In May 2007, Oprah Winfrey selected for her “book club” (by then just a gold seal on the cover that served as a recommendation) the latest novel from a nearly unknown author: The Road by Cormac McCarthy. Prior to that point, McCarthy had given just two interviews over the course of his entire career, one to the New York Times in 1992 and the other to a local paper in El Paso, Texas, where he lives. In the legendary Times piece, the journalist noted, “It would be hard to think of a major American writer who has participated less in literary life. He has never taught or written journalism, given readings, blurbed a book, granted an interview.” McCarthy’s best friends, the journalist noted, were a physicist and a marine biologist, and he claimed not to even know any writers.
That reclusiveness came at a cost: though Harold Bloom called him one of the four most important novelists of his time, along with Pynchon, DeLillo, and Roth, and although Saul Bellow was on the committee that awarded him the MacArthur (so-called “genius”) Fellowship in 1981, McCarthy had not become a household name. Far from it: most of the world’s readers had never heard of him. He had brushed up against fame, of course. In 1992 he published All the Pretty Horses, the first of his novels to become a bestseller, with 200,000 copies sold during the first six months of sales. In 2000, Billy Bob Thornton directed the movie adaptation of the book, with a screenplay by Ted Tally (of Silence of the Lambs fame) and performances by Matt Damon, Penélope Cruz, and Sam Shepard. November 2007 saw the release of the Coen brothers’ version of No Country for Old Men, with Tommy Lee Jones and Javier Bardem. Even so, the exposure provided by the movies based on his novels did not coax McCarthy out of his cave. But Oprah did. The talk show host phoned him and invited him on her show. McCarthy told her he’d have to think about it. She gave him two hours to make up his mind. McCarthy himself called her back before the deadline and agreed; his only condition was that Winfrey come to the library at the Santa Fe Institute, which the writer considers his second home. There they recorded an interview in which McCarthy acknowledged—somewhat discomfited—that The Road was a love letter to his eight-year-old son, John Francis. And that he really enjoyed being a bestselling author. He always knew he wanted to write, he said. He just didn’t know how to make a living at it. And there were so few women in his works because “women are tough. They’re tough. I don’t pretend to understand them.” The interview on the country’s most popular TV show wasn’t the beginning of anything—rather, it was a momentous ending and a gesture of thanks to the woman who made him famous at the end of his life.
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In 1964, a novel titled The Orchard Keeper made it to the desk of Arthur Erskine at Random House. Erskine had edited Faulkner and also Lowry’s Under the Volcano, and he found in the manuscript that same genius and a very similar style. But this young author’s macabre realism was even more unsettling than Faulkner’s: The Orchard Keeper, a coming-of-age story, had as its main characters a half-mad old man who was taking care of—even worshiping—a corpse that had “fallen” on his land, the dead man’s teenage son, and the murderer.
Eager to acquire the book, Erskine called the author, who at the time was working in an auto repair shop in Tennessee, having recently been booted out of a New Orleans hotel for failing to pay his bill. “There is a father-son feeling,” Erskine said of their relationship, but admitted, “we never sold any of his books.” McCarthy, a huge fan of Faulkner’s work, stayed with Erskine until the editor’s death, in what was to be one of the last old-school editor-writer relationships in U.S. literature.
Four years after his birth in Rhode Island in 1933, McCarthy’s upper-middle-class family moved to Knoxville. The eldest of six, the future writer had absolutely no interest in education or literature. In the New York Times interview, he remarked, “I was not what [my parents] had in mind. I felt early on I wasn’t going to be a respectable citizen. I hated school from the day I set foot in it.” It was only at age twenty-three, bored in Alaska during his brief stint in the Air Force, that he began to read. He eked out a living from prizes and grants (“teaching writing is a hustle,” he said, explaining why he doesn’t give workshops) until his breakout fame in the 1990s. With one of those grants, he wrote his second novel, Outer Dark. And there is a curious disconnect between life and literature: as he typed Outer Dark in 1963, McCarthy was living in Ibiza with his second wife, the beautiful singer Anne DeLisle. The novel is about a young woman who is searching for her stolen baby, born of incest with her brother. In addition to containing one of the cruelest scenes ever written (some of which, crueler still, would be written by McCarthy himself in later novels), the book wore its Faulkner influences on its sleeve. He doesn’t deny it: “The ugly fact is books are made out of books. The novel depends for its life on the novels that have been written.”
His ex-wife Annie, who remains a friend, recalls that when they returned to the United States, “we lived in total poverty,” in a converted barn outside of Knoxville. They bathed in the lake because they didn’t have running water. “Someone would call up and offer him $2,000 to come speak at a university about his books,” Annie says. “And he would tell them that everything he had to say was there on the page. So we would eat beans for another week.” It is worth noting that McCarthy has been disinherited by his father, who had dreamed that his son would become a lawyer.
The marriage didn’t last long, but McCarthy’s enthusiasm—and his sense of the macabre—grew unabated. Child of God (1973) is the story of Lester Ballard, a serial killer and necrophile who lived in underground caves with his victims. The book was critically acclaimed, but it was, naturally, too dark to become a hit. Maybe that is why he wrote Suttree (1979), a humorous novel about the oddballs and good-for-nothings who populate Tennessee’s bars and pool halls—his friends. The protagonist was practically an alter ego, the son of an upper-crust family who decided to go live on a boat. The book was well received only by critics (today, many consider it his finest work)—so much so that after its publication, he was granted the MacArthur Fellowship. According to Bellow, McCarthy deserved it because of his “absolutely overpowering use of language, his life-giving and death-dealing sentences.” This boost helped him write the novel that marked a watershed both in his life and in his work: Blood Meridian.
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In the 1980s, McCarthy moved to New Mexico. The journey, from the South to the southwestern frontier—to the limit—continued in his literature, which shifted from Southern gothic to a peculiar sort of baroque Western: devoid of heroes or redemption, with a language that was at once florid and dry, a lush vocabulary employed with maximum economy.
Blood Meridian (1985) was published when McCarthy had also quit drinking. Bloom was wild about it, naming it one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century. Rick Wallach, a McCarthy scholar, wrote, “Re-envisioning the ideology of manifest destiny upon which the American dream was founded, Blood Meridian depicts the borderland between knowledge and power, between progress and dehumanization, between history and myth and, most importantly, between physical violence and the violence of language.” Besides the enormous beauty of the prose, there is nothing beautiful in Blood Meridian, a book in which violence breaks out with bloodcurdling ease.
Critics consider McCarthy’s “border” or “Southwestern” period (as compared to his “Southern” period) to be when the author found his true voice. His early novels may have been remarkable and perhaps even brilliant, but these were also unique. The later works, which incorporate a great deal of dialogue in Spanish—McCarthy studied the language in order to research Mexican history—are politically profound because they bring focus to the border, where so much of the soul and the history of the nation are present, as the site of all conflict and passion.
Blood Meridian was followed by the so-called Border Trilogy. In his first bestseller, All the Pretty Horses (1992), he even bowed to the masses with a love story, between the teenage cowboy John Grady and Alejandra, the daughter of a powerful family of Mexican ranchers. A novel of first love and coming of age, it is McCarthy’s first to have likeable characters; the beauty of the titular horses is that of the young people who will end up destroyed, annihilated, or forever damaged by the law of the border and its implacable—and, for McCarthy, inevitable—violence. The book was followed by The Crossing (1994), similar in spirit to the previous novel but crueler: the coming of age here is that of Billy Grady, a sixteen-year-old cowboy. A wolf is attacking their cattle, and his father sends him out to set traps for her. But when the young man finally finds and captures her, he does not take her home; he decides to return her to the Mexican mountains she came from. Thus, the crossing referenced in the title, as the young man, his horse, and the beautiful wolf embark on a journey that will abruptly cease to be unobstructed, with immensely cruel consequences (and, of course, a brutal end). Make no mistake, McCarthy seems to be saying to the readers and writers of coming-of-age tales. Life is not going to be good. Not in the least. Life is made up of losses, of voids that are filled only with pain.
The trilogy closes with Cities of the Plain (1998), an ending that many considered a failure. But they were wrong. Masterfully, McCarthy recounts several years of friendship between the protagonists of the first two installments, back when they were young men barely past twenty; it is the 1950s and they are working near El Paso and its mirror city across the border, Juárez, Mexico. One of them is in love with a Mexican sex worker named Magdalena. Her fate lays bare what McCarthy had in mind: the unsolved and unpunished murders of Ciudad Juárez. Cities of the Plain is a powerful manifesto, never obvious and profoundly sad, elegiac.
It seems almost self-evident that his next work would take on a contemporary border issue: drug trafficking. In No Country for Old Men, Llewelyn Moss is hunting near the Rio Grande when he comes across dead bodies, heroin, and two million dollars. In the war set off by a drug delivery gone wrong, the central player is Sheriff Ed Tom Bell, a man as tormented by his actions in the Second World War as Moss is by his own as a veteran of Vietnam. Once again the border provides a pretext for a contemporary cop Western that is at bottom a reflection on violence, not only the violence of individuals but also of the United States. And, always, the flawless use of slang and Spanish, always that spare and beautiful style.
The legend continued to grow: according to oft-repeated lore, McCarthy doesn’t write about places he does not know, which is why he frequently goes backpacking through Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona, and, across the border, through Chihuahua, Sonora, and Coahuila. But in fact he does write about things he does not know. That is what he did in The Road.
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The Road may be the greatest postapocalyptic novel ever written. A father and son cross the United States from north to south, surrounded by ashes, under a leaden sun, freezing in the cold. There are hardly any people left in the world. Most of those who remain eat their fellow humans because there is no more food. McCarthy never explains what happened. Nor does he give the boy and his father names. But the reader is as invested in them as if they were beloved family members, even knowing that the worst has already happened, and from the novel’s first sentence it is clear that the future can offer nothing better. The Road is a novel about the future: about the love between parents and children and the selfishness such love also entails, about why new existences might be created, about huge responsibilities. (Oprah may have chosen it because, in a way, it also evokes concerns related to climate change.)
An exquisite and inexorable nightmare, The Road won the Pulitzer; Mondadori published it in Spanish in November 2007. The translation is weak, even taking into account that McCarthy is not easily translated, but at least it is the first of the great writer’s novels to be published with some fanfare, and it may serve as the way into his magnificent and bone-chilling work. Now that he is, at last, no longer the United States’ finest unknown writer.
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Mariana Enríquez
Mariana Enríquez is a Buenos Aires-based writer, journalist and author of the acclaimed novel Nuestra parte de noche (2019; Our Share of Night, 2023) and the book of short stories Los peligros de fumar en la cama (2009; The Dangers of Smoking in Bed, 2022), a finalist for the International Booker Prize. She has published six other novels; another short story collection, Las cosas que perdimos en el fuego (2017; Things We Lost in the Fire, 2017); and nonfiction, including La hermana menor: Un retrato de Silvina Ocampo (2014; The Youngest Sister: A Portrait of Silvina Ocampo) and El otro lado (2020; The Other Side), where this essay first appeared prior to Cormac McCarthy's death in June 2023.