novels

Blood Meridian will become an American classic. It will stand along with Twain's Huckleberry Finn and Melville's Moby Dick as an epic evocation of American culture. The kid is Huck Finn gone bad, Huck Finn without the civilizing influence of Widow Douglas, Aunt Polly, or the moral example of Jim. The Judge, a hulking, hairless albino, without soul or conscience, evokes Melville's white whale, a symbol of absolute evil. These characters along with a host of others ride the blood red dust of the Sonoran desert, McCarthy's Mississippi and Atlantic. McCarthy is not a moralist, like Twain or Melville, but he does demand that the reader reflect the characters and action upon the history of violence in America past and present. (I couldn't help but relate Blood Meridian to Gangs of New York, which share both theme and character.)

Blood Meridian is a literary masterpiece and a page turner. Note many books can reach that distinction.
The story is archetypal and mythical, but the style and narration are objective and naturalistic, the great periods of American literature, romance,realism, naturalism, and minimalism are all represented in the texture of this novel. McCarthy is a masterful stylist reminiscent of both Faulkner and Hemingway. His language is objective, vivid, and mesmerizing. And nowhere is there a better literary rendering of the topology and geology southwestern deserts in than this book. While the experience of reading this novel is unique, I also think it would make a great American film.

Feeling like a challenging and mind boggling novel - or an Odyssey is more like it? Try Cormac McCarthy's BLOOD MERIDIAN -- Or the Evening Redness in the West. Finished it yesterday a in shutter. Nothing like it. Deliberately archaic language, among other conceits. Gigantic myths come to life. One protagonist, perhaps the God of War, certainly a "warlord," named Judge Holden, seems singular in American literature - our Iago, and kin to Milton's Satan: you cannot resist him. He is immortal.
Harold Bloom says this book is the heir (and fulfills the promise to American Literature) of Melville and Faulkner and Lowry.
It is also feels like King Lear & Dante and many other unforgettable works.
It seems to me, moreover, especially IMPORTANT now (written in 1985) because the setting is a parched desert & mountain land of chaos, starvation, ignorance, anarchy, tribal & racial hatred, and literally unspeakable & unholy violence - exactly like Afghanistan today, but this is America on the Texas-Mexico border in 1850, and based on facts & real characters: a gang run amuck. But this ain't no "western," pardner!
Finally, as a "visual performance" the book's imagery is among the most vivid I can recall, and certainly the most economical: as in the sharpest poetry. Not a cliche anywhere.
A book so terrific, and so apocalyptic, it may make much other fiction one reads seem like pulp junk for some time to come. The risk of exposure to the best!

I came to this novel urged on by the gushing, almost speechless, praise of Harold Bloom in an interview on television a couple of years ago. He called it the most important novel of our time and MacCarthy the finest writer living. He said all of this in the context of a discussion of the controversy he created in breaking with some literary elitists in his severe criticisms of hallowed icons of the modern literary canon. In short, I got the impression that Bloom was as impatient with pseudo-literary pretentiousness as was I.

So I picked up MacCarthy's noble work in a feeling of near euphoric epiphany. This was surely going to be the most gritty, realistic and (above all) unvarnished western ever written. Then I hit this sentence:

QUOTE: The thunder moved up from the southwest and lightning lit the desert all about them, blue and barren, great clanging reaches ordered out of the absolute night like some demon kingdom summoned up, the mountains on the sudden skyline stark and black and livid, like a land of some other order out there whose true geology was not stone but fear.

That would make for perfect purpling in H. P. Lovecraft's "At the Mountains of Madness", but its a bit too much to swallow for a novel that aims to be an unvarnished account of unflinching realism. It is by no means an exceptional out take. The book is unctious with this kind of prose. MacCarthy is the absolute worst pretender to literary significance I have ever read for the plain reason that he tries so damned hard to be literary that it gets in your teeth like fine alkali dust.

Yes, he has a fine gift for a well turned sentence. So do armies of nameless hacks and better known writers who never get nominated for being visionaries of our time. What sets him apart is his deliberate effort at obtuseness. He makes no obvious effort to say anything, so the mavens of literary pith conclude that it must be so profound that it reaches beyond the capacity of mere mortal words to tell, thoughts angelic or infernal in transcendence. Please.

This is the kind of pretentious rubbish that has made Melville the dandy of lit professors for the last 150 years. I hate to be uncharitable, but the emperor is starkers. If you think this is as good as it gets, or rises above the too self-consciously literary efforts of modern fiction, then you need to read more widely.