NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN BY CORMAC MCCARTHY

                        7-7-26
‘No Country For Old Men’ by Cormac McCarthy

Every year I end up organically spending that year obsessing over an author or a poet’s body of work. Last year it was Galway Kinnell, the year before Seamus Heaney, then Faulkner, then Hemingway. This year is shaping up to be the year that I spend on McCarthy. 

As always, as was expected, another great novel from the yankee southern gothic. The similarities in the writing style to The Road, as contrasted against his earlier work, and especially Blood Meridian, is immediately apparent. I haven’t read the Passenger series, which I believe was posthumously released, but I would be interested to know if they continued in the same style as the rest of his later novels. I’ve heard that people don’t like No Country for Old Men because it’s “too simple”, (even though The Road is generally considered a difficult read as far as following the events goes, despite being written in an identical manner) (an accusation that loses all merit once you remember that he wrote Blood Meridian, maybe one of the most complexly written, without sacrificing submersion, modern novels [which, the more distance I get from, the more I am convinced it really is The Great American Novel]). People forget that the best American writer was a champion of the “deceptively simple”, a school of thought that McCarthy was able to stroll in and out of effortlessly on any single page he wrote. To me, the ability to write a classic novel, using simple language in simple scenes, is the hallmark of an author that has fully mastered his craft. As the hallmark of intelligence is the ability to explain circumstances as precisely as possible in the plainest language possible, so too does it transfer into the writing of great writers. Although it has nothing to do with anything, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that the great Neil Young is another champion of the deceptively simple, which has led people to underestimate the complexity of themes that he explores, despite it being proof of the profound understanding he has for his craft, or that McCarthy had for his. It’s a little exhausting to consider that, critics thought ‘No Country for Old Men’ was too simple, while, at the same time, Blood Meridian is notorious for being so complex in its prose that, for many, it circles all the way back around to being ‘bad’. So, simultaneously, McCarthy’s works are underwrought and overwrought. I find both styles a breath of fresh air in a prolonged period of artistic stagnation, either simple or complex, his novels are written so effectively that, even non-readers will pick them up and be unable to put them back down.

While trying to find an article pertaining to the development of No Country for Old Men, which I correctly half-remembered was written as a screenplay originally, but was turned into a novel after a difficult time getting it developed into a film. Which, is so typically and extraordinarily inept, that it could only have been declined by the bureaucratic middle-men in the entertainment industries that, despite never creating anything, still like to consider themselves creatives. Producers and agents and accountants and studio representatives, all of which are so thoroughly out of touch with trends, and often just lack the prerequisite taste to determine what is and what isn’t good, turned down No Country for Old Men originally. It went on to win four Academy Awards, if I remember correctly. But, while looking up the development and writing process, I found a quote of McCarthy’s where he lists his four favorite books. Moby Dick, Ulysses, The Brothers Karamazov, and The Sound and The Fury were the four listed; the former half of the bunch I haven’t read, despite owning them both and being a fan of James Joyce, while, the latter two, are also potentially two of my three favorite stories, including Blood Meridian. The Sound and The Fury was the novel that originally had won me over to Faulkner - when, after like fifty pages in, you realize that the first act is being told through images of the past by a mentally retarded kid, and the whole lead up just clicks together perfectly and tragically and expertly executed, it’s nearly an out of body experience. I figured McCarthy was a Faulkner fan - he’s a southern gothic writer - but I was pleased to discover that we both have the same favorite story from Faulkner. 

I wish I had become a McCarthy fan sooner, preferably before his death - not like I would have a chance to meet him, or anything, but knowing these legendary creatives like McCarthy, or Neil Young or DeLillo, are still living and still enjoying a life of international respect and acclaim inspires me. That, if these men, who made a name off of the most unlikely pursuits are still alive and enjoying the awardments they’ve earned, then maybe this world hasn’t immediately devolved into apathetic retardation, and that those who create in an effort to seek out and analyze universal themes and the truths therein still have a place in this world. At least for now. Now that McCarthy’s gone, and so is Robert Stone and Norman Mailer, I struggle to think of a living author worthy of taking their spots on the podium beside DeLillo and Thomas Pynchon, the most worthy likely being Richard Ford, or, if you extend the criteria to include screen and stage writings, would maybe include Mamet and Schrader. 

Every death from the Greatest Generation brings us one step closer to a world devoid of the Greatest Generation, and with them, I fear we will be losing everything that is grounded in reality, simply honest yet complex in its ability to be so, and the world that they’re leaving behind is directly facilitating the devolution of the generation that is replacing them from the bottom. I am also Generation Z, technically, but am an Elder of said generation, and am completely disconnected from the rest of my Generation. I just hope they’re still reading, and they’re not convinced it’s like, a jewish conspiracy to keep us smart, or whatever.

BLOOD MERIDIAN BY CORMAC MCCARTHY

                        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.

POOR PEOPLE BY WILLIAM T VULLMAN

                        4-24-26
‘Poor People’ by William T Vullman

Poor People is the first non-fiction book I’ve finished in nearly five years. Vullman’s international exploration for a definitive answer to the questions of poverty in the third world was one of the most excellent books I’ve read in so long that I finished it in a day’s time (which is exceedingly rare for me). My biggest take away (because, as someone whose day job brings them in contact with poor Americans constantly, and who is poor myself, I have a pretty good understanding of the many different belief systems among them) was the in depth analysis’ of all of the different cultures he was immersed in. It’s edifying hearing first hand accounts of the way people in whatever country live and the overarching ideals from a person whose analysis I trust - partly because he’s not beholden to any corporate interests, but is also doubtlessly due to the fact that he wasn’t interviewing politicians or ambassadors or spokespeople for foreign corporations, but people on the ground who experience the country the way I would also experience the country by way of my own class. 

What I found particularly interesting was his section on Invisibility inside Pakistan and Afghanistan, wherein he explores the nuances of wearing a burqa vs wearing a hijab vs wearing neither. I had an assumption as to what women in those regions thought regarding their ‘modesty’, which was essentially what the same as they thought; which can amount to considering their entire body as a ‘private part’, or, when considering their modest garb, they would compare their own modesty to American women, who they actually pity for their sexual openness, where an American woman’s perceived lack of modesty could potentially lead them into situations where their bodies are used for another’s enjoyment at their own detriment. The way Vullman considers the nuances, while interviewing everyone from cab drivers to his own interviewer to farmers and even members of the Al-Qaeda, not unduly placing blame on anyone while also not excusing the circumstances that facilitate any person’s oppression was beautiful. He made well-brought-to points on either side of the ‘burqa discussion’ which I found myself agreeing on, either way. 

The chapter on Invisibility was one of seven or so chapters each dedicated to identifying and examining prevailing states of being that are brought about by, or at least pointedly exacerbated by, poverty. He ended the chapter on Invisibility, which is almost entirely composed of his travels in the countries, by discussing how much more difficult the function of invisibility is to maneuver when the homeless woman asking for change can’t show her face, a person’s most identifying factor, and what all passerbys look for when determining if a homeless person is ‘worthy’ of their charity. Many parts of that book have haunted me since finishing it days ago.

TIMEQUAKE BY KURT VONNEGUT

                         2-26-2026
‘Timequake’ by Kurt Vonnegut

Timequake was the last Vonnegut novel that I have not read at least the first fifty pages of, and probably the ninth book of Vonnegut’s I’ve read. His book Cat’s Cradle was the first book that moved me, maybe the second after The Sun Also Rises. Vonnegut’s books are probably more responsible for pushing and then broadly defining my tastes than any external influence that wasn’t a family member. His books are the only reason I enjoy science-fiction today. So much of his own personal philosophy has defined my own ethos; his work always grounds me, almost every story he’s written being about coming to terms with one's own inconsequential existence in the universe. This might seem like an especially nihilist interpretation, but I choose to look at the other side of that coin - that, if nothing we do matters, then nothing we do can leave a lasting scar. 

I love Vonnegut’s work, but have found some of his later novels to drag, his characters and how they relate to their world being so familiar to me, even if the character and their world have just been introduced to me. I’ve read every book of his before Slapstick, and have started every book of his after, except for Timequake. After the first ten chapters or so, as he transitioned into more autobiographical sections for every fictional section, I was drawn - it took me six months to read the first fifty pages, and yesterday to read the last one-hundred-fifty. 

Returning to Vonnegut after going half-a-decade at least since the last time I’ve finished one of his stories for the first time (a time in which I’ve reread Cat’s Cradle at least thrice and Siren’s of Titan once) felt exactly like reuniting with a beloved member of your extended family after decades away from each other; becoming a sincere and heartfelt dive into his family and his friends and his relationship with them was like catching up. I realized that, for how important Vonnegut’s books were to my late adolescence, I knew very little about his life - or, rather, didn’t quite know what he incorporated into his work was based on his real life, what characters or settings were direct parallels. 

He is so succinct and so profound all while speaking so deceptively doltishly; he reminds me so much of my grandfather and my father to a secondary degree. The ways in which he thinks he’s funny fall so oafishly flat to me that I can’t help but become more endeared to him, in similar ways to which my grandpa would try to relate to me by being silly well past the age that it produced a genuine laugh from me. I say Vonnegut’s work defined my own ethos and the way in which I answer almost any theory, but can’t quite tell whether that’s the case or if I happened upon a strikingly similar rationale independently - so much of Vonnegut’s messaging mimics the way my dad thinks, which he unconsciously passed on to me, that I think I would come to similar conclusions even if I had never read a word of his, as my dad had already came to similar conclusions, and I had to introduce my dad to Vonnegut’s work (the total sum of which he binged within a month, and then wouldn’t shut up about). 

I haven’t read any of his strictly non-fiction work, and am not sure how much of it consists of autobiographical stories, but getting some clear insight into my favorite author’s favorite people - at least who I gathered as being real people - felt like the first piece of Vonnegut’s work that was written for pure fan service. I’m so happy he had so many loved ones, he had so much family and so many of them that he raised. Upon reading the epilogue, and realizing that the book was a tribute to his late brother, who died five months before Timequake was published, and who a sizable portion of the book was centered around, I was floored. I couldn’t help but once more think of my grandfather, and his dad, and all those of their shared generations and just what has been lost to the world with their collective passing. They took with them a sort of constitutional magnanimity that is so rare to come across anymore and seemed to be universal to everyone born before the second half of the 20th century. Maybe we have it too easy, or our experiences are too varied to find total commonality with one another, though I still try to. 

Timequake, in retrospect, is circled around the death of Vonnegut’s siblings, and, in further retrospect, his own death, which would come to pass ten years later. Certain aspects of the novel read as premonitions. The novel as a whole reads as his good-bye to his readers - whether he knew he wouldn’t publish another novel in his lifetime or not at the time, I have no way of knowing, but his sending off of his self-insert Kilgore Trout with a sudden reversal of fortunes, seemingly as a subtle nod to his own fortunes (fortunes he managed to find in the face of tragedy), will stand as a fitting bow to wrap around an astronaut-sized career.

THE PASTEL CITY BY M. JOHN HARRISON

                         2-16-26
‘The Pastel City’ by M. John Harrison

I picked up the first novel of John Harrison’s Viroconium Sequence to put off finishing the last novel of his Kefahuchi Tract Discontinuity trilogy, the latter of which just may be the best series of fiction books I’ve ever read. The first book of the Kefahuchi series was my introduction to the author two years ago and it breathed new life into my love for science-fiction. Light inspired me to change how I thought about and approached science fiction writing. Harrison made me realize that it was possible to both distance a story from the high-science-fiction I usually gravitate towards and ground it in reality, while also leaning into the high-science of a world when needed, avoiding the impulse to constantly simplify the more complex (or convoluted) aspects of a story and instead trusting in the audience to be intelligent enough to follow the story regardless. 

I thought The Pastel City was a good story, but his later series of novels - the final novel in the trilogy being published after he had already spent nearly fifty years on his craft - were so intimidatingly well-written and effortlessly read that the bar I had for Harrison’s writing was set unfairly high. 

I have always rejected the idea that science-fiction, fantasy, action, adventure, etc. were mutually exclusive genres from great or classic literature; that all great stories, no matter how violent or how many action or chase sequences were involved, were doubtlessly only great because they were wrapped in a blanket of inspired prose. This preconception, for most people and for the most part, comes from soulless cash-grab action movies; but some of the blame is owed to pulp fiction authors, who too often can come up with a brilliant plotline and an imaginative setting for it to take place in, yet the prose that connects one plot-device to the next will come out stunted in comparison to how inspired the story is or the depth of the setting. 

To my mind, out of all authors of the pulp-derived genres, John Harrison’s stories exemplify just how brilliant an idea for a genre-fiction can be without resting on the laurels of the plot and successfully delivering the idea without sacrificing prose. 

The Pastel City was his second book, and it was published the same year he published his first book. The book and the series of stories are doubtlessly inspired, and populated with inventive peoples and landscapes, well-detailed vistas that are easily pictured in the reader’s mind - but so much of the dialogue seemed unnecessary and at times even grating. Harrison’s sophomore effort just lacked the cohesion to actually bridge the gap between.

What I discovered upon reflection was that, even in the gap of caliber between his first and his last books, The Pastel City had still inspired me, just not necessarily by the virtue of his gift for his craft as his other books had for me. In fact, the gap itself inspired me; that, if one of my favorite authors, one of the most original voices in genre-fiction can grow in his craft in such a way that even I notice it, then there is plenty of time for me to do the same. To put it succinctly, it humanized someone who I unquestioningly considered to be of another caliber of person past human. 

As I finalize the draft for the last few chapters of my first high-genre-fiction, encyclopedic novel, I’ve become increasingly critical of my own work, I’ve been second guessing additions and whether or not I am even qualified to know what to add or cut from a story to make it believable, or appropriately paced. But, when I thought about it, and consented to the idea that I wasn’t good at writing, then remembered that I have (hopefully) fifty more years to draft and hone my craft - fifty years to create my own brilliantly layered and believed story. Whether or not any of my stories get published is ultimately of less importance than refining my own writing processes and hitting new personal goals therein.

CHILD OF GOD BY CORMAC MCCARTHY

 

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.