He was a man of miracles,” John Hillcoat writes of his longtime friend, Cormac McCarthy, who died last month at the age of eighty-nine. Hillcoat is in a position to know, having adapted The Road, McCarthy’s most miraculous novel, to film in 2009. Though his output was modest—twelve novels, two screenplays, and two stage plays over a sixty-year career—those acquainted with his work will gratefully affirm with Hillcoat that McCarthy “created miracles for us all.”
Born Charles Joseph McCarthy Jr. on July 20, 1933, in Providence, Rhode Island, he and his family soon relocated to Knoxville, Tennessee. His upbringing in the American South deeply influenced his early works, including his first published novel, The Orchard Keeper (1965). This debut, an allegorical meditation on the corruption and eventual abandonment of Eden, fixed McCarthy firmly within the Southern Gothic tradition. His prose style was shaped by William Faulkner, but his mordant humor and thematic concerns—such as the frailty of the human condition overwhelmed by sin—more closely resembled those of Flannery O’Connor. However, whereas O’Connor’s novels and short stories featured overt flourishes of grace, McCarthy approached these notions more obliquely, especially in his early novels.
McCarthy’s second novel, 1968’s Outer Dark, is at once experimental in its form and timeless in its treatment of love’s perseverance in the face of depravity. When the incestuous union of an isolated brother and sister—a theme to which McCarthy returned at the end of his career in The Passenger (2022) and Stella Maris (2023)—bears fruit and the brother abandons the child in the forest, his sister quests through all manner of trials to recover him. The ending is quite bitter—yet grace is present nonetheless in the form of a mother’s sacrificial love. A seed was planted here in McCarthy’s work that would germinate fully in The Road (2006).
In Child of God (1973), the young, mentally addled protagonist is a serial murderer and necrophiliac destined for the gallows. Grace appears only in the exquisiteness of the prose, in the black humor, and in the narrator’s assurance that, like us, this man too was made in the image of God. The contrast with McCarthy's next book, the semi-autobiographical Suttree (1979), could not be starker. Although profoundly melancholy and occasionally brutal, Suttree marked an intimate turn in McCarthy. Once again, McCarthy’s present informed his future, as one might argue the novel’s emotional rawness and Faulknerian nearness to its narrative consciousness made possible the more finely attuned pathos of the Border Trilogy and The Road.
McCarthy’s greatest masterpiece, Blood Meridian, or The Evening Redness in the West (1985), represented both a return to the emotional and narrative distance of his first three novels and a radical departure into the genre that would most define his legacy: the American western. It also features his most celebrated and terrifying creation in Judge Holden—a charismatic, irreverent murderer and child molester who embodies Milton’s Satan and draws strength from the depravity he inspires in other men. A searing image from an early scene best exemplifies the world of Judge Holden:
Long buttresses of light fell from the high windows in the western wall. There were no pews in the church and the stone floor was heaped with the scalped and naked and partly eaten bodies of some forty souls who’d barricaded themselves in this house of God against the heathen.
Holden will not countenance the idea of a being greater than himself. Indeed, he even insists that the only things that exist do so with his permission as he imposes his moral and aesthetic tastes on the world. In the novel’s teenaged protagonist, “the Kid,” Holden recognizes and fosters a “taste for mindless violence,” hoping to create an unwavering disciple, “the last of the true.” Even though he defies Holden at the novel’s end, the endless stream of violence that marked his youth has left him morally arrested, capable of refusing further commands to violence but too numb to practice true virtue. We have grace in photonegative: As a man, the Kid carries a Bible that he never learns to read.
Blood Meridian earned McCarthy critical acclaim, but it was the subsequent Border Trilogy (All the Pretty Horses, The Crossing, and Cities of the Plain) that provided the first commercial success of his career. Although all are violent westerns, their depictions of friendship and love far surpass his earlier work. For the first time, grace becomes a positive presence. This is accomplished through the novels’ parallel narratives and dual protagonists—John Grady Cole and Billy Parham. Cole is an unflinching idealist whose disdain for the modern world’s encroachment on his romantic notion of the Old West makes him a martyr. The final scene of Cities of the Plain shows Billy bearing the body of his friend down a city street, transforming Cole into an almost Christlike figure.
McCarthy continued these lamentations on the perversions of modernity in his follow-up to the Border Trilogy, 2005’s No Country for Old Men, which was adapted into an Oscar-winning film by Joel and Ethan Coen. The novel is no less striking. However, it is not until The Road in 2006 that we see McCarthy at the peak of his craft.
At its heart—and there is more heart in this novel than in any other by McCarthy—The Road is an Arthurian grail quest set against the backdrop of an unspecified apocalypse that has left North America a continent of ash. The plot is deceptively simple: A fatally ill father (a symbolic Fisher King) leads his young son (Percival) south through the cannibal-infested wasteland in search of resources and a more hospitable climate. Together they are carrying “the fire,” what remains of the Good. That neither character is named enhances the story’s mythic register.
The first miracle one encounters in The Road is its language. “The paradox of language undoing the death it deals animates every passage,” observes Michael Chabon. He offers a typical example:
The country went from pine to live oak and pine. Magnolias. Trees as dead as any. He picked up one of the heavy leaves and crushed it in his hand to powder and let the powder sift through his fingers.
Images of death and destruction are rendered with living nouns, in cadences that entrance. McCarthy’s prose is incantatory in all of his novels, but never more so than in The Road. Robert Alter explains how McCarthy achieves his effect: “Sentence by parallel sentence, word by hard-edged word, [The Road] draws on the structures and something of the diction of the King James Version to forge without pathos a reality whose harshness beggars the imagination.”
The greater miracle, however, is how the use of biblical cadences and allusions underscores the fierce intimacy of father and son, lending the father’s quest a scriptural gravitas, while also suggesting that the act of “carrying the fire” is bound inextricably to the biblical text.
The father’s duty is to shepherd his child through a world of unrelenting evil without sacrificing the boy’s innocence in the process. He knows his time is short and he dreads leaving the boy alone without guidance or protection, long before he’s strong enough to fend for himself. This precise fear is what inspired McCarthy to write The Road, and what makes it his most personal novel. The book is dedicated to his young son, John Francis McCarthy, who was not born until McCarthy was in his late sixties—the greatest miracle of his life. Mercifully, unlike the father in the novel, McCarthy lived long enough to see John Francis into manhood.
Cormac McCarthy has left an indelible mark in the canon of American letters. To critics and fans alike, he was a master whose “elemental voice” unearthed truths buried deep within the earth. His ability to stare without flinching into the bleakest corners of human existence surpassed that of every writer of his generation. But it is the presence of grace in such dark stories that made him truly peerless.
Kris Dougherty is an Instructor of English at SUNY Rockland Community College.
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