Geoffrey Himes dives deep into Cormac McCarthy's new pair of novels, which mark a significant stylistic departure for the author that doesn't always work.
Cormac McCarthy is one of America’s greatest writers—and with the death of Toni Morrison, probably our best living novelist and best chance at another Nobel Prize in Literature. After writing his five best-known—and, to my mind, best—novels between 1992 and 2006, McCarty published no fiction from 2007 through 2021 . Now he has reemerged with not one but two novels:These volumes are obviously the work of a gifted prose stylist and a major thinker, even if they don’t quite work as novels, as such.
McCarthy wove these together by writing his narration in the maximalist voice and his dialogue in the minimalist register. His books were usually set in either Southern Appalachia or America’s Southwest borderlands, and he would bring to life the beauty of those landscapes—and the hard work and violence they contained—with a visionary efflorescence of language.
He largely abandons that approach in these two new books. His protagonists, the siblings Bobby and Alicia, are too well educated to be believable speaking with the pith of the author’s horse thieves and backwoods trackers. These only children of a man who helped create the atomic bomb are more than smart; they’re super-smart, he in physics, she in mathematics.
The problem is that banter does not make for very satisfying fiction. It can often be clever, but rarely is it compelling or suspenseful. It can be a useful device for unloading a lot of research, and McCarthy allows his characters to explain what the author has been up to over the past 16 years of research into atomic weapons, cutting-edge math, the unconscious mind, and the nature of reality.
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