Why Cormac McCarthy Stands Alone Among Novelists

I came late to Cormac, probably because, having fallen under the spell of Robert Stone in my early 20s after reading Dog Soldiers (his 1971 novel about a war correspondent in Vietnam who runs afoul of a drug cartel after trying to smuggle Asian heroin into Oakland, Calif.), I was predisposed to doubt and then, after reading follow-up prose in A Flag for Sunrise (1981) and Children of Light (1986), flat-out dismiss claims that any current-day writer could be as good as Stone. Moreover, when publishers aggressively promoted Stone’s fifth novel, Outerbridge Reach (1992), by comparing him to Herman Melville, I assented, before I quit reading novels altogether for about ten years while doing historical research for a book about eastern Ohio and the trans-Allegheny West.

Upon completing that project (published in 2021 as The Seven Ranges: Ground Zero for the Staging of America), I started to read novels again — chiefly as a means for blowing off steam, but also because I had begun to wonder whether the American mind, so called, could continue to support the production of great novels, given what I’d learned over the course of writing my book — and came across Cormac’s “Border Trilogy.” Which I marveled at. These tales starring John Grady in Mexico and, in particular, Billy Parham under a freeway overpass somewhere west of Albuquerque didn’t just nail the West Texas cowboy myth; they actually elevated that myth to a level customarily reserved for 3,000-year-old myths commemorating Greek gods. And then along came Cormac’s post-apocalyptic father/son novel The Road, a tale of light shining in darkness. Where had I been all these years, while bemoaning the loss of word-based knowledge as a default cultural position? What with Richard Ford and, now, Cormac McCarthy, in addition to Robert Stone, we were going to be fine, for America had produced not just one but three superbly talented novelists who could stand with Saul Bellow, John Updike, and Philip Roth.

But then Cormac died, and suddenly I was looking at a whole new set of what seemed to be preposterously adulatory claims occasioned by the posthumous publication (in 2023) of two long-awaited novels about physics, the atom bomb, and the existence of God called The Passenger and Stella Maris.

So, I read those two books. And was ri-vet-ed.