More love for Cormac McCarthy

I keep returning to Cormac McCarthy's novels; he may be my favorite fiction writer. He often gets lumped in with "postmodern fiction writers" like Don DeLillo, who is usually 'blamed' for spawning more recent literary figures like Jonathan Franzen, Dave Eggers, Jonathan Safran Foer, and David Foster Wallace. I don't think that's fair to McCarthy. He's more cast in the mold of Conrad, Melville, and Faulkner.

I had just finished reading No Country for Old Men when I stumbled across the first and only negative review I've seen of the new Jonathan Franzen book, Freedom, in the Atlantic. Reading it made me appreciate McCarthy even more, since his novels aren't about 'banality' or 'the mundane' or 'the people next door' --- they're somehow premodern apocalyptic texts in a vaguely postmodern format. Unlike most "postmodern" novels, they don't deny transcendence and revel in vanity, they just find that the one transcendently True element in human(-ist?) existence is the violent will to power (remember the Judge: "War endures"). In a way, it's really quite a Christian view of evil, except for the characters' despair that God seems to have abandoned them and left things to run amok. Evil (of the specifically American variety, kind of like Junot Diaz's "fuku Americanus") portrayed thus has more in common with the work of Flannery O'Connor than with any American 'social fiction' now.

The Atlantic's review complains about Franzen:

Even when he finally loses his temper, the book shows him no respect: the chapter in question is called “The Nice Man’s Anger.” Would he have turned out less of a clown had Freedom been written after the BP spill? I doubt it; Franzen must riff and smirk for our age, the Age of Unseriousness. No sooner does Walter declare his love for his assistant than we are forced to follow him to the bathroom, where, unable to pee, he wastes water in “an unnecessary flush.” How tiresome all of this is; literary fiction has drawn man smaller than life for much, much longer than it ever did the opposite.

McCarthy is just the opposite, he's telling the Truth as he paints characters larger than life. Melville does it with Captain Ahab, Conrad does it with Kurtz. In No Country for Old Men, Sheriff Bell wonders:

The stories get passed on and the truth gets passed over. As the sayin goes. Which I reckon some would take as meanin that the truth cant compete. But I dont believe that. I think that when the lies are all told and forgot the truth will be there yet. It dont move about from place to place and it dont change from time to time. You cant corrupt it any more than you can salt salt. You cant corrupt it because that's what it is. It's the thing you're talkin about. I've heard it compared to the rock --- maybe in the bible --- and I wouldnt disagree with that. But it'll be here even when the rock is gone. I'm sure they's people would disagree with that. Quite a few, in fact. But I never could find out what any of them did believe.

I wonder if that's the whole point of McCarthy's writing. The Truth is both transcendent and terrifying, contrary to the chroniclers of banality like Franzen. Reviewers constantly compare authors like Franzen to DeLillo, to whom McCarthy is considered a peer... but what DeLillo got right -- that his imitators don't -- is just this: the truth is terrifying. He doesn't express it nearly as explicitly as McCarthy, so the mood is paranoia instead of meditative, fatalistic despair. But it's the same underlying principle; when you look reality squarely in the eye, you will come apart. McCarthy illustrates the coming apart itself with unflinching directness, DeLillo critiques the social and technological defenses we put up to prevent it. Later writers like Franzen seem to have lost the sense that banality conceals dread; they treat the banality as the sum of reality itself, not a distraction from it. They just want to write dialog as snappy as DeLillo's, and without weight behind the surface, it quickly gets boring.