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Grant, for argument, that life is pointless—that purpose and moral order are mere projection, God just a big piece of embroidery. Still, there remains this odd human genius for projecting and embroidering. We call it "adaptive," and then blame it for making us ill-adapted. We call it "comforting," though it is most often felt as a burden, a sharp twinge, a weight of dignity. It sits out there, beyond all our tedious explanations, mysterious as Stonehenge. If you're a novelist, why not celebrate it?
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This is the question that Cormac McCarthy's work has often raised for me. Clearly the man doesn't believe in God, and I'm not about to make him. But granting that for McCarthy there is nothing here beyond what's here, he has sometimes seemed insufficiently bedazzled by what's here; the rigor and uncompromising honesty of his vision have been, at times, indistinguishable from sadism and nihilism.
This tendency reached a peak of sorts with 1985's Blood Meridian, a blood-soaked revisionist Western set in 1840s Texas. Blood Meridian, regarded by many critics and fellow-novelists as McCarthy's masterpiece, suggests that wanton murder and self-destruction are definitive of humanity. Total depravity? You'd better believe it. Under the weight of this oppressive gloom, a kind of Calvinism minus God, even McCarthy's brilliant prose begins to sag, as when he writes of a mountain range that seems to be carved from "some other order whose true geology was not stone but fear." Blood Meridian was followed by the Border Trilogy, three novels that recast banal ("mythic") stories into an overstuffed ("Faulknerian") style that frequently devolves into mannered stuttering. The first two novels—which are likable enough and even moving, if you can ignore the affectations—serve as set-up for Cities of the Plain (1999), in which McCarthy broods on the end of the cowboy lifestyle and the misuse of the West as nuclear testing ground: America as Sodom and Gommorah.
The crowning annoyance in this phase of McCarthy's career was No Country for Old Men (2005), a juiced-up police-procedural in which a hardworking Texas cop hunts a vicious killer. The novel makes an interesting parallel with Child of God (1974), a grim early work in which a hardworking Tennessee cop, well, hunts a vicious killer. The difference is that in the earlier novel, the killer, Lester Ballard, was the protagonist of his story—a child of God, the title insisted, however much debased—and McCarthy's purpose in examining him was to see the way certain human traits persisted even under appalling derangement. No Country's villain, Anton Chigurh, leaves no such impression. He makes grandiose speeches before shooting people, like a minor Dennis Hopper villain reading from Job, but his inhuman, ghostly efficiency renders him less a character than a symbol of the wantonness of the drug economy. As for the police chief, he is not so much a person as a collection of homilies. Novels obsessed with abstractions tend to replace character with exempla. Perhaps this is one reason for McCarthy's somewhat awkward use of the police chief's right-wing monologues as the backbone for the novel: the main character, denied meaningful action, must express himself through talk. Meanwhile, McCarthy's loving focus on his villain's sadism, in a novel that more or less mocks the impotence of its other characters, raised the suspicion that he was acting in collusion, so to speak, with the universal death that (for him) forecloses the possibility of human significance.
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