Cormac McCarthy is an odd duck in the literary pond. He appears on no literary panels, sits on none of the bookish juries that parcel out prestige, and is not given to signing petitions to save the sardines. More notoriously, he avoids the press. McCarthy is a novelist who sticks to his lathe — not a canny career strategy in a time when literary reputation is merchandised like deodorant.
Before the first book in his Border Trilogy, All the Pretty Horses, was awarded both the National Book Award and National Book Critics Circle Award in 1992, McCarthy was pretty much academic fodder. He’s the subject of at least three of those thin volumes of essays usually edited by English professors. His first five novels — The Orchard Keeper (1965), Outer Dark (1968), Child of God (1973), Suttree (1979), and Blood Meridian (1985) — were not the sort to be selected by the Book of the Month Club. Child of God, for example, is an appalling and darkly comic story of a backwoods necrophiliac. Blood Meridian is a harrowing allegorical tale of a band of Indian scalphunters and their satanic leader, perhaps even the Devil himself.
Those books established McCarthy’s reputation as a writer of stunning energy, but bleak and brutal enough to make the most devoted follower of Hobbes seem sunny. Saul Bellow, a member of the committee that chose McCarthy in 1981 for one of the MacArthur Foundation “genius grants,” noted the “absolutely overpowering use of language, his life-giving and death-dealing sentences.”
Nonetheless, it was not until he began the Border Trilogy — with its more traditional narrative than that found in his earlier books — that McCarthy obtained a popular audience to match his critical reputation. The Crossing (1994), the trilogy’s second novel, was admiringly reviewed, and his latest work, Cities of the Plain, now concludes the sequence.
McCarthy’s canvas is the raw landscape of the American Southwest and Mexico. In Cities of the Plain, the principal characters of each of the two previous novels return, their violent histories similar but separated by a generation. John Grady Cole is a young man; Billy Parham is his older friend. Both are cowboys, between World War II and the Korean War, at a ranch just across the Rio Grande, not far from E1 Paso and Juarez — the cities of the plain on which the plot pivots.
The traditional way of western life on the ranch that has endured into the 1950s is less anachronism than relic — as are John Grady and Billy. A portion of the ranch has recently been taken by the army for a new base and the remainder is likely to be absorbed by the government.
The elderly patriarch of the ranch, now slipping toward senility, ruminates one evening on the porch as John Grady sits with him:
The day after my fiftieth birthday in March of nineteen and seventeen I rode into the old headquarters at the Wilde well and there was six dead wolves hangin on the fence. I rode along the fence and ran my hand along em. I looked at their eyes. A government trapper had brought em in the night before. Theyd been killed with poison bait. Strychnine. Whatever. Up in the Sacramentos. A week later he brought in four more. I aint heard a wolf in this country since. I suppose thats a good thing. They can be hell on stock. But I guess I was always what you might call superstitious. I know I damn sure wasnt religious. And it had always seemed to me that somethin can live and die but that the kind of thing that they were was always there. I didnt know you could poison that. I aint heard a wolf howl in thirty odd years. I dont know where youd go to hear one. There may not be any such a place.
That reminiscence defines the theme of Cities of the Plain and its two predecessors. McCarthy is a compelling blend of romantic and realist, hard-edged in both. He also trafficks at the edges of the mythic (though less so in this final novel than in The Crossing). His ear and eye are superb. McCarthy builds his characters from daily existence in a place where the odds are always barely even. And he knows so many things: about horses and dogs and the way work is done. He has a nonpareil ability to convey the gritty life on a marginal ranch — as in his remarkable description of the pursuit on horseback and destruction of a pack of wild dogs that have been preying on calves.
McCarthy is often critically compared to William Faulkner. That’s facile, but it has a marginal usefulness. The comparison is applicable at least to each writer’s ability to inhabit the past vividly and to their shared vision of — as Faulkner puts it in The Hamlet — the “doomed and damned fragility of human conditions.”
The plot of Cities of the Plain is rudimentary, like most of McCarthy’s plots. They are merely the right-of-way along which his locomotive speeds. In a Juarez bar with Bill Parham and other ranch hands, John Grady notices a teenage prostitute and is profoundly smitten. He returns several times unsuccessfully seeking her. He is able to learn that she’s in a pricey brothel outside of town, having been purchased several years before from her parents in Chiapas. Eventually, Magdalena returns his love.
John Grady draws advance wages, sells his horse, his saddle, and pawns the pistol his grandfather left him so he can try to rescue her from the whorehouse, marry, and set up housekeeping in an old adobe house he has repaired in the hills. The small problem is that Eduardo, the thoroughly vicious pimp (McCarthy’s villains are unrelentingly nasty), also has decided to marry her and refuses to sell her to the young ranch hand.
Billy, as a surrogate older brother or father to John Grady, visits Eduardo to see if something can be worked out. But the pimp, after listening to Billy’s description of the situation, replies, “What is wrong with this story is that it is not a true story. Men have in their minds a picture of how the world will be. How they will be in that world. The world may be many different ways for them but there is one world that will never be and that is the world they dream of.”
When Billy reckons that some men get what they want, the pimp continues, “No man. Or perhaps only briefly so as to lose it. Or perhaps only to prove to the dreamer that the world of his longing made real is no longer that world at all.”
Billy Parham and John Grady Cole, in parallel experiences on both sides of the border, have survived in unforgiving country where weakness is often lethal. Billy, however, as the older, has come to accept the obdurate chanciness of the event. Not so John Grady. Billy tries to persuade the younger man of the futility of his plan to rescue Magdalena. “‘Theres a difference between quittin and knowin when youre beat. . . . I guess you don’t believe that.’ ‘No,’ he said. ‘I guess I dont.'”
The word “Border” in the title of the trilogy holds various meanings. It denotes the contrasting cultures of the United States and Mexico that are intricately woven into the three novels. It means the border between hope and illusion, between aspiration and the perversity of how events defeat or deflate hope. Mostly, “Border” refers to the line between what was and what is — the irreparable subtractions of life: “The world past, the world to come. Their common transcencies. Above all a knowing deep in the bone that beauty and loss are one.”
A gritty and stunningly written climax swiftly follows, consistent with the fatalism that pervades all of Cormac McCarthy’s haunting tales. And yet, as embedded as fatalism is in McCarthy’s fiction, there is a more compelling quality in his work. And that is his belief that the individual must not acquiesce, no matter the odds, no matter how stacked the deck against intentions. To endure in a course of action once chosen is a defining characteristic of McCarthy protagonists.
Not all that long ago, this trait would have been called “manliness” — which points to another noticeable feature of the trilogy: Women occasionally appear, and not just as lace and curls; but when they do appear, they are never central to the narrative. Readers will judge this as they will. But McCarthy’s virtue as a writer derives from his keen observation of the land and its creatures and his incisive sense of individuals contending in a universe not inclined to accommodate them.
Woody West is associate editor of the Washington Times.
