Is Cormac McCarthy THAT GOOD?

Cormac McCarthy lurks in the place of American letters like a ghost from a disappearing age when writing MATTERED and writing had its own mythos of excessive drinking, womanizing, and a machismo that went through the roof. I'm reminded of Erica Jong's observations on being an undergraduate at Barnard at how so many of the poets that came through -- Untermeyer, Ted Hughes (of Sylvia Plath notoriety), and the like all told them that as women they were wasting their time writing poetry -- the real themes of blood and guts belonged to men. Never mind that already Grace Paley, Muriel Rukeyser, Adrienne Rich, to name a few had already begun to establish a significant readership and a new way of writing that was far from the feminine form of traditional romance.

If as Philip Roth once commented: to be a great writer means risking telling something shameful, to be more perverse rather than neurotic, McCarthy does succeed in precisely this way. His novels don't stop short of the full truth -- be it violence, cannibalism, incest, and the two themes he defines as central to the nature of life in America -- violence and death. He never pretends to be redemptive, and he rarely strikes a false note.

My problem with his much lauded work (how complex that the NY Times mega-review of American classics places his "Blood Meridian" third, beneath Toni Morrisson's "Beloved") is the pervasive sense that comes through the writing that McCarthy insists on being seen as a "big writer" in the way that Faulkner and Hemingway were huge. In insisting on this icon status it detracts from the actual power of his work. In my view James Dickey succeeded to be both more subtle and more profound about the same issues in Deliverance, without his ever present fingerprint hovering over the novel, clamoring for immortality. Beyond violence and death lies craft, humility and the importance of writing for its own sake. If McCarthy could discover this subtlety he could truly be one of the great voices of our time.