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PARTISAN REVIEW
unhinged. Unlike many writers, McCarthy does not try to do what he
cannot do; he simply takes us into the heart of his belief, and - caught in
his strange seclusion (he seems to live out of time as well as place) -
makes fewer compromises than almost any writer I know .
At the same time, to this English-born reader, McCarthy seems a
profoundly American writer, deeply physical in his attentions, and heavily
metaphysical in his implications, impatient, in fact, with anything but
absolutes. For all his extraordinary precision in writing about a wolf in a
trap and a boy in a private medical operation (and the way one
resembles the other), his is an impenitently theological book, about the
secret design of the world and the passage of the soul. It is littered with
young girls who do not speak and blind sages who see everything. And
yet, if shaken out of its momentous cadences and claims, this book could
be easily read as a standard cowboy tale tricked up in immemorial prose;
a typical, almost romantic B-Western story of a boy on a horse in an
alien world.
What distinguishes McCarthy, then, is that he can take the dustiest
cliches in the land and make them fresh simply by the power of his
writing. At times, I felt the same terror and raptness I felt when reading
Moby Dick,
the terror of being possessed by a man possessed, in thrall to
some terrible vision. At other times, I saw only the strain of cadences
that fall roughly on the ear ("Those too drunk to travel were shown
every consideration and room made for them among the chattels in the
carts"). I wearied of reading things like, "The world which he imagines
to be the ciborium of all godlike things will come to naught but dust
before him" (or, in the same paragraph, "Somos dolientes en la oscuri–
dad"). I felt that a writer who reminded me so forcibly of Hemingway
and Faulkner could not really be himself. And sometimes I didn't know
whether to regard with awe or impatience a novelist who could write,
of a teenage boy, "He looked fourteen going on some age that never
was. He looked as if he'd been sitting there and God had made the trees
and rocks around him. He looked like his own reincarnation and then
his own again."
Towards the end, as the boy rides his horse he knows not where, on a
quest for something in the desert, McCarthy begins to leave realism en–
tirely behind. Everyone becomes a symbol or an oracle, and everyone
speaks in the same odd, disembodied voice that suggests some post- (or
pre-) human wisdom. A blind man in touch with "the true and ageless
world," pronounces, "The world was sentient in its core and secret and
black beyond men's imagining." A woman by the side of the road reads
Billy's palm, and says "that while rain fell by the will of God evil chose
