The American Century: Literature since 1945 587similar forms of entrapment in a series of postmodern detective stories set in a
dystopic New York City. Bell and Ford, in turn, write about dangling men, leading
outwardly comfortable lives (in the movies, journalism, insurance) but wryly ill at
ease, at odds with themselves and the world – and sunk in a desperation that is,
inevitably, quiet. What connects all these fictions, however, is a dread of
inconsequence. Their protagonists all share what one of them, Frank Bascombe in
Independence Day, calls a fear of “the cold, unwelcome, born-in-America realization
that we’re just like the other schmo, wishing his wishes, lusting his lusts, quaking
over his idiot frights and fantasies, all of us popped out from the same unchinkable
mold.” What is more, most of them also share the feeling that, maybe, the fear has
been realized – that they have indeed been “tucked ever more deeply,” as Bascombe
puts it, “more anonymously, into the weave of culture.” And that culture is itself
anonymous, an accumulation of insignificances. It could be anywhere; it might be in
the city or the suburbs, east or west, south or north. It is, above all, not just ordinary
but blank.
Nothing could be further from all this than the world of Cormac McCarthy
(1933–), whose work is marked with an indelible sense, not so much of blankness or
evil (although both are certainly there) as of homelessness. Some commentators
have referred to the elemental and equivocal activity of human settlement as the
essential subject of McCarthy’s fiction. Others, perhaps more accurately, have called
his novels a series of meditations on the unhomelike nature of our environment, the
scary disconnection of the human from the nonhuman that both Freud and
Heidegger called the unheimlich. And still others have been vexed by the question of
just how to place him. There is an argument, for instance, for seeing McCarthy as a
Southern writer – or, to be more accurate, one of those many white male writers
who have been busy recently rewriting Southern subjects and themes: among them
Peter Taylor (1917–1994), Harry Crews, Barry Hannah, Robert Olen Butler, and
Larry Brown. The literal geography of his first four novels (The Orchard Keeper
(1965), Outer Dark (1968), Child of God (1973), Suttree (1979)) is, after all, scrupu-
lously confined to one Southern place within a hundred mile radius of Maryville,
Tennessee. And they could be said to participate in one of the oldest debates on
Southern writing, between pastoralism and the anti-pastoral. There is, however,
equally an argument for situating McCarthy among those other white male writers
who have been busy deconstructing Western myth and telling tales of a newer, truer
West: among them, Edward Abbey (1927–1989), William Gibson (1944–), Frederick
Barthelme (1943–), Tim O’Brien, and Rick Bass (1950–). McCarthy’s 1985 novel,
Blood Meridian, marks the beginning of his departure from the South into Western
or other settings: a departure confirmed by his Border Trilogy – All the Pretty Horses
(1992), The Crossing (1994), and Cities of the Plain (1998) – and two subsequent
novels, No Country for Old Men (2005) and The Road (2006). All six later novels are
characterized not only by an inversion of traditional Western stories about crisis and
redemption – there is violence here but no visible sign of regeneration through it –
but by a sense of the bleakness of Western space. The unobstructed extension of the
landscape triggers here, not the conventional feelings of freedom and possibility, butGGray_c05.indd 587ray_c 05 .indd 587 8 8/1/2011 7:31:33 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 33 PM