Life > December 6, 2007

By By Jacob Bathanti | Staff writer

Cormac McCarthy claims not to care about money, or possessions. Sitting a little pigeon-toed, directly across from Oprah in his only televised interview – ever – he tells her quite seriously, though smiling an almost sheepish dreamy smile, that he never wanted to work.

“You have to be dedicated, but I made it my No. 1 priority,” he said without changing his expression.

McCarthy’s 2006 best-selleing book, No Country for Old Men, has recentlybeen adapted into a critically-acclaimed film directed by the Coen brothers and is in theaters now.

When you add the multiple bestsellers under his belt, including 2007’s post-apocalyptic The Road, McCarthy has managed to do pretty well without working.

He wasn’t always so well-off, however; being turned out of a $40-a-week hotel is a pretty solid index of poverty.

Despite having seen these peaks and valleys, McCarthy maintains an impressive degree of equanimity.

What he calls a naïve assumption that he’d be taken care of has clearly been merited in his life: he was the recipient of one of the first MacArthur “Genius” Grants in 1981 and of multiple other fellowships as well, so perhaps this level-headedness is warranted.

And indeed, a bemusedly placid sort of devil-may-care attitude comes off as McCarthy’s dominant characteristic in the interview, which aired June 5 on Oprah.

He professes a total indifference toward the number of people that read his books, saying that the people who need to read his books will find them.

He discusses his preference for the company of scientists over that of writers. And he recounts a number of stories of harrowing poverty: house-sitting without a dime to his name, living off the pantry he was supposed to be guarding, scraping by without even toothpaste in a Tennessee shack.

Even as McCarthy calls “passionate” a “pretty fancy word” (Oprah has just held forth for a spell on the topic of following one’s passions, since those denote the things worth following in one’s life), I am struck by the incongruity of the whole venture.

If McCarthy finds “passionate” a fancy word, what about “vesperal?” Or “vouchsafed?” What about “rigid homologues of viscera”? All these appear in Suttree, his fourth novel; I found them by selecting for the letter “v.”

And moreover, is the man who wrote his third book about a necrophiliac named Lester really on Oprah, being beamed into millions of homes across America?

McCarthy represents a bit of a cipher. The sparse accounts of him emphasize his normalcy. But the corpus of his work lays bare the innate depravity of human beings.

His earliest, Appalachian phase is probably the most disturbing. Besides Lester’s story, recounted in Child of God, there’s Outer Dark (finished ironically on the island of Ibiza, currently boasting the world’s largest dance club and the invention of ecstasy), which details the separate wanderings of a brother and sister across the mountains in pursuit of their abandoned child. They themselves are pursued by three strangers who cut a bloody swathe across the countryside.

The Orchard Keeper, which deals loosely with coming of age and which may be his best book (and unequivocally his first), and Suttree, which introduces us to a ne’er-do-well living on a Nashville houseboat, round out this grouping.

McCarthy’s attention also falls heavily upon Western themes, starting with 1985’s Blood Meridian. This is McCarthy’s masterpiece, at least for now.

In it we follow a band of scalp-hunters across Texas and Mexico as they kill and are killed. Blood Meridian is unbelievably savagely violent and strangely beautiful – in it we see the archetypal instance of McCarthy’s indescribably gorgeous prose illuminating almost inexpressible horrors.

McCarthy’s Border Trilogy – All the Pretty Horses, The Crossing and Cities of the Plain – contains McCarthy’s first bestsellers.

All the Pretty Horses was a National Book of the Year and was turned into a movie with Matt Damon in a starring role. If one is to read McCarthy, it is sound practice to begin with these books.

They’ve a little of everything: plot and action, certainly, which cannot be said for his earlier works.

The oblique and disturbing ponderings which mark his novels without exception; and a reasonable portion of his beautiful writing, not stripped down as in his recent works nor almost unmanageably Faulknerian as in Suttree and Blood Meridian.

I say “if,” but there’s really no “if” to it.

One should read McCarthy’s works, and for many reasons.

He is surely striving – albeit unannounced – after the as-yet unwritten Great American Novel, and he may well get there.

He wrestles with the mighty themes proper to great poets. But simpler yet, one should read Mr. McCarthy’s works for the same reason one should watch sunsets, climb mountains, swim the Hellespont: for the sheer beauty of the thing.

He is a wordsmith of rare magnitude. Indescribable, save only to quote him, from The Road this time: “Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains.

You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand.”

His most recent two novels, aforementioned, have been significant commercial successes and are accessible enough.

The film version of No Country for Old Men is superb.

The Cohen brothers’ penchant for weirdness and for homicidal maniacs finds a proper subject in this tale of drug violence in the Texas Borderlands.

The screenplay is remarkably true to the book, with McCarthy’s unusually lean prose complementing the well-shot scrublands impressively.

And then there’s The Road, which was awarded the Pulitzer for fiction. McCarthy has always written about post-apocalyptic landscapes, but this is the first time he actually takes us to one explicitly.

A father and his son stumble across the wasteland of a post-nuclear world, zig-zagging toward and away from their own humanity.

I focus back on the screen. I wonder how Oprah liked the ash-coated cannibals of The Road.

I shake my head a little. Cormac is talking again about his sparse need for money and things.

“You’ve got to have food and shoes,” he says, staring lamb-like at some vision above and to the left of his interviewer’s head.