Cormac McCarthy, lone wolf among the last of the literary giants

It’s not hyperbole to say that we’ve been burying literary giants: Toni Morrison, John Updike, Philip Roth. There are others to follow, who will go unnamed here, mostly out of good manners but also to avoid the outside chance of a jinx. You can argue who among this American generation was as (or more) brilliant than McCarthy, who died Tuesday at 89, but it would be hard to claim that anyone was more ferociously — if at times parodically — themselves.

Cormac McCarthy, spare and haunting novelist, dies at 89

Then again, any great style is not just vulnerable to parody but also ripe for it. It’s easy to satirize those who sound like no one else. McCarthy was famous for swinging between two registers, and it was primarily one of them that both guarantees his legacy and makes him, for some, an acquired taste. He did the virile, pared-down Hemingway style well, but a million writers try, and it doesn’t take much strain to read it. But not many authors — and perhaps none who lived well into the 21st century — attempted the kind of baroque portentousness that he did.

There’s a net under high wires for a reason. And whether McCarthy thrilled or fell, image to image, could be especially subjective. To this reader, this moment in “All the Pretty Horses” is an example of his style ringing a lofty bell:

The storm front towered above them and the wind was cool on their sweating faces. They slumped bleary-eyed in their saddles and looked at one another. Shrouded in the black thunderheads the distant lightning glowed mutely like welding seen through foundry smoke. As if repairs were under way at some flawed place in the iron dark of the world.

While these lines from “Blood Meridian” build past feverish to become nearly comical:

The jagged mountains were pure blue in the dawn and everywhere birds twittered and the sun when it rose caught the moon in the west so that they lay opposed to each other across the earth, the sun whitehot and the moon a pale replica, as if they were the ends of a common bore beyond whose terminals burned worlds past all reckoning.

“Blood Meridian,” a lyrical gorefest set in the mid-19th century that places the reader in a staring contest with uncut evil, is widely considered the book of McCarthy’s most likely to permanently join the canon. And thinking purely of posterity, it’s probably true.

But every reader’s life is prone to accidents of timing. “All the Pretty Horses” was published when I was 18, and I read it for the first time soon after. Having not read McCarthy before then, I didn’t know enough to believe, as some did, that the book represented a watering down and sentimentalizing of his project.

It’s true that “Horses,” the first volume of what became the Border Trilogy, is the closest thing McCarthy ever wrote to a bildungsroman, the story of a Texas teenage rancher named John Grady Cole who, beset by personal losses, travels into Mexico with two friends. The book did represent a change, a somewhat softer brand of McCarthyism. But it was hardly simple: peppered with untranslated Spanish and English words that even graduate-level students might run to a dictionary to learn, and shaded with plenty of general mercilessness.

“The Crossing,” the second book in the trilogy, is an equal achievement. For all that I’ve read, few things have lingered as vividly as that book’s long opening third, in which another teenage protagonist, Billy Parham, travels hundreds of miles in the sole company of a wolf.

If a general reader — an intelligent reader, with aesthetic discernment, an average enough moral compass and a stomach made from some material other than cast iron — asks where to start with McCarthy and you suggest any novel published before “All the Pretty Horses,” you’re a sadist. (That doesn’t mean this hypothetical reader wouldn’t or shouldn’t eventually admire the earlier works.)

In McCarthy’s first three novels, he doesn’t just refrain from leading the reader by the hand; he chops off the reader’s hand with an ax. These books — “The Orchard Keeper,” “Outer Dark” and “Child of God” — can be briefly summarized as blind spelunking trips into the malformed depths of the human soul.

Having said that, they do possess a glimmer of the religious concerns that many saw emerging more brightly as McCarthy’s career progressed. His style wasn’t frequently called biblical just for its rhythms. “Child of God” was a darkly ironic title, but McCarthy did seem to see in even his most misshapen characters something, maybe not salvageable, exactly, but at least in tune with the universe and whatever grim jokester might have created it. All of this was quite Old Testament in spirit — the purpose of evil is none of your business, keep suffering — until, arguably, “The Road,” a story of a father and son at the end of the world with increasingly loud echoes of Christian symbology. “All the Pretty Horses” made McCarthy literary famous; “The Road” made him Oprah Winfrey famous.

For this one reader, the massive success of “The Road” was more a symptom of the culture’s then-burgeoning (and now over-satiated but somehow still there) appetite for all things apocalyptic, the Pulitzer it received more of a lifetime achievement award. Even though the novel has its moments of raw beauty, it was in some ways what dissenters thought “All the Pretty Horses” was: McCarthy for Dummies. (Many, many brilliant people have spoken in favor of “The Road,” but there’s no fun in hedging.) The clipped, macho-mysterious speech between father and young son in some unspecified, blasted future in “The Road” was far less convincing than the similarly terse dialogue between cowboys in previous centuries.

McCarthy was one of those rare writers who could be caricatured in shorthand not just on the page but also off it — in his case, easily pictured grimacing while polishing a collection of cattle skulls to a high sheen in a rusted trailer on some arid plain. But there didn’t seem to be any Salinger or Pynchon in his reclusion, no self-mythologizing “disappearance.” He even had the decency to simply show up and talk to Winfrey (though he was terse) six years after the far more earthly Jonathan Franzen had initially snubbed her. McCarthy seemed to simply, genuinely not care about public or extra-literary matters.

He was probably among the last of a breed who can — or would want to, or would know how to — so purely disengage from the social and technological world. But, of course, his passing represents a large piece of the loss of something much more profound. You can place his ambition and grandiosity in the tradition of Melville and Faulkner, as Harold Bloom most famously did, and you can convincingly trace his work as stemming directly from, and in spirited conversation with, foundational texts of civilization, from the Bible to the Greek tragedians. He had many illustrious ancestors. But does he leave any true heirs?