Volume 45, Number 14 · September 24, 1998
The Sun Also Sets
By A.O. Scott
Cities of the Plain, Vol. 3, The Border Trilogy
by Cormac McCarthy
Knopf, 293 pp., $24.00
Cities of the Plain is the concluding novel of Cormac McCarthy's Border Trilogy, following All The Pretty Horses (1992) and The Crossing (1994). The critical and commercial success of these books—All the Pretty Horses won a National Book Award, and Cities of the Plain has followed both of its predecessors onto the best-seller lists—transformed their author from the object of a small, devoted cult of readers into a major figure on the contemporary literary scene. (A degree of cultishness remains: according to a recent article in Texas Monthly, an 'international colloquy' on the notoriously reclusive writer will take place in El Paso in October under the auspices of the Cormac McCarthy Society, whose adherents hold frequent and informal discussions on the Internet. Among other activities, the society collects paintings of McCarthy's house, gleanings from his household trash, and members who can quote choice passages from memory.) A number of his reviewers have invoked the names of Faulkner and Melville, and invoking these invocations has become something of a critical habit.
Review, 4224 words
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