Meet the Westerns

My Cormac McCarthy kick started in Texas in 2020, ending with his crazy and excellent novel The Passenger, a major departure from the rest.

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I’m currently reading The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro—my fifth of his; if you’ve never read Ishiguro, I recommend starting with Never Let Me Go or Remains of the Day.

This week, I finished Sensation Machines by Adam Wilson, and it would have fit perfectly in last week’s metaverse issue. Wilson’s vision of the very near future is clever and just dystopian-lite enough to feel not only plausible, but probable. His metaverse element is an augmented reality game called “Shamerican Sykosis,” played by putting on a helmet, with its own cryptocurrency (Sykodollars) that become a hedge against the crashing markets (sound familiar?) as the Senate debates a Universal Basic Income. One of the two main characters is hired to create a secretive social media campaign to turn people against the UBI while also promoting a new product: a biometric suit (called The Suit™) that gathers data on everything from your breast feeding to your bowel movements and airdrops it to the cloud to improve your life (sounds awesome, jk, but actually? but jk). This novel matches my thesis from last issue that reading about digital dystopias is not exactly uplifting. But fiction isn’t always supposed to be uplifting, and it contains a few brilliant scenes I will never forget, including an attempted threesome that gracefully weaves in Patrick Bateman-style narration about Eminem’s oeuvre and is funny and tragic at the same time.

But for Issue 17, let’s log out of the metaverse, emerge back into the natural world, and… saddle up.

As a kid, I wanted to be a cowboy so badly that I dressed up as one for multiple consecutive Halloweens. What East Coast Jew hasn’t fantasized about riding a horse through the American West?

The first Cormac McCarthy I ever read was The Road, in 2010 (a paperback with the Viggo Mortensen movie poster cover—awful), and I thought it was a miserable read. Not just because of the plot (there are ways to do post-apocalyptic without making the reader as unhappy as the doomed characters; Station Eleven is one example) but the sparse, brutalist writing and dialogue. Yes, it scored the Oprah Book Club sticker and won McCarthy the Pulitzer. But I have suspected for years that The Road is McCarthy’s most “basic” novel and wondered if I’m the only person who doesn’t rave about it as a life-affirming experience. This comment from Justin Taylor in Bookforum earlier this year made me feel vindicated: “it’s a silly, forgettable piece of YA that desperately wants you to believe it is the Book of Job.”

I didn’t try McCarthy again until late 2020, on a Covid-distanced family road trip through West Texas, when I (appropriately) read All the Pretty Horses. It was love at first gallop.

McCarthy’s prose can be famously unforgiving (no commas, no quotation marks) but once you learn how to read him, it carries you along and has a way of conveying the characters’ voices even in non-dialogue. When he does use dialogue, it’s so pitch-perfect I find myself underlining a lot of it. Two examples from Horses: thirteen-year-old Jimmy Blevins saying “Whoo, I’m drunkern shit”; Rawlins trying on boots in a store and saying to the saleswoman, “Shit, you’re lookin at a dancin fool.”

This, from page 23 in Horses, is to me a perfectly representative McCarthy paragraph: “The boy who rode on slightly before him sat a horse not only as if he’d been born to it which he was but as if were he begot by malice or mischance into some queer land where horses never were he would have found them anyway. Would have known that there was something missing for the world to be right or he right in it and would have set forth to wander wherever it was needed for as long as it took until he came upon one and he would have known that that was what he sought and it would have been.”

You either enjoy that or find it insufferable, and if you find it insufferable, you probably won’t like reading Cormac McCarthy.

I recently recommended All the Pretty Horses to two friends and both said they gave up after five pages, which was disappointing. This is the book’s opening paragraph:

The candleflame and the image of the candleflame caught in the pierglass twisted and righted when he entered the hall and again when he shut the door. He took off his hat and came slowly forward. The floorboards creaked under his boots. In his black suit he stood in the dark glass where the lilies leaned so palely from their waisted cutglass vase. Along the cold hallway behind him hung the portraits of forebears only dimly known to him all framed in glass and dimly lit above the narrow wainscotting. He looked down at the guttered candlestub. He pressed his thumbprint in the warm wax pooled on the oak veneer. Lastly he looked at the face so caved and drawn among the folds of funeral cloth, the yellowed moustache, the eyelids paper thin. That was not sleeping. That was not sleeping.

I think that grabs you right away, but the writing style certainly will be exhausting to many. I remember giving up on David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas twice initially, because of the way the opening section is written, before finally making it far in enough to love it—same with Will Self’s The Book of Dave, one of my favorite novels ever.

What’s happening: it’s 1949 in San Angelo, Texas, and John Grady Cole is at the funeral of his grandfather. He soon learns his mother plans to sell the family ranch, so he takes off for Mexico with his friend Rawlins to find work as cowboys. Action and adventure ensue. Romance and violence ensue. John Grady and Rawlins end up in a Mexican jail. (Even though the writing style is spare, let no one tell you McCarthy lacks plot—things happen in his novels.)

Having now read the Border Trilogy and five other McCarthy novels, I see how much of an outlier The Road was. The Border Trilogy is far more representative of his overall body of work. And while the tone of All the Pretty Horses has been called sunny compared to the bleakness of Outer Dark, Child of God, Blood Meridian and others, there’s plenty of darkness here, and plenty of utterances that hint at McCarthy’s worldview, like when an old man tells Cole, “among men there was no such communion as among horses and the notion that men can be understood at all was probably an illusion.”

In the second novel, The Crossing, Billy Parham traps a wolf that was killing cattle on his family’s land in New Mexico and decides, bizarrely, to return her across the border to the mountains of Mexico—by himself. Another very McCarthy passage here (page 105) with man preferring the company of animal even when animal cannot respond: “He talked to her a long time and as the boy tending the wolf could not understand what it was he said he said what was in his heart. He made her promises that he swore to keep in the making. That he would take her to the mountains where she would find others of her kind. She watched him with her yellow eyes and in them was no despair but only that same reckonless deep of loneliness that cored the world to its heart.”

The third book, Cities of the Plain, is my favorite because of the satisfying way it brings the stars of the first two books together and puts them on a ranch in New Mexico, where things are pretty good until they go wrong because of John Grady falling for a girl he shouldn’t touch, just like in the first book. And like in the first book, his friend nearly suffers the consequences. (The friendship between John Grady and Billy gives us banter like this, after they set traps for wild dogs that keep killing their calves, only to find the traps dug up by the dogs, unsuccessful: “I didn’t know dogs were that smart” // “They probably didn’t know we were that dumb.”)

The knife fight that ends Cities of the Plain is one of the most visceral and memorable scenes I’ve ever read in fiction.

While characters in these three novels occasionally philosophize about life, death, human nature, and evil (usually random supporting characters who make a single appearance), they are mostly just trying to work and live—to survive everyday life in their part of the country, survive weather and disaster and animals and men.

Sure, there is a somewhat-dated-these-days lionizing of traditional tough-man masculinity in these cowboy stories that may turn some readers away. (“I will always prefer the earlier Tennessee novels — Outer Dark, Suttree — to the later westerns; the former had an otherworldliness that in the latter risked stiffening into a sort of baroque machismo,” John Jeremiah Sullivan wrote in the Times last year.)

But the Border Trilogy felt like the closest approximation of my childhood cowboy fantasies: get on my horse and ride away. And while McCarthy may be first thought of as a writer of the South (he grew up in Knoxville, and The Orchard Keeper, Child of God, and Suttree are all set in Tennessee), his Westerns alone (Border Trilogy + Blood Meridian) form a body of work that rewards rereading and have prompted much deserving literary scholarship.

And that brings me to The Passenger, his first novel in 16 years (along with the slim companion novel Stella Maris) and surely his last (he’s 89). It is a fantastic book that is utterly different from everything I just wrote about.

This one is set mostly in New Orleans and Mississippi, with a few excursions to rural Tennessee. And while the content might be the most insane of any of his novels (which is saying a lot considering Child of God is about a vagrant who stores a dead body in his attic and fucks it), I think it is probably McCarthy’s most accessible novel for newcomers to his work.

I said “content” above rather than “plot” because, while there are a series of extremely inventive characters and back stories here, they don’t really add up to a plot per se.

The book opens with Bobby Western discovering the body of his sister Alicia Western hanging from a tree in the woods, so we know from the first page that her life will end in suicide. Then her first chapter takes us back to a year earlier, and introduces us to the Thalidomide Kid, usually shortened to The Kid (not to be confused with The Kid of Blood Meridian), a snarky midget with flippers for hands, and his merry band of vaudevillian freaks. They are hallucinations of Alicia, who is severely schizophrenic but also a brilliant mathematician. Meanwhile, Bobby’s chapters begin in 1980, eight years after Alicia’s suicide.

The chapters alternate between the siblings; all of Alicia’s chapters are italicized conversations/encounters with her imaginary friends. This time-switching has the effect of making both Bobby and Alicia feel alive in the reader’s present, even though for Bobby she died nearly a decade ago (though he is far from over it). Bobby and Alicia were in love (yes, in that way, though it sounds like they never acted on it).

Bobby is a deep-sea salvage diver, and in his first chapter he and his friend Oiler (the names here are pretty unsubtle) investigate, on a job in the Gulf of Mexico, a sunken plane full of corpses—with one passenger missing, along with the black box.

That mystery doesn’t really matter as much as what happens to Bobby afterward: quite a lot, although with very little direction to it. He goes to jobs; meets up with friends for drinks, including a beautiful trans woman named Debussy Fields; friends die suddenly; he drives to visit his grandmother in Wartburg, Tennessee; and all the while he is increasingly messed with by federal agents who have questions. He meets with a private investigator, Kline, who ends up becoming his confidante but doesn’t do much to help him. The feds cut off his bank account and steal papers from his apartment—it’s unclear if they’re dogging him because of the plane, or who his father was (he worked on the atomic bomb with Oppenheimer), or some other reason. He hides and re-hides his final letter from his dead sister. He gives plenty of righteous anger to the Feds (“I dont care who you are… I actually believe that my person belongs to me, I doubt that sits well with chaps such as yourselves”). But almost every new development is a red herring.

It’s Alicia’s sections that entertain most, even though they sometimes devolve into nonsense, and even though one could argue they carry no narrative momentum since we know what Alicia will eventually do. Her exchanges with The Kid are often laugh-out-loud funny, if you can forget for a moment how dark they are for happening at all. He repeatedly calls her different names, anything but Alicia, always alliterative; he ridicules his companions, who keep trying to do little performances for her and failing.

Alicia’s arguments with The Kid are also revealing of backstory, even when it might seem like he’s not saying anything important. For example, while mocking her, he says, “You told Granny that you wanted to live in the woods with the raccoons and she hauled you off to see Doctor Hard-Dick to have your head examined except that’s not all that got examined is it?” (“You dont know anything about it, and his name is Doctor Hardwick,” is all Alicia can retort.)

There is humor throughout Bobby’s sections too, of a less sinister type, usually coming from his colorful circle of friends. (This has got to be McCarthy’s funniest novel, and the one with the most dialogue by far.) Early on, he goes for a drink with a group of people, most of them “looking for work,” we are told, and we get this incredible job interview story from a character named Brat:

I just blew it. Something came over me. This breather kept going on about this policy and that policy. Finally he said: And another thing. Around here we dont watch the clock. And I said well I just cant tell you how happy I am to hear you say those words. I’ve had a lifelong habit of being up to an hour late for just about everything.

What did he say?

He got sort of quiet. He sat there for a minute and then he got up and left. It was his office. After a while the secretary came in and she said the interview was over. I asked her if I’d gotten the job but she said she didn’t think so. She looked kind of nervous.

(For no good reason, The Passenger uses no apostrophes in contractions like can’t and don’t.)

Bobby’s bombastic friend John Sheddan gets a lot of the best rants, crude and funny and self-pitying, mostly about money or booze or women: “It’s hard to keep them entertained, Squire. They keep upping the ante. You think you’ve done a workmanlike job of fucking them but that’s just the beginning. God. The hoops a man will put himself through. At some age you fancy you might rise above these sorts of things and at some age you dont… I suppose that when a man is sick of pussy he is sick of life but I do think the bitches may have finally done me in.”

Dark as its setup is, The Passenger is fun and absurdist, and you will vividly remember The Kid, and Bobby all alone on an empty oil rig, and what happens to his friend Oiler, and what happens to Sheddan. You will forget all about the sunken plane.

The Passenger offers no answers, no resolution, nothing final (apart from death), which sets it apart from the Western novels, in which there is typically a Manichaean sense of good and evil, and in which the events and their consequences are not in any way unclear.

I believe this novel is where I’ll now recommend McCarthy newcomers start, with the warning that it is an outlier in content, but not style. And you can skip Stella Maris, the "prequel” novel also released this year. The entire book comprises conversations between Alicia and her therapist, Dr. Cohen (of course), and doesn’t have any of the cleverness or pleasure of The Passenger. Justin Taylor, in his great Bookforum review, warned people to skip it (“there’s no reason for Stella Maris to be this boring; but then, there’s no reason for it to be at all”), but I still read it for completion’s sake, as I’m sure many will. But you really shouldn’t.

McCarthy’s voice, across his novels, feels to me like an all-knowing ghost, or Death itself, speaking timeless Manichaean truths in blunt poetry.

None of McCarthy’s novels reckon with the internet, by the way, and there is a lot of joy and peace in that, a break from our mad present.

As always: thank you for reading my writing about my reading.