6-13-26
‘Blood Meridian’ by Cormac McCarthy
I finally finished Blood Meridian a few days ago. I’d been reading it for like a year, just taking my time with it, and then with fifty pages left the end (concerning the Judge) got spoiled for me. Either way, fantastic book. Obviously. One of the best. Closest thing to Faulkner I’ve read that isn’t Faulkner and it’s about gunfights and criminals and scalping injuns.
Cormac McCarthy, as always, just continues proving with each book of his I read that any and/or all of the hardline rules people try to hold to in an effort to turn an algorithm into good writing are just useless advice. One of the most glaring examples, which is something that I’ve heard spoken about since before the current kindle/reddit/amazon independent romance slop factory writers (who love to make rules for writing and consult the rule list more than they do research) is the idea that you shouldn’t contain anything in a script (or I’m assuming just any story?) that doesn’t primarily move the plot forward. It’s not bad advice when if you need help keeping a story on track, but ninety-five percent of the time it’s bad, broad advice. The entire first hundred pages could be thrown out and it would essentially be the same book at the end, (as long as you spend a page introducing the kid and toadvine); Glanton is basically the main character, and the kid doesn’t mean him until like the tenth chapter? I don’t know it’s been a while since I was on the tenth chapter. This isn’t to say that the chapters before he meets Glanton aren’t great (I mean a thousand more chapters of just the kid and the judge and toadvine setting shit on fire), but that they are and are a welcome addition to the story. The other typical do’s and dont’s of McCarthy’s writing are obvious. Bad punctuation, stream-of-conscious, doesn’t credit the speaker for dialogue, doesn’t use commas, doesn’t give characters names; the thing is, I don’t know the ethos of modern rule-based storytelling, so I don’t know whether the way McCarthy writes is the accepted approaches, or if its the opposite. Either way, McCarthy’s opposite in writing style is probably somewhere around Frank Herbert or Tolkien (for different reasons), and all of them are great writers. You can use all or none or some combination of the ‘reddit rules for writing’ guidelines and it will have very little influence on whether your writing is good or not. To me, following those ideas is like reading a self-help book. Why would I listen to someone else’s opinion when I literally have my own?
McCarthy gets a little pretentious at points in this one, which, when it's tempered through the parlance of the Judge, might be some of the best pretentious dialogues and monologues ever written. I genuinely might be convinced that it actually is the Great American Novel. Who else? Maybe Infinite Jest, a Pynchon story or Dickens or Faulkner, Portnoy’s Complaint, Kill Mockerbird, Confederacy of Dunces, and (personally) as you obviously have to choose a Hemingway, I would argue the first posthumous novel of his (which is like maybe the only one set in America?) Islands in the Stream is his best work and might just be the best novel. Okay now I’m reviewing Islands in the Stream.
I don’t really care about artists politics anymore, as I end up disappointed in ninety percent of everyone’s politics, but I am kind of interested in McCarthy’s. It’s probably a trite observation to call him a protosigma, because all the sigma virgins love him too, but he might be the most grounded sigma to ever exist, and I would love to have gotten the chance to know.