Cormac McCarthy's Fiction Was a Solution to the Problem of His Life
The Style Is Father of the Man
Tracy Daugherty's biography, the first life of Cormac McCarthy, traces how the novelist's work answered the problem of his own upbringing. The son of a Tennessee Valley Authority lawyer, McCarthy rebelled against his father's faith in progress, filling his novels with illiterate drifters, casual slaughter, and worlds shrinking to "a raw core of parsible entities." Daugherty's book also shows how McCarthy's prose grew leaner over time, and how his fathers reversed course—from abandoning sons to dying to protect them.
The whole notion that somehow or another the world can be improved... and that everybody will live in harmony and peace happily ever after is a really dangerous and lunatic notion.
- ramesh31
The way Harold Bloom talked about him, there must really be something there. But I'm squeamish. What to do?
- scuppernong
Don't care for the style of this article