2-15-26
‘Child of God’ by Cormac McCarthy
Cormac McCarthy was always one of those names to me that had been familiar from an unknown moment and had stayed only just familiar to me for a while. The majority of authors I read come from just a generation before him, and the few that came after him. The generation of authors in the middle of Hemingway and David Foster Wallace always represented a cynical decline in quality and cohesion for sake of style that had yet been refined, and gave way for writers like Wallace to do as much. McCarthy occupied a space in my mind beside the likes of James Cameron and Stephen King - who I staunchly consider to be slop peddlers without any of the campiness of quality science fiction or apocalyptica. While I will forever hold to that opinion of King and Cameron, I couldn’t have been more wrong to group McCarthy into their camp.
After reading The Road in the shortest start-to-finish of any book I’ve read in the last half-decade, and getting a hundred pages into Blood Meridian before I picked up Child of God, I realized that McCarthy is representative of the middle generation of authors between modern, early post-modern, and later post-modern, but, unlike James Cameron, whose stories create a sort of negative void of entertainment, McCarthy’s didn’t. Cormac McCarthy was of a class of writers within his generation that formed the subtle link between the modern and post-modern that I had once written off as just not existing. Since, I’ve gone back through the list of familiar names from his generation that I had written off as drivel without ever reading a sentence of their work, and discovered that McCarthy, along with the likes of Don DeLillo and Robert Stone, represented a quiet kind-of early post-modern movement that, unlike the writers of The Lost Generation or the Beat Generation, didn’t insist upon themselves or aggrandize their public facing persona, and simply allowed their work to speak for itself - which isn’t necessarily a good or bad thing, but, it had come with the secondary effect that, without an idea of the author’s personality from which to connect and contextualize a piece of work from, made their body of work easier to forget or completely overlook.
I’m equally as fond of a deceptively simple writing style as I am fond of a successfully executed, objectively difficult writing style. Given that these are two completely opposing writing styles, my brain wouldn’t allow myself to consider just how similar McCarthy and DeLillo were to their contemporaries like Pynchon or Gaddis; the former of which utilized the deceptively-simple style and down-to-earth subject matter that the realist, modernist writers from the previous generation, like Steinbeck or the Lost Generation and, to the uninitiated, could be mistaken for a stubborn unwillingness to depart from traditionalism. Which would also be the exactly incorrect interpretation of McCarthy’s work and his contributions to the medium.
McCarthy’s writings weren’t petulant refusals of the future for the past, but instead were the needed combination of traditional modernist writing style with the brutally honest (and unapologetic of it) subject matter of the early post-modern authors of the Beat Generation that would go on to form the basis of later post-modern American literature. Wallace employed the same combination of juxtapositionally conflicting writing styles and subject matter, and took it to another degree, inside of which the deceptively simple writing style, after fifty pages of describing a two-minute series of events, teetered the line of deceptively simple and just simple. He openly dropped the facade of deceiving the reader of his story’s simplicity with a wink, while creating a second, deeper layer of meaning and themes that existed all the way beneath Hemingway's Iceberg, and would never give so much as a hint as to what existed on his own iceberg.
When McCarthy’s straight-forward writing style was paired with the uniquely violent and morose southern-gothic backdrops of his subjects, most of which had only been related by the likes of writers like Faulkner and Capote, he created his own writing movement - even if I am the only person that would consider it as such. The ease with which he could relate descriptions - and his ability to flip from dedicating pages to detailing the lay of a flat plane (and managing to do so much without being exhaustive) to pages of dialogue, or inner-monologue, that don’t describe anything beyond the movements and actions of their characters, and not knowing how the story will read when you make it to the next page, was such an interesting choice in and was executed so well that reading his work has become a revelation to me with every paragraph.
I picked up Child of God because I was enjoying my time reading Blood Meridian that much; I wanted more time with the book, so I started one of his earlier publishings in the interim. Something I find most compelling about McCarthy work is, for how grounded his stories are in stark reality and the human condition, he is constantly using language and terminology that is either so antiquated that he was the only person alive at the time that knew such terminology existed, or he so accurately relayed his descriptions that you hardly noticed his use of onomatopoeic near-words that he fabricated out of yet-to-be combined etymologic concentrations - he would make up words, using a proper noun or a verb as an adjective and in spliced combination with a setting or feeling, and doing so in such a way that you would never have to wonder what he was trying to get at. He used the mutt-like qualities of the English language to land a mathematically precise strike at the core of what the audience could consider just-still-familiar.