best in a treatise on drains’, goes one from 1917), and the initial response given to Moby Dick ended up sinking Melville’s career until well after his death. But this early criticism of Cowboy Cormac McCarthy in the New York Times, from 1965, has rarely been bettered:

Cormac McCarthy grew up in the hills and mountain coves east of Knoxville, Tenn. There he must have spent much of his time inspecting flora and fauna, listening to the talk of the hill people and acquiring a nostalgic yearning for a society not so much outside the law as indifferent to it. Later he must have spent as much time studying Faulkner’s novels. 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. 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.

Sixty years later, with the finished arc of McCarthy’s career behind us, the review seems, if anything, overly charitable. There’s no other way to say it: McCarthy’s novels are Faulkner Lite, with all that the term implies; in all ways McCarthy is like Faulkner, but lesser. Where Faulkner is acridly comic, McCarthy’s ‘humor’ clunks flatly or, more often, is absent entirely. Where Faulkner’s sentences are crazily articulated and muscular lexical snakes that distend and tighten like pythons, McCarthy…piles up words, often feebly and imprecisely. Where Faulkner faces down every variety of venal evil and still somehow comes out batting for humanity, McCarthy pretends to peer into the heart of darkness but finally flops back into sentimentality and obscurity.

The much reviled but usually very accurate critic B.R. Myers’s takedown of McCarthy, at a time when his reputation was beginning to inflate, remains pointedly relevant here, and Myers deserves credit for speaking the truth at a time when few would have agreed:

But as Conrad understood better than Melville, the novel is a fundamentally irreverent form; it tolerates epic language only when used with a selective touch. To record with the same majesty every aspect of a cowboy’s life, from a knife-fight to his lunchtime burrito, is to create what can only be described as kitsch. Here we learn that out west, under a big hat, even a hangover is something special:

‘[They] walked off in separate directions through the chaparral to stand spraddle-legged clutching their knees and vomiting. The browsing horses jerked their heads up. It was no sound they’d ever heard before. In the gray twilight those retchings seemed to echo like the calls of some rude provisional species loosed upon that waste. Something imperfect and malformed lodged in the heart of being. A thing smirking deep in the eyes of grace itself like a gorgon in an autumn pool.’ (All the Pretty Horses)

It is a rare passage in a rare book that can make you look up, wherever you may be, and wonder if you are being subjected to a diabolically thorough Candid Camera prank. I can just go along with the idea that horses might mistake human retching for the call of wild animals. But ‘wild animals’ isn’t epic enough; McCarthy must blow smoke about ‘some rude provisional species,’ as if your average quadruped had table manners and a pension plan. Then he switches from the horses’ perspective to the narrator’s, though just what ‘something imperfect and malformed’ refers to is unclear. The last half-sentence only deepens the confusion. Is the ‘thing smirking in the eyes of grace’ the same thing that is ‘lodged in the heart of being’? And what is a gorgon doing in a pool? Or is it peering into it? And why an autumn pool? I doubt if even McCarthy can explain any of this; he just likes the way it sounds.

As Myers points out, McCarthy tends to alternate between dully functional Hemingwayesque sentences (mundane actions linked with endlessly repeated conjunctions: what Myers terms the ‘andelope’) and flights of ‘literary’ fancy—nigh-Lovecraftian thickets of vocabulary that break down upon close inspection into sloppy non-meaning. Usually, in the latter, very little is actually being said, and the refusal of punctuation leads to odd unintentional comedy. Trawling through McCarthy’s oeuvre is an exercise in constant eye-assaulting double takes:

When the wind was in the north you could hear them, the horses and the breath of the horses and the horses’ hooves that were shod in rawhide and the rattle of lances and the constant drag of the travois poles in the sand like the passing of some enormous serpent and the young boys naked on wild horses jaunty as circus riders and hazing wild horses before them and the dogs trotting with their tongues aloll and foot-slaves following half naked and sorely burdened and above all the low chant of their traveling song which the riders sang as they rode, nation and ghost of nation passing in a soft chorale across that mineral waste to darkness bearing lost to all history and all remembrance like a grail the sum of their secular and transitory and violent lives.

Like a skateboarder trying to land a complicated trick, McCarthy builds up speed by circling in place for a while with all those ‘and’ constructions before finally taking to the high rail for a flip, only to spectacularly and embarrassingly crash at the end: in what sense can the highly religious Comanche nation be described as ‘secular’? There are no answers here, just more randomly chosen ‘evocative’ adjectives and attempts to keep the reader approvingly skimming without paying terribly close attention. This is the sort of thing many of us wrote in high school, thesaurus-flexing to sound ‘literate’ and ‘serious.’² Most writers get past this phase and learn to bring their diction, however recondite, under precise control; McCarthy never did. The lack of proportion confirms an underlying lack of seriousness: in almost every Cowboy Cormac novel we find doomy King James pomposity padding extremely basic and corny sentiments. And without the corsetry of proper punctuation, McCarthy’s stylistic love handles bulge and flop over the page. The unseemly rhetorical Dad Bod on display is not the sinewy poverty-sharpened specimen we’ve been programmed to expect, but an effete agglomeration of endless comma splices and puzzling verbiage, usually declining into lazy fragments. Examples, as ever, are too numerous to highlight; opening any of his books to any page at random usually throws one up:

The segments of road down there among the dead trees. Looking for anything of color. Any movement. Any trace of standing smoke. He lowered the glasses and pulled down the cotton mask from his face and wiped his nose on the back of his wrist and then glassed the country again. Then he just sat there holding the binoculars and watching the ashen daylight congeal over the land. He knew only that the child was his warrant. He said: If he is not the word of God God never spoke.

Confronted with this poopily portentous passage, the already bored reader is forced into imagining ‘God God’ less as a punctuational peccadillo than a junior deity in the toddler phase of repeating its own name. Creative misreading becomes the only relief when wading through page after droning page. This isn’t stream of consciousness or Joycean stylistic looseness, just tiresome self-importance.

Grammatical floundering aside, McCarthy wasn’t very deft at character—the teenage boy protagonists in the Border Trilogy often converse like middle-aged men, and as Krug points out, the female characters like Alicia Western resemble no woman who has ever lived. All this, again, is in contrast to Faulkner, whose crazily memorable characters (good and bad) have an underlying historical accuracy and psychological reality. Even Faulkner’s ‘potboiler,’ Sanctuary, is consistently better written, more upsetting and hilarious than anything McCarthy was capable of producing.

The barely concealed truth is that McCarthy was an inflated genre writer, and that his various stabs at Westerns (All the Pretty Horses), crime (No Country for Old Men), science fiction (The Road) and the like are always less compelling than examples of the same by writers who haven’t received the sanctifying gloss of ‘literary fiction.’ This is the fallacy of ‘elevated genre’: allegedly high-brow writers pumping basic tropes full of steroids and synthol until they become uselessly bloated and non-functional display pieces. There are much better writers of Westerns (Zane Grey, Louis L’Amour), much better crime writers (Raymond Chandler, Dennis Lehane, James Ellroy), and much better SF writers (Gene Wolfe, Roger Zelazny and countless others), all of whom reach greater ‘literary’ heights while also pulling off concrete formal and conceptual innovations in their fields.

What, then, does McCarthy offer? Once the ‘prestige’ frame is removed, the answer is—very little. Blood Meridian is amusing as a sort of Gnostic comic book in prose, but finally difficult to take seriously (and we suspect that without its anointing by Harold Bloom, it would have remained obscure). Much of the writing in this novel, his absolute straining best, sort of works—until you blink a certain way and realize the effect is a trick of the light, the author slathering words on so thickly that they become an unintentionally comic impasto, evading real meaning entirely. Like Mannerist cherubs, McCarthy’s ‘big effort’ passages can seem impressive if scanned quickly but are at best grotesque and imprecise distortions. His writing on the whole lands better with people who don’t read widely or aren’t used to any sort of close analysis and basic skepticism (this explains his appeal as a prop for Ian Cattanach and other mentally-handicapped booster-grifters). The pomp is taken seriously, the inflation isn’t clocked, the canned ‘mythology’ connects. Cormacmaxxing ensues, and other writers are neglected.

McCarthy’s reputation in its present state is entirely a triumph of marketing over product—the lightbulb-carrying itinerant, the grandfatherly Oprah guest. We suspect the whole edifice will collapse within another generation or so, as the basic unreadability sinks the myth; although, like the equally tedious and dated David Foster Wallace, his books will likely remain in print simply as intellectual ‘effort totems’ meant to convey ‘seriousness’—Neo-Passéist commodity fetishes, mere cargo cult accessories.”
—Justin Isis

“Many people working in the humanities feel inferior when faced with the rigor and complexity of the hard sciences. Even our best writers are not immune. Cormac McCarthy was something of an artistic billionaire, but mental riches cannot buy self-esteem any more than money can. Toward the end of his life it appears that the elder McCarthy desperately wanted to be seen, not just as a great artist, but as a serious intellectual force. This is a relatively common problem and McCarthy opted for a common solution: like many literal billionaires, he began telling everyone that he could have been a physicist or mathematician.

When The Passenger and Stella Maris were released many McCarthy fans were excited to see what the master thought about these complicated subjects; I too had hope. You’d think after spending around four decades LARPing around the Santa Fe Institute he might have some insightful things to say. I have not read The Passenger, so I cannot evaluate what he writes in there, but I have read Stella Maris. Taken as a novel of ideas it’s a masterclass—in pseudo-intellectualism.

Problems begin immediately with the main character of this little novel: Alicia Western, who is described by her psychotherapist as ‘a twenty-year-old Jewish/Caucasian female. Attractive, possibly anorexic.’ She is also a math prodigy, which as Alicia tells us, ‘comes from the Latin word for monster.’ And what a monster she is!

Early in the novel we learn that she has a super high IQ: ‘What is your actual IQ? / I dont have one. / This is not a form of hubris? Being untestable? / Not if you’re not.’ She reads a lot: ‘I’ve read practically all of Gödel’s papers. Most of the notes. Including those written in Gabelsberger.’ She has an eidetic memory for all this stuff: ‘Do you remember everything you read? / Yes. Why else would you read it?’ Oh, and she speaks fluent blood meridian: ‘Forms turning in a nameless void. Salvaged out of a bleak sea of the incomputable.’ What kind of person is this exactly?

I can only speak for myself here, but I didn’t come away from Stella Maris with the feeling that McCarthy had invented a compelling female character; rather, I felt that here is a hot, young, mentally ill mouthpiece for the intellectual obsessions of a geriatric.³ She has the mind of an octogenarian hoping to excite Epstein’s scientist friends and the body of a woman that would. I’m sure she is more fleshed out in The Passenger, but in Stella Maris we don’t get Alicia Western as a character in a novel and Cormac McCarthy as literary artificer looking down from on high. We get something much weirder: a sphinx with a sexy fictional body and the shriveled face of a fading novelist.

Call her ‘Alimac McWest’—the transgender self-insert in this autofictional novel of ideas. The fact that McCarthy basically repeats all the same talking points in his interviews only strengthens this reading.

Creating someone like Alimac McWest is a big gamble from a literary standpoint. Had they been a real genius with brilliant ideas about math and physics, then it would prove that Cormac McCarthy was a real genius, for all the ideas are his own. But with twice the pride comes double the fall. What actually happens is that Alimac comes off rather poorly, making them unconvincing within the novel, as Alicia Western, and unimpressive as a thinker bearing the thoughts of Cormac McCarthy.

There is a lot of talk today of being performative, and pseudo-intellectuals, like narcissists, seem to employ the same set of techniques without having been taught. Stella Maris is practically a manual for pretentious dilettantes in this respect. Here is how Alimac McWest attempts to convince us of their towering intellect:

1. Long lists of names that show how well-read they are: ‘Cantor, Gauss, Riemann, Euler. Hilbert. Poincaré. Noether. Hypatia. Klein, Minkowski, Turing, von Neumann. Hardly even a partial list. Cauchy, Lie, Dedekind, Brouwer. Boole. Peano. Church is still alive. Hamilton, Laplace, Lagrange. The ancients of course.’⁴

2. A lot of name-dropping that never goes anywhere interesting: ‘Schopenhauer says somewhere…’ — ‘Jung tells of a case that suggests…’ — ‘Spengler seemed eager to make a distinction…’ ‘Who’s Quine? / He’s a philosopher. Some say the greatest living.’

3. The occasional name dropping that doesn’t even explain the reference, thus forcing the reader to either look it up or stare blankly with wonder at the breadth of Alimac’s learnedness: ‘It could easily say: Kekulé, it’s a fucking ring.’ — ‘Not created out of nothing but out of that something whose actual reality is forever unknowable. Kant.’ — ‘The foundational problem. What to do about Frege. The Grundlagen. The beginning and the end.’

4. Oversimplified statements that are exciting to people who have never thought about these topics: ‘Words are things we’ve made up. Mathematics is not.’ — ‘The core question is not how you do math but how does the unconscious do it.’

5. Cheap paradoxes: ‘The problem with the unknowable absolute is that if you could actually say something about it it wouldnt be the unknowable absolute anymore.’

6. Nonsensical riddles: ‘Can a thing exist with no assistance? Logically no. If space contained but a single entity the entity would not be there. There would be nothing there for it to be there to.’

7. Banal remarks about Gödel’s incompleteness theorem…which is strange because this obsessive genius with a mind like a steel trap who has read all of his stuff can tell us almost nothing about him that can’t be found on Wikipedia.

8. Gossip and anecdotes about intellectual things: ‘Russell saw the problem with it and he begged Whitehead not to publish it. They seldom spoke afterwards. A situation not helped by Russell’s continually trying to fuck Whitehead’s young wife.’ — ‘In any event Grothendieck and Motchane had a falling-out. Motchane told him that the Institute was accepting military money so that he would resign. Which he did. I’m not even sure if it was true.’ — ‘It may have started with von Neumann. He was present at Gödel’s presentation to the Vienna Circle and when Gödel finished reading the papers von Neumann said: It’s all over.’

9. That stupid William Burroughs idea: ‘The arrival of language was like the invasion of a parasitic system. Co-opting those areas of the brain that were the least dedicated. The most susceptible to appropriation. A parasitic invasion.’

10. Quantum physics clichés: ‘Experiments, gedanken or actual, seem to require our active involvement. If we’re not there they dont work. The ugly truth is that other than Feynman’s sum-over theories there is no believable explanation of quantum mechanics that does not involve human consciousness.’

11. And of course, synesthesia: ‘From about the age of seven I never mentioned synesthesia again. For instance. I thought it was normal and of course it wasn’t.’

Parts of this book read as if Bill Nye had a manic episode, cross-dressed as a woman, and then gave some low level introduction to the philosophy of mathematics and physics to his therapist.

Of course, it’s not all bad. There are ideas here about music, Platonism, consciousness, language, relativity—all of which are rather simple and underdeveloped—and they point towards things that could interesting. But instead of going deep Alimac prefers to present an idea, cite the person who said it, maybe tell a random anecdote, and then move on. They don’t sink to new levels of profundity like a real monomaniacal genius but gloomily skid along the surface. At one point Alimac even tells us that ‘I thought about the quotation that Quine cites. Save the surface and you save all.’ Indeed…

In places I have wondered if this is some kind of hyper-irony that I’m too unsophisticated to understand. Make your protagonist a pseudo-intellectual hack but endow them with all of your own ideas and fixations? Maybe that is genius!

I understand that the form of the novel makes complex discussions about these topics challenging, and McCarthy’s lack of interiority in his narration makes this even more difficult. But it’s one thing to frame your character as a genius and put a Dr. Watson-like psychiatrist in there to clarify questions the reader might have; it’s another to have your sexy BDP gifted kid fail to so much as mention the nuances of the problems that are supposed to obsess her. What we want as readers of a novel of ideas are interesting ideas, not a charade to make the author’s fictional stand-in look smart.

This failure could be interesting—if we were talking about Alicia Western, a character in a novel with an overinflated ego and mental problems. But we are talking about Alimac McWest, who is both Alicia and McCarthy. The end result of all this is a disaster for both. The character that is Alicia Western appears phony and monstrous; and the thinker that is Cormac McCarthy comes off like an insecure little girl who hopes to be seen as ‘smart.’

All this is terribly disappointing. It’s no wonder that we are in such a cultural slump when even our best writers are pretentious wannabes. Let’s hope that future generations remember McCarthy not as the intellectual giant that he wished to be but as the literary artist that he truly was.”
— Krug

“I was once banned for life from a Melbourne second hand bookshop by the proprietor, who had finished off an entire bottle of ouzo just before I entered at around noon. He disapproved of one of my selections, Marilyn Robinson’s Gilead, suggesting calmly and sedately that I substitute her for a Cormac McCarthy. ‘You don’t want that,’ he said in his refined Australian manner, ‘you want a Cormac McCarthy.’ I duly returned to the fiction shelves and took down his pick from the shelf. I think it was All The Pretty Horses but it may have been Blood Meridian. It was certainly one of the more famous McCarthys, and when I saw it was priced five dollars higher than the Robinson I asked if he would price match given he had so very gently talked me into it, to which he responded that we were not in India (?) and that there was no haggling in his shop. He then snatched my other selections (about 8 books, from memory, or roughly 2.5 bottles of ouzo worth) and declared I was to quit his shop forevermore. To be fair, he was right about the Robinson, but I still hold that you can judge an author by his most elegant fans.

I have nothing to say against McCarthy as a person. There are worse ways to spend your life than writing mid-tier novels. Doing so is not a moral failing. But comparing McCarthy to other Western genre writers is embarrassing for him. The highly comedic first chapters of Blood Meridian are enough to demonstrate this. The episode in the revival tent is straight out of the opening sequence of a Netflix show, that someone turns on in the background after a hard day in the email frontier. It makes no sense whatsoever, which is obviously fine when you can bamboozle a television audience with visual and sound effects and techniques but which become comedic when attempted in fiction.

McCarthy then moves to a wholly stereotypical bar fight scene that was already a cinematic cliche when dialogue came on placards. Then later, Captain ‘White’ (get it, he’s white) finishes his letter before looking up to speak to the kid. We can see the camera panning, pen scratching, kid waiting. It’s way too cinematic (this is one of the worst insults I can imagine, by the way). We see only the surfaces.

If, as Philip Meyer writes in the introduction to my Picador Classic version, ‘McCarthy wants nothing to do with internality. None his characters are as developed as Melville’s Ishmael—we see them from the outside.’, and moreover, ‘McCarthy leaves out so much of what makes the novel [per se] powerful—indeed if he leaves out most of what makes human life interesting—how can it be that this book is such a masterpiece?’

Excellent question, Philip, perhaps the answer is lurking already within the question itself. Cormac, if this is what your most devoted fans are saying about you, perhaps rethink your approach. Meyer’s answer is that McCarthy is ‘drawing from older traditions. The Bible. The Odyssey and the Iliad.’ If that is true then where is the Biblical and the Homeric? Meyer compares Judge Holden Caulfield to Aeneas or Odysseus, but it’s unimaginable that Aeneas or Odysseus could perpetrate the kind of gratuitous horror that opens the book like a cheap Netflix opening montage, calumniating a man he’s never met to the point of gunfire and laughing about it.

In all the canonical works about great battles and violence, the most deadly and dangerous characters are the most prone to ruminating on the nature of what they are doing and their concern with honour is absolutely paramount, from Achilles on. If the revival tent scene of Bludge Meridian is to be taken as sincere and not an extremely subtle satire, then Judge H.C. is nothing resembling any Biblical or Homeric hero. What’s impossible to take seriously is the acceptance and even laughter of the bar patrons, who, remember, had been listening to the Reverend Green speak every day for two weeks in an age with no electronic distractions, when they learn that the Judge had never laid eyes on Green before that day and invented his calumny from whole cloth. It doesn’t matter how tall or imposing someone is, or how far beyond the frontier of civilisation you are, your reaction to that knowledge is not going to be laughter and shouting another round. The fictional dream, as John Gardner would put it, wherein we trust the author’s grip on his own reality, is rudely interrupted by page nine.

It makes sense that the precisely rendered details of hand-to-hand melee violence, scalping, gunfights and executions should appeal to millenials, the most physically courageous and accomplished generation in the agonistic arts since Lysander. ‘It’s all about war, man, everything is violence.’ Quite. Can’t argue with that, but it does devolve to tautology rather swiftly. The millennial, who prides himself most on not being a dupe, which fact makes him all the easier to dupe, has been taken in by McCarthy. Is your life all about violence, millennial man? To ask is to answer. Just as to the incel everything is about sex, so to the millennial man everything is about violence.

Louis L’Amour was what’s often called a genre writer. Genre is an untranslatable French word meaning (approximately) ‘readable and enjoyable’. Think ‘joie de vivre’, think ‘genre de vivre’. If L’Amour’s sentences are workmanlike, at least they are grammatically correct and he clearly identifies who is speaking. His hard violent men are full of depth, like the pools of the Arizona oases they kill for in one of L’Amour’s best, Last Stand at Papago Wells. Here is L’Amour setting the scene for the climax of the novel, which occurs in a sand storm.

And so the sun shone…another seemed no end to its shining, but now the high dust carried by the winds above the mountains obscured the sun but took away no heat. It lay heavy on the land, and although the heat waves were gone and the yellow pall covered the higher heavens, there was silence everywhere.

No birds flew, no lizard moved upon the ground…no quail called from the distant trees, for there was silence, and only silence.

There is upon the great sand wastes no more terrifying thing than a sand storm…the driving grains of sand wipe out the earth and sky, obscure the horizons, and close one in a tight and lonely world no more than a few feet square. Until one has experienced a sand storm upon the desert one cannot know horror; until one has felt the lashing whips of sand one cannot know agony; and until one has felt that heat, that terror, that feeling that all the world has gone wrong, one has not known hell. [ellipsis in original]

Here is a sample of Cormac’s landscape description, which I had to read three times to grasp.

He’s left behind the pinewood country and the evening sun declines before him beyond an endless swale and dark falls like a thunderclap and a cold wind sets the weeds to gnashing. The night sky lies so spent with stars that there is scarcely space of black at all and they fall all night in bitter arcs and it is so that their numbers are no less.

That last sentence in particular is a real head-scratcher. Maybe Cormac should have taken an MFA to polish up his prose. But it’s alright, because in contrast to L’Amour, McCarthy is a literary writer, which means he’s not obligated to invite or seduce you, but has a licence to bludgeon. The words come at you like Tetris blocks, unwieldy shapes that you yourself have to manipulate into some kind of comprehensible and aesthetically pleasing order, until you realise you’re pouring your essence into a flat meaningless screen. No handholding the precious reader with things like quotation marks either. You have to stop and reverse tracks to figure out who, if anyone, is speaking. Most of the time it’s just Cormac.

Some ‘characters’ also speak Spanish, actual words such as ‘burrajo’ and ‘gustas’ but they also on the same page say ‘something in Spanish’, which is confusing because it’s as though at one level the omniscient author understands Spanish and on another level doesn’t, perhaps because he’s too lazy to check his dialogue or he just forgot mid-page that he understands Spanish? It’s as if Graham Greene, trying to conceal information from the reader for some inexplicable dramatic reason wrote of Scobie, ‘then he said something to her in English.’

I felt honour-bound to read until page fifty (actually I made it to fifty-six). I’m open to the idea that the novel significantly improves and would welcome the excavation of such evidence; I’m also open to the idea that Bludge Meridian is a highly subtle satire of a type of mid-list fiction, but life is wasted playing Tetris. Meyer is right, it is bereft of ‘most of what makes life interesting.’”
—Lucas Smith

“I had been meaning to read Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy for years. It looms large in the pantheon of Important Books. The late critic Harold Bloom considered it a work of genius. In 2003, he ranked McCarthy, along with Delillo, Roth and Pynchon, as the best writers alive. The Four Horsemen of American Letters.

Lots of men my age insist Cormac McCarthy was a god. A seer. A writer whose Books Will Change Your Life™. I have friends who swear by him, quote him in regular conversation, and whose style was ripped whole from his pages before they gave up not finding their own voice.

When I was a younger man, I spent a week digging post holes at Ellamar, a former mining camp and off-road community next to the village of Tatitlek in Prince William Sound, Alaska, only accessible by boat or bush plane. I stayed at an old man’s house. He wasn’t there. There was no cell service or internet or television, just an extensive back catalog of decades-old Playboy magazines, U2 and Eric Clapton on cassette, and lots of books. Louis L’Amour. James Patterson. Dusty machine manuals. And The Road by Cormac McCarthy, which I read on the front porch in the evenings overlooking the ocean.

The Road was good. Not my favorite apocalypse story and lacking humor (check out the The Last Bad Job by Collin Dodds for some comedic end-of-days), but the writing sang to my young brain. Brutal scenes. The story felt ready-made for a film adaptation. For all its McCarthy tics, the novel is streamlined and, at times, heartwarming. It’s a very consumable piece of narrative fiction wrapped in a no commas package.

(I also read a Louis L’Amour paperback that deck. L’Amour is late night corn flakes and a morning bloody mary. His stories are warm quilts to wrap your heart in, morality tales to ease your mind, especially when you’re at hunting camp. Breezy. Simple. Great with a cup of black coffee. The quintessential Dad Fiction.)

After Ellamar, I didn’t read any McCarthy for fifteen years. Why, I don’t know. But this last year, I vowed to try. I’d just come off a Philip Roth binge, reading three of his 90’s masterworks in a row: Sabbath’s Theatre, American Pastoral, and The Human Stain, plus one later short novel called Indignation. Roth can write people. You glimpse their struggle to survive and the convoluted ways humans give meaning to their struggle. All the awful limitations we push up against.

Emboldened, it was time to try more of Bloom’s Four Horsemen. It was time for Cormac McCarthy.

I started Child of God (1973), which followed necrophiliac serial killer Lester Ballard’s sojourn into madness in 1960s rural Tennessee. It was difficult. I just felt like I was following some wiry creepy Alaskan guy who shoveled boats for a living. All the moonshine and illiteracy and sex crimes and disgusting murder sounded like quite a few of the men in this state, carrying around only their first name and hiding from a past they themselves can’t bear to reckon with. I didn’t finish the book. There was just nothing to grab on to. The story appeared as a mountain, jagged with juts for my mind to hold on as I ascended, but upon closer gaze it was smooth and flat and my attention slid off. A painted staircase on top of a steep and frictionless slide. Something wasn’t holding. What was wrong?

It wasn’t the subject matter. After all, I just read American Psycho in three days. 400 pages about brand names, serial killing, and dinner reservations and couldn’t stop turning pages. Why? Why not Child of God? Was it me?

I moved on.

The sun and moon danced. Snow fell. A dog barked somewhere. Finally, it was time. I woke up one day for the night shift and decided to tackle the masterwork, McCarthy’s contender for Great American Novel.

In the break room at work my coworker Logan asked what I was reading.

‘Blood Meridian.’

His eyes blew up and didn’t blink.

‘Dude, brutal book.’

I laughed and kept reading.

And so the pages turned and behold the hot gaggles of killing and widescreen bloodshed and lo did the moon look piss yellow on night shift as my flaxen thumb flicked the screen while snow accumulated up on the pines and willows and the magpies scuttled under ice arches, yes, yes, the dark autistic night like gunsoot fell on their ran faces as hoof clomps ruddered. It was night shift but I felt tired. Fiction should enliven you, no? I got halfway through then stopped. Was I taking a break? Why was I taking a break? Was I not learned enough? What was it about McCarthy that wasn’t working for me?

Maybe reality kept getting in the way. While I read Blood Meridian during breaks at work, I’d also been on the deck of a boat, outside, dealing with eighty-mile-per-hour winds, face windburn and frostbitten to hell, clad in a mustang survival suit working on the stern’s open edge with two other people, seven foot waves nearly carrying me off into the sea. The winter was the worst in forty years. It got so cold the water pipes froze inside my trailer. God and Mother Nature were fighting and we were the children of the separation. Around that same time, my brother was diagnosed with stage three cancer and sent out of state to the Lower 48 for better medical care. The whole situation was quite public, so much so I can write that here without hesitancy, and it was surreal to have something close to you be out in the open, the feelings of dread and vulnerability scraped bare at the post office as you wait in line to pick up a package and a stranger you’ve never met asks how your own brother is doing, this bizarre sensation that your life has been made into a performance, it always has been a performance and always will be, because we as people need things, and it would be rude to tell someone who has helped give your brother money for treatment on his tumors, his kidneys, his faltering flesh, that you would rather not talk about it right now.

Blood Meridian is about a young man named The Kid who ends up joining a gang of scalp hunters in the mid-1800s. They rape and pillage different tribes and villages in and around Northern Mexico. There is a character named The Judge, who is seven feet tall and pale and a philosopher and pedophile. He’s a villainous evil pro-science asshole. One wonders if Jeffrey Epstein modeled himself on the man.

The first half of the book consists of the ultraviolence and the Judge occasionally looking at the stars and saying some weirdly modern perspective, and everyone responding by saying gosh dern aint that a pickle then spitting, and then more ultraviolence and wondrous descriptions of landscapes. There are moments in Blood Meridian so comically brutal that a reader wonders if a character will kick a baby like a football. There are descriptions of fauna that would make said fauna blush. There is Spanish that isn’t translated, because screw you.

After a hundred pages of the scalping and whoring and drinking I finally thought, okay, okay, I get it. Pretty sentences, sure, but give me a break. Life is hard enough as it is, and I had enough shit going on. This existence overflows with gruesome framed images you ponder while driving. I understood the brutality, I saw the point of the brutality, but the brutality did not reach.

Again, why?

Bob Dylan once said: What made the real blues singers so great is that they were able to state all the problems they had; but at the same time, they were standing outside of them and could look at them. And in that way, they had them beat. What’s depressing today is that many young singers are trying to get inside the blues, forgetting that those older singers used them to get outside their troubles.

Catharsis can be achieved by experiencing hard art. I believe that. But, like the blues, some art casts the audience into the darkness and leaves them there. A young man listens to sad music in order to feel wells of deep emotions. As life progresses, he listens to sad music less, because the sadness of life is available whenever, wherever, just by him paying attention, just by living. If you live long enough, you won’t need help feeling blue. The big trick will be escaping its grip.

Blood Meridian is a great book. The writing is superb. I understand, intellectually, that it’s brilliant and respect its strangeness and courage. But it might not be for me. Maybe just at this time in my life. Maybe one day it will. I have no interest in an Emperor No Clothes takedown of McCarthy, because I’m not well-read enough nor convicted enough of that idea to even attempt such a thing.

I am curious about the McCarthy fan base response to my complaints.

Some of the more virulent McCarthyites will call me a plebian, a prude, a person who is willingly ignorant, nay, too dumb to understand. I haven’t read enough. I haven’t done the work. Looking at the McCarthy subreddit, there are spotted grand dismissals of anyone whose taste doesn’t jive with theirs.

But would a McCarthyite, the pure and true kind who elevate their writer above all others, consider reading anything else?

According to the Beyhive, Beyonce Knowles is the greatest living artist in the history of the Universe, and was flawless in every way before her husband had some bad press from being a side character in the P. Diddy Cinematic Universe and, uh, other things. If you were moderately online popular and attacked her, or, merely didn’t kiss the ground her thousand dollar shoes walked on, there was a good chance you’d be harassed, torn to bits, made to contemplate suicide because you rejected the glory of Lemonade.

When people respond poorly to a great thing, there can be this immediate judgement that the person is too weak and caught in their own subjective gaze. But nobody ever frames the opposite as a negative; maybe you respond to this great thing so intensely with love because you are weak in some area, or romanticize some towering object you yourself cannot possess, and are blind to its flaws because to admit its drawbacks would be to lose your purpose. Maybe you hold something up because you are insufficient and need something to worship, and only by creating an idol can you find yourself a god to tell you what to be. You’re too afraid to be a person, so you borrow someone else to inhabit. Not a self-created individual, but a makeshift sketch.

Great art is based on how greatly it can impact someone, not what the impact might be. The greater something is, the greater its misunderstandings. There are those who do not understand Notes from Underground is a warning, not comforting solidarity. There are those who see McCarthy’s visions, and their ability to swallow them, as a sign of a more refined palette. The virtue is in liking the thing itself.

I am not going to argue something as bold and foolish as Cormac McCarthy being a bad writer. He’s not. Nor do I wish to even make the claim he’s overrated by the general population. But can we at least admit he’s a limited writer? All writers are, of course, limited, for it is their limitations that create what we call style. Stephen King has never written a fun sex comedy, and Jonathan Franzen has never written a book where somebody scalps a child (deleted scene in Freedom, per chance.) But Cormac’s books, over and over, reveal a very particular palette and expanse of the world. It is great if you want to be in there, and awful if you don’t. I really don’t. But why do so many men want to?

It goes back to 2007.

The Road helped propagate the current myth of McCarthy. A McCarthy better for public consumption. Oprah Winfrey nominated the book in March of 2007 for her Book Club. In May 2007, the movie No Country For Old Men was released, with the general consensus for the Coen Brothers’ magnum opus, one of the greatest films of all time, and, yes, based on the 2005 book by McCarthy. That June, Oprah interviewed McCarthy for television and McCarthy didn’t flinch, he took the questions with her. A new McCarthyism was in town.

McCarthy was already an established, even legendary, writer by this point in the literary world. All the Pretty Horses was his big mainstream novel, the one that shot him into the mainstream of popular higher-end American fiction. It was even granted the greatest of honors for written works at the end of the American century: a film adaptation, released in 2000, and starring Billy Bob Thorton, to middling reviews and soon to be forgotten.

McCarthy’s stature was secured, but I don’t believe he would have become an icon of the forever-online lit bro unless there was the mid-to-late 2000s push to bring him greater fame. Must have had a good agent. 2007 is the year McCarthy really became a household name to the general public, the barely-reading public, the Oprah-watching American sprawl, so much so that his Pulitzer Prize winning book about cannibalism and the end of the known world was sitting on a table in a waterfront house in Virgin Bay, next to Ellamar mountain, next to The Joshua Tree by U2, next to all common streams of culture.

The double whammo of The Road and No Country for Old Men shot McCarthy into a kind of widened mainstream American consciousness, and No Country for Old Men was particularly potent for teenage boys and young men. All the Pretty Horses is not a book that is going to inspire awe in kids raised by Jackass. Anton Chigurh, a character so memorable the only other comparison one can muster is Heath Ledger’s Joker the next year? A young man is going to read that book.

I’d argue this novel and movie grabbed a generation of men at a pivotal point in their life, similar to Fight Club nearly a decade before. This helped create what I like to call the McCarthy Online Industrial Complex and a cult-like devotion to the writer that only happens when you discover something when your mind is fallow, waiting to give itself up to emulation.

McCarthy himself is a character worth looking up to for a certain kind of aspiring young male writer. You see, when a man decides to become a writer, there’s a select-your-character screen, featuring a list of ready-made personas based on some critical darlings. Each is an archetype made flesh. Each comes with a wardrobe and schedule. You must choose your character to start the game. This has always been the case. Somebody wanted to be Joyce or Blake, Thompson or Kerouac. You dream of someone, someday, wanting to be you.

In the internet era, because of hive mind sociopolitics, there seem to almost be less heroes to choose from, not more. Literate men have buckled down and chosen a few people to copy and write about. These options have winnowed to a select few, like David Foster Wallace, Yukio Mishima, and, yes, Cormac McCarthy. Pick one and commit. Get the costume too. Mishima is the hardest to accomplish, because you must go to the gym with dedication. Chuck Palahniuk also encouraged men to work out, to give their lives to something unequivocally. But to write like either of them is to enter two different countries, not even a border across. Palahniuk with his short sentences, Mishima with his lines like extended spider webs of beauty. I’m not sure Palahniuk has the same adulation as he once had. Much like his Gen X counterpart Bret Easton Ellis, he kept on living and had to make money in the modern attention economy, going on podcasts and being somewhat accessible. But Palahniuk’s Fight Club, outside of the author himself, offers many modern men a road map for masculine life and a writing style that has become so absorbed into a kind of macho internet expression his offspring might not even know he’s the father of them all.

Mishima became a prop of the right-wing surge of the last decade, of a fascist nihilism with an undertone of camp. What was Mishima but a looksmaxxer? What was he but a proto-Trumpian figure, where the aesthetic world of ravaged beauty collided with hundrum realities in bold and distasteful ways? Mishima’s psychosis was a future-facing genius because if you brought him with a time machine to 2026, he would be exactly the same man.

David Foster Wallace cosplay varies, but you need to spend time with a thesaurus and conflate your low-end depression with the cosmic hell he went through. To be a Wallacite in 2026 is a courageous battle, as the man formerly deemed Bandana Christ has been knocked off the pedestal due to a karmic balancing of the scales. It was to be expected. Your estate can’t pimp out a cash-grab book of your college graduation speech sold right next to a Live Laugh Love poster at a Barnes and Noble without a little pushback. You can’t receive a biopic starring the Forgetting Sarah Marshall guy without someone bringing up the time you pushed a woman out of a moving car.

Which brings us to Cormac McCarthy.

McCarthy is the most connected to the Earth, the Land, and Just Guy Things. On Substack, I see people dissecting the mysteries of his archive, discussing the secrets of Blood Meridian, asking, over and over in new ways the same question, why is McCarthy so damn good? He was a percieved recluse in the manner of Salinger or Obi-Wan Kenobi, and his unwillingness to be truly known makes so many wish to see.

Hero worship is often tied to second-hand nostalgia, which carries the quixotic feeling that you were, to quote many a YouTube comment, born in the wrong generation. Most writers, because they now exist in a world where they are primarily writing not to a large reading audience but to other writers, yearn for the days of typewriters and cheap rent and everybody reading paperbacks, never taking into account their entire personality might only exist because of Steve Jobs and Reddit releasing a mobile app. The You you think you would be then wouldn’t exist, because you wouldn’t be reading Child of God and you sure wouldn’t be writing Child of God, no no no, you would be pining after the 1930’s Faulkner or whatever else.

McCarthy’s biography attests that he himself was one of these men pining after William Faulkner. Faulkner was McCarthy’s McCarthy, so much that McCarthy became his own hero once he finally absorbed all of Faulkner. The son of a successful lawyer, Cormac came from an upper middle-class home (a ten room house in Knoxville) and received a quality college education. Cormac isn’t his real name. It’s Charles. Charles McCarthy. Charlie McCarthy. Say it out loud. Remember the monocled ventriloquist dummy with the top hat? Of course you don’t, you’re not one-hundred years old, but, oh, hey, what about The Muppet Movie? Yeah, he’s in that. Edgar Bergen was the guy with the hand up the puppet. McCarthy didn’t want his books to be associated with a goddamn doll, so he changed his name and moved into a shack with his first wife in the Smoky Mountains. They divorced in a year.

And so Cormac McCarthy is a creation of sorts in the classic American tradition, by a man who rejected his wealthy past to better understand the darkness by becoming the darkness. This is very similar to the plot of Batman Begins, where Bruce Wayne runs away from being the rich kid of Gotham city and learns kung-fu from ninjas, except swap out ‘Gotham City’ with ‘Tennessee,’ ‘kung-fu’ with ‘alcoholism,’ and ‘ninjas’ with ‘the common folk.’ Instead of fighting crime by becoming a creature of the night, Cormac went full immersion into low-class living so he could write books and get super drunk.

McCarthy’s second wife, Ann Delisle, said, ‘Someone would call up and offer him $2,000 [16,700 adjusted for inflation - Author’s note] to come speak at a university about his books. And he would tell them that everything he had to say was there on the page. So we would eat beans for another week.’

Is this admirable? Mind you, Cormac had a young son from his first marriage, named Cullen, who he wasn’t supporting. He told Ann to get a third job if she wanted more money. Charming. There is something particularly awful about a man who abandons their child. There is also something terrible about a man who won’t support his family. Call me a sell-out, but if someone called me and offered me two grand not adjusted for inflation to speak about my book or album or whatever, which would enable my wife to not have to bathe in the lake, I would do it. So would you.

This isn’t just a man sticking to a principle, this is a man screwing over someone he promised to protect with marriage vows, which he broke in interesting ways. More on that later.

You can write with a job. I’m writing this diatribe during breaks on night shift, day shift, traveling during work. Alexander Sorondo just published his fantastic 19,000 word history on Bret Easton Ellis while working in a grocery store. Anything is possible. Hell, Cormac, work in a tollbooth a la Adam Sandler in Big Daddy, just anything. For God’s sakes, get your wife out of the lake.

Other elements of McCarthy sound cool to the impressionably young. The comical trappings of his monk-like focus with the cheap Olivetti typewriter cranking out all those millions of words, the carrying of the lightbulb from cheap motel to motel so he could always read.

It’s an attractive, ready-made identity to the narcissist who doesn’t yet have one.

Writing has always struggled to be a masculine behavior, because it generally involves sitting on your ass and making up stuff. This is not the behavior of a macho guy of action, because they’re usually not sitting down but standing up and doing something action-oriented, like supporting their family or fighting a bull. There’s a bit of Hemingway in McCarthy, that veneration of the comically masculine. The difference is Hemingway was full of great activity, murdering various animals and sidling up to wars, whereas McCarthy appeared to primarily read and flit around. Hemingway also grappled with the feminine his entire life. His literary world is one where a sea of yin hides underneath a current of yang. This is not found in McCarthy’s work. Women are scarce, madonnas and whores and teenage runaways who could be both or either.

One part of McCarthy’s very private life that recently went public was the grooming of Augusta Britt, 16 years old, when he was, um, 42, starting way back in 1976. These revelations were published by Vanity Fair in late 2024, by Vincenzo Barney in a winding, now-infamous bit of tall prose that sparked a thousand angry rebuttals.

According to Britt, they met at a motel pool in Tuscon, Arizona. She was in and out of foster care and recognized him from the author photo on the back of one of his novels. They started talking. Things happened. In 1977, when Britt was 17, McCarthy forged a birth certificate to get her into Mexico. He feared statutory rape charges, as the age of consent in Arizona was 18, and being convicted under the Mann Act, which outlaws transporting anyone across state lines for immoral purposes.

Britt recounted how McCarthy knew all the laws and repeated them to her in a Aren’t I A Stinker? fashion, joking about how he was getting into trouble. He was also still married to Ann, and Britt didn’t find out about McCarthy’s wife till they got back from Mexico.

This was the story, more or less, given to Barney by Britt, and recounted in a much more romantic, less blunt fashion.

One more twist to the story though. In February 1974, Guy Davenport, a novelist, was waiting for McCarthy to finish edits on his novel Tatlin! but McCarthy was a little busy. In a letter Guy complained:

Cormac McCarthy has just run off to Mexico with a teenage popsy, abandoning a beautiful British ballerina of a wife.

So either Britt changed the timeline, probably to make the story less gruesome (14 versus 17), or McCarthy had done this whole show before.

Some McCarthy fans justify their hero’s behavior with the old It Was a Different Time argument, which doesn’t really work, because while it was over half a century ago, and (like all of the past) technically a different time, it was still a time where this behavior was considered godawful abhorrent, and McCarthy would have been locked up in prison for what he pulled. That’s why he took her to Mexico. To break the established laws. Because it was bad.

I point this out because some readers and fans were shocked, just shocked, that the guy who wrote Blood Meridian was capable of doing something so heinous. To which, really? To give credit to McCarthy, he rarely posited himself as a sage or moral guide. His work is full of cold clay. But the veneration is ultimately hollow.

As McCarthy aged, after his celebrity grew, after the money kept coming in, he struggled to write. He spent more time at the Santa Fe Institute, a non-profit R&D center. McCarthy saw himself as man of science, and this was his circle of friends. He drifted from the man he himself had created, no longer Cormac, but back to upper-middle class Charlie, encased in amber and no longer able to conjure the old muse. As Britt wrote:

Santa Fe killed the Cormac I knew. He gained fame, wealth, and fancy superficial friends. He turned his back on his old friends like Jimmy Long (J-Bone) and Billy Kidwell. They were left to die, forgotten and alone. He lost much of his compassion and kindness. As the Institute crowd claimed more of his time, he struggled to write. Couldn’t write. How could he? He’d stifled or killed that which inspired him. The advance for The Passenger was spent. He was obligated. These last many years he has taken up drinking again. Living in majestic splendor but enjoying none of it. Surrounded by junk and the clutter of a lifetime. Haunted.

Haunted.

‘McCarthy is for thin men,’ someone said to me recently.

‘What do you mean?’

They riffed, ‘Thin bones. Thin boned men love McCarthy. Thick boned men have no need for him.’

I’m taking another break. I’ll finish Blood Meridian after. Until then, I’ve moved on. Maybe one day Harold Bloom can look beyond the grave to me and smile. Maybe I will one day understand. Maybe one day I can enjoy the words for themselves. One day.”
—Shane Kimberlin

art by Aaron Lange

1. It isn’t; he was born Charles Joseph McCarthy, Jr. and presumably didn’t think “Lil’ Charlie Joe McCarthy” had quite the required gravitas. —Justin

2. McCarthy is absurdly easy to parody since most of his prose already seems to be in the parodic register (the most alcohol-soaked passages of Faulkner as riffed on by a high school student with a C+ in English). Most of these parodies, being indistinguishable from the original, are correspondingly pretty unfunny; when there was never any subtlety there in the first place, what’s the point?

3. Strange that this obsessive genius with a mind like a steel trap can tell us absolutely nothing about Gödel that can’t be found on Wikipedia. That same perfect memory gives us sentences like this: “Grothendieck says somewhere (?) that twentieth century mathematics has begun to lose its moral compass.”

4. And there is no way he could have read all these people—Brouwer—and written what he does about ontological problem in mathematics.