The world does not need Secret Squirrel’s opinions about how Cormac McCarthy is the new Alice Munro but in a good way, but I wrote them anyway:
-Who cares that the profile was badly written? The standards for this kind of thing are abysmal, it isn’t like it would have been better in the New Yorker or the NYRB. It is nice that Vincenzo Barney comes from the Texas literary scene, and that there is such a thing. The image of McCarthy worrying about Augusta Britt’s comment on somebody’s Substack is a good advertisement for this platform. Britt picked Barney to tell her story.
-I always thought that McCarthy’s writing after he moved west became fake (post-Suttree, basically), in spite of the beautiful prose. He lays the brutality on too thick, in a way that doesn’t seem to accord or even resonate with what one imagined was his experience. A Real Man faces the Existential Grimness of Existence or whatever. In the final two books and Cities of the Plain the symbol of 20th Century horror is the atom bomb. Fair enough, but the bomb is supposed to supercharge the brutality that came before with meaning, or a numbing lack of meaning, in a way I don’t buy. Britt’s story gives us (or me) a better lens to read it with.
-If you compare his work to, say, Life and Fate (or The Gulag Archipelago, or even Storm of Steel and On the Marble Cliffs), the essential phoniness of McCarthy’s self-presentation is glaring. Grossman lived through the battle of Stalingrad. McCarthy has all these ideas about being a man and having grim determination and knowing how to build a wall with masonry, but he was a normal bougie North American of his era who wasn’t as different from John Updike or Alice Munro as he affected to be. (Hemingway is his ancestor in pretension.)
-McCarthy’s way of dealing with the problem of not being Vasily Grossman isn’t so unusual, it was pioneered by McCarthy’s friend Werner Herzog and adopted by Mario Vargas-Llosa (La guerra del fin del mundo) and the early J. M. Coetzee. (The archives show how entranced all three authors were by Aguirre, the Wrath of God. Somebody should write a thesis…) Basically: imagine a maximally brutal past! For my money “The Narrative of Jacobus Coetzee” from Dusklands is the high point of this kind of writing (it is J. M.’s retelling of his elephant hunting ancestor’s adventures while colonizing north-central SA). Perhaps this is because white guilt has an electric charge coming from a South African in the 1970s that Blood Meridian couldn’t match.
-Yet Blood Meridian reads very differently if you realize that McCarthy was planning and writing it in Mexico, moving from town to town while one the run from the FBI with Augusta Britt! In fact McCarthy turns out to be amazingly similar to Munro: his fiction is an endless series of reflections on a few basic family and romantic traumas. If there was one thing I felt certain about McCarthy vs. like Phillip Roth or Munro, it was that he was making his stories up, spinning a yarn. But I was wrong. It is striking how little post-1950s novelists make up!
-I don’t read enough to really judge, but the two works of anglophone 2010s literature I’m confident are masterpieces are Munro’s Dear Life and Coetzee’s Jesus. (How original of me, I like authors who have been awarded the Nobel Prize!) McCarthy’s late diptych is not quite as good because it is full of the BS philosophy he absorbed in Santa Fe (as opposed to the sterling philosophy Coetzee absorbed from the Committee on Social Thought lol but maybe), but we need to be ready for a world where many of the best writers are in their 80s and 90s.