A Universe of Ostentatious Invention

...With the appearance of that work the author rose from the mists of relative obscurity (his five earlier novels having earned him a tiny if devoted, readership) into the blinding glare of hyperbole...

...When he'd said all he knew to say he told it stories...

...Yet as soon as his glance fell on her she opened her eyes...

...Still, if you give in to McCarthy's way of doing things, his prose begins to exert a hypnotic power...

...He speaks in All the Pretty Horses and again in The Crossing of boys who become men not by grappling with their Jay Mclnerneyish urges for drugs, sex and meaninglessness, but by traveling due south and setting themselves against the lure of extinction that calls from the wild...

...It may well be that we have come so far from assigning any relevance to the writing of fiction that a novelist who sets his sights at a great and mysterious ascendancy strikes us not just as an anomaly but as an infinitely precious relic worth honoring...

...It begins as a love story between a boy and his wolf, a soul communion between human and animal that is all the more strong for being unspoken: "He already knew that she was smarter than any dog but he didnt know how much smarter...

...Within the constricted male atmosphere he sets out to create, McCarthy doesn't miss a trick...

...McCarthy is fond of teeth-grinding, Latinate words such as "inameliorate," "predacious," "selvedge," "preterite," and "damascene...

...A novel is a novel, after all, there be none other like it come into the world, and a man (or woman, though the latter be mostly good for serving up tortillas) reads in it what he will...

...he said...

...Liking him is a form of reverse snobbism, choosing Fire Island as against the Hamptons...

...But let me begin again, in a more serious vein...

...Cormac McCarthy was said to be the Great American Writer we had been looking for lo these many years in all the wrong places (the New Yorker and Elaine's, for instance) when he was in fact honing his manly craft in solitude and seriousness away from the red-hot center of the literary world off in El Paso, Texas...

...Nevertheless, it behooves the skeptical reader, who knows life is getting ever shorter and art takes up time that might be spent watching Court TV, to inquire as to what manner of beast we have here...

...He looked at Billy and he looked out the window...

...It occurred to me more than once while traversing his stony, unyielding terrain that it is partly this ambition which has earned him the hallowed literary place he occupies...

...Or this way: If Ernest Hemingway and Gertrude Stein had sat down to compose a novel together, he with his gnomic ruminations and languid dialogue and she with her run-on sentences and concretized abstractions, you'd get close to the sound of the peculiar, imperial sensibility that pervades The Crossing...

...He told it stories in Spanish that his grandmother had told him as a child and when he'd told all of those that he could remember he sang to it...

...on the contrary, they expect it...

...Coyotes were yapping in the hills below them and he turned to see if she paid any mind to them but she appeared to be asleep...

...Billy and his younger brother, Boyd, have been raised in the art of breeding horses and they treat these creatures the way people were once instructed to treat their children??with equal parts discipline and affection...

...Is he genius or fraud, or is he something of both...

...What also cannot be denied, however one sizes him up, is that Cormac McCarthy's fiction springs from a dark and uncompromising vision utterly removed from the concerns of the day...

...He is alone with his animals, the forces of nature and a passing parade of human apparitions??mute yet maternal Mexican and Indian women who fix him meals out of their own bare provisions, as well as a slightly more talkative but badly-intentioned crew of men...

...The Crossing is the second book in what is referred to as The Border Trilogy...

...Lawrence had freed himself from his mother and Frieda, he might have sounded a little bit like Cormac McCarthy, although he would surely have snuffed out half his consciousness in the process...

...I have framed the questions so as best to reveal my bias, which is that Cormac McCarthy is a bit of everything: genius, fraud, boy's writer, and talking cowboy...

...The Crossing is full of esoteric cowboy lore??how to skin a rabbit, how to muzzle a wolf??and recondite vocabulary...

...From its very first sentence...

...There are no real characters in The Crossing other than the landscape and the author's mind??both are stark, even pitiless??and in this sense it is less accessible than All the Pretty Horses, which made a gesture in the direction of pinning its concerns onto novelistic players...

...His antiquated, idiosyncratic, frequently ungrammatical prose was compared with Melville and Faulkner's, and admired by a range of pedigreed readers from Saul Bellow to Jim Harrison...

...The time is shortly before World War II...

...The first one, All the Pretty Horses, was published to acclaim and prizes (it received both the National Book Award and National Book Critics Circle Award for 1992...

...Cormac McCarthy's ambition is monumental, partaking as much of the moralist's impulse as of the storyteller's...

...Or is he, again, a genre writer of distinctive but minor gifts, a Louis L'Amour for the intelligentsia...

...It is, perhaps, one of the more genuinely tragic aspects of a culture such as ours, living on sound bites and broadly delineated critical categories, that to express some reservations in the face of a successfully orchestrated publicity campaign??especially one that has succeeded in reaching the "higher" media levels ??is almost beside the point...

...When Billy spoke to him again his brother wouldnt look at him but Billy could see that his eyes were wet...

...When they came south out of Grant County Boyd was not much more than a baby and the newly formed county they'd named Hidalgo was itself little older than the child"??The Crossing demands to be accepted on its own inflated terms, without readerly interference...

...In an age whose readers appear to be engaged only by fiction that addresses the here and now with as much of the ring of truth as possible, McCarthy offers up a universe of ostentatious invention with aspirations to the mythic...

...He waited and then tried it again with more stealth...

...He looked away...

...This novel reads like a long, repetitive car ride with some occasional glimpses of breathtaking scenery...

...By page 52 Billy has left his family home ("He rode out the gate before his father was even up and he never saw him again...

...He shut the door and set the pail on the kitchen table...

...contributor, "New Yorker," "Partisan Review" I DON'T RECKON I quite know what to make of Cormac McCarthy, and I'm suspicioned that neither do those who profess to be bowled over by this writer...

...The rest is darkness coming in over the mountains, obscuring your better judgment and trying your patience: How many roads must a reader walk down before Billy Parham reaches The Crossing's end...

...If I'd of thought you was dead I wouldnt be here...

...He stands in his fiction for the sort of purist frontier ethos that is, at its core, misogynist and xenophobic??and immensely appealing to the self-consciously macho imagination...

...The truth, when it appears from the mouths of blind seers, is always unregenerately bleak: "He said that the light of the world was in men's eyes only for the world itself moved in eternal darkness and darkness was its true nature and true condition and that in this darkness it turned with perfect cohesion in all its parts but that there was naught there to see...

...Just waitin on you...

...The ethos has lots to do with sky and saddles and blood and loyalty, and next to nothing to do with domesticity and its discontents...

...No one Billy encounters along his journey is surprised by calamity...

...The boy in question is Billy Parham, a 16-year-old who is determined to save the wolf in question from the bandits and settlers who would trade or kill her...

...Yeah, said Boyd...

...There is, indeed, an auto-didactic quality to his choice of words, as though Wyatt Earp had gone and got himself a copy of the unabridged OED...

...The eyes opened as before...

...Some hundred pages later Billy returns home and tracks down Boyd, who has been orphaned since his older brother's departure...

...The dialogue that accompanies their reunion is bitten-off and unexultant, as all the human communications in this novel tend to be: "I reckon you thought I was dead, Billy said...

...Think of it this way: If D.H...

...Although I am definitely not the reader he has in mind, when I wasn't resisting his many stylistic tics and grandiose theories I found myself pulled along by the primal mantra he invokes and by his undeniable, if somewhat manic, descriptive powers...

...Once the wolf is finally caught and then shot in an act of mercy by Billy himself, the novel becomes a love story between a boy and his horse: "The horse faltered behind him and he dropped back and took hold of the bridle cheekstrap and walked beside the horse and talked to it...

...the place is on and around the southern tip of New Mexico, where the unclaimed land is inhabited by the poor who have nowhere else to go and by the brutal who hope to make it their own...

...Are you ready to go...