Colmac McCarthy (1933 - 2023)
On June 13, the English-speaking world lost one of its most remarkable writers. As is true with many good writers, most people don’t know Colmac McCarthy by name but by the movies based on his books, the most well-known of which are _No Country for Old Men_ and _The Road._ _No Country for Old Men_ won the Oscar for best picture, and so is probably McCarthy’s most famous book. It boosts your career trajectory when two of Hollywood’s most admired directors, the Coen brothers, take a liking to your stuff.
But I’m not a movie person. I’m a book person, and McCarthy was well-known to me before _No Country_ came to the theaters. I was first introduced to Colmac McCarthy in medical school when I noticed a classmate reading _All the Pretty Horses_ and asked him about it. (Not many medical students have time for fiction reading. It was a fluke.) I read it not long afterward, finding myself both admiring and perplexed by a book that was quite different from the lyrical image the title suggested. It was lyrical. But it was also intensely sad, lonely, and bleak. Not the typical Western, although on the surface, that was its genre.
To date, I have read 2½ Colmac McCarthy novels. _All the Pretty Horses_ was first, and years later, I attempted (and failed) to read _The Road._ I read _Blood Meridian_, considered his masterpiece, two years ago.
_The Road,_a book I stopped reading halfway through (a rarity for me), probably sums up my relationship with McCarthy best. It is a post-apocalyptic novel about a man and his son trying to survive after most human civilization was destroyed in an unnamed apocalypse — probably a nuclear war, but McCarthy does not specify. On page 3 or so, the main character’s wife, emotionally distraught by the disaster, commits suicide, leaving behind her husband and their young son. The rest of the book is about their efforts to avoid being murdered and cannibalized by the marauding gangs of humans that roamed the decimated landscape. A bit like the TV series _The Dead,_ except the zombies are normal humans. (If you are concerned about who copied who, _The Road_ was published in 2006. At any rate, McCarthy’s originality lies more in his style than in his plots.)
The opening pages of _The Road_ say a lot about McCarthy. Although he is a complex and supremely talented writer, his main themes are easy to figure out. He is a pessimist. Some critics would argue that my assessment is a bit harsh, countering McCarthy’s characters are too human and empathetic to write off his books as purely pessimistic, but I disagree. That he would create sympathetic characters with goodness in them and then run them through the horrors he does in books like _The Road_ just makes his brutality all the more raw and dismal. (In a way, McCarthy subscribes to the Job hypothesis — people don’t deserve the suffering they are put through, but tough luck with that concern.) He tries to get the reader to care for a character, then puts him through unspeakable pain. Or worse, transforms a good character through time and circumstances into an accessory to torture and murder, as he did with the Kid in _Blood Meridian._That seems pessimistic to me. Even a bit manipulative.
It is revealing and typical of McCarthy that in _The Road_, the cause of the apocalypse is not even named. We don’t know if it is a nuclear war or a plague or a comet striking the earth, or even the final outcome of pollution and climate change. To McCarthy, it doesn’t matter. He just needs an unspeakable horror to build his story on. I also think it is problematic that after the apocalypse, the main character’s wife commits suicide. McCarthy rarely writes about women (his last novel is the exception), and to some degree the beginning of _The Road_feels like he is getting rid of the female character so he can get on with his depressing story with an all-male cast. But the death of the wife and mother doesn’t bother me so much as an act of misogyny as it does as an act of nihilism. It removes the possibility of more children, or of the family surviving intact. This is McCarthy, all over. He likes putting the lights out.
Still, I read past the early tragedies of this book, as the man and his son struggled to survive in a shattered world in which probably 99 percent of living humans died. When I got to the middle, I ran out of energy. I have a son, and at the time I was reading the novel, my son was almost the exact age of the boy. Something about the constant jeopardy and uncertainty in that boy’s future cut too close, and I put the book down.
Some would argue that, since I was so struck by the force of the novel that I had to stop reading it, this only proves McCarthy’s gifts as a writer. I agree completely. But it doesn’t make him any easier to take.
This isn’t the end of my experience with _The Road_. My son is much older now, and I am now in a different place. I have plans to go back and finish it someday, to see if I can now bear to read words I couldn’t a few years ago. It is too consequential a book to simply ignore.
But that experience of reading half a Colmac McCarthy novel sums up my relationship with the author. He writes compelling fiction, with characters that are worth investing emotion in. But he makes the characters suffer so much, so capriciously, that the journey to the end is difficult. A McCarthy novel is a bit like a Shakespearian tragedy — everyone has to suffer, and most of the characters the reader finds himself caring about are doomed to die. This sense of tragedy can be the height of an artistic experience, but it can also be more weight than a work of art ought to bear. Because McCarthy is so deliberate with the imposition of tragedy in his work, I find it hard to call him anything less than a pessimist. He is intent on not only portraying misfortune, but also in making the reader feel there is no way the situation could be worse than it is. It isn’t just the depths of despair; he is striving for depths that cannot be exceeded. McCarthy certainly deserves a lot of credit for being able to evoke extreme and opposite emotions — the joy of compelling human characters and the depths of abject depression — but the polarity is sometimes too much for me.
None of this is to imply that I don’t admire his talent. He is a great writer, and a stirring writer. He just spends too much time building his palaces in a bleak land.
Read him. I would never tell anyone not to. But be prepared, for Colmac McCarthy brings a burden with him.
