Volume 52, Number 16 · October 20, 2005
The Treasure of Comanche County
By Joyce Carol Oates
No Country for Old Men
by Cormac McCarthy
Knopf, 309 pp., $24.95
OTHER BOOKS BY CORMAC McCARTHY DISCUSSED IN THIS ARTICLE
The Orchard Keeper
by Cormac McCarthy
Vintage, 246 pp., $13.00 (paper)
Outer Dark
by Cormac McCarthy
Vintage, 242 pp., $13.00 (paper)
Child of God
by Cormac McCarthy
Vintage, 197 pp., $12.00 (paper)
Suttree
by Cormac McCarthy
Vintage, 480 pp., $14.95 (paper)
Blood Meridian
by Cormac McCarthy
Vintage, 337 pp., $14.00 (paper)
The Stonemason: A Play in Five Acts
by Cormac McCarthy
Vintage, 133 pp., $12.00 (paper)
All the Pretty Horses
by Cormac McCarthy
Vintage, 302 pp., $14.00 (paper)
The Crossing
by Cormac McCarthy
Vintage, 426 pp., $14.95 (paper)
Cities of the Plain
by Cormac McCarthy
Vintage, 292 pp., $13.00 (paper)
Pascal's enigmatic remark in the Pensées 'Life is a dream a little less inconstant' would be a fitting epigraph for the novels of Cormac McCarthy, which unfold with the exhausting intensity of fever dreams. From the dense Faulknerian landscapes of his early, East Tennessee fiction to the monumental Grand Guignol Blood Meridian, from the prose ballads of the Border Trilogy to this new, tightly plotted crime novel, McCarthy's fiction has been characterized by compulsive and doomed quests, sadistic rites of masculinity, a frenzy of perpetual motion—on foot, on horseback, in cars and pickups. No one would mistake Cormac McCarthy's worlds as 'real' except in the way that fever dreams are 'real,' a heightened and distilled gloss upon the human condition.
Review, 4809 words
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