Discovering Cormac

So this morning I woke up early and didn’t really want to get up, so I reached over the side of the bed and fished around for something in my reading pile. Up came the August issue of Vanity Fair. I’d already read James Wolcott’s column, which is what I bought the magazine for. Looking over the offerings listed on the cover didn’t particularly inspire me.

Martha Stewart’s big post-prison interview. Eh.
How Elle McPherson went from Bikini Queen to Lingerie Mogul. Big Eh.
The Bitter Battle over the Jimmy Choo Shoe Empire. eh.
The Brawl that Shook the Guggenheim. Possibility.
Has Tom Cruise Lost his Marbles? snicker.
The NYPD Cops Accused of Killing for the Mob. Eh.

Well, I leafed through the magazine, kind of enjoying the ads, at least. And then I opened to a page with a familiar face staring out. Turns out the August issue holds only the second ever interview with Cormac McCarthy. And it’s not on the front cover???

Let me say that I have never read anything by Cormac McCarthy. He was a blip on my awareness scale and I know that he authored the book behind the Matt Damon movie a while ago (All the Pretty Horses). That, I have to admit, didn’t inspire me to read Cormac McCarthy.

The interview? Well, that’s a whole different universe. What a fascinating guy. A genius, I’d guess, hanging out with the intellectual elite at the Santa Fe Institute. A conservative curmudgeon among latter-day-hippie scientists, by the sounds of things. And they all get along just dandy and respect each other’s work and contribute to it, as well. He sounds like a genius who happens to write pretty well, too. Maybe even better than Faulkner.

So I visited my favorite bookstore this afternoon with the intention of correcting my Cormac McCarthy oversight. His newest hardcover book was there, No Country for Old Men, but I wanted to start nearer the beginning. I wanted Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West and The Border Trilogy (All the Pretty Horses, The Crossing, Cities of the Plain).

After hunting for a while, I asked one of the staff if there were any Cormac McCarthy books in the store, aside from his new one. She said there might be one in the used book section, but since the Vanity Fair interview and the release of his new book, McCarthy’s older books have been flying off the shelves faster than they can restock. There’s a new batch coming in later next week.

I did find the third book of the trilogy in the used book section. As far as I know, these are easily read as stand alone books and, since it was only $4.75, I grabbed it.

After only one chapter (81 pages), I am in love with Cormac McCarthy. The man doesn’t cotton much to commas and quotation marks. The longest run on sentences connected with a string of ‘ands’ that I’ve seen in a while. But can that man write. Beautiful words and an enormous vocabulary all strung together like liquid poetry. Turning violent subjects and death into...what? From what I’ve heard, his stories emotionally wring his readers out like a sponge, and they can’t wait for more. I’m thinking now that maybe I should wait for the new books to come in so I can start from nearer the beginning. At least with the book considered his career and writing turning point —Blood Meridian. I think I want to savor these books in order.