Cities of the Plain by Cormac McCarthy My rating: 3 of 5 stars Cities of the Plain began life as a screenplay, and it shows. For most of its length, it is bare description and dialogue. While its scene-setting is often concisely vivid and its cowboy conversations laconically witty, it lacks either the lived-in quality … Continue reading Cormac McCarthy, Cities of the Plain
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The Crossing by Cormac McCarthy My rating: 3 of 5 stars The Crossing (1994) is the follow-up to All the Pretty Horses (1992) and the second part of Cormac McCarthy's Border Trilogy, three novels focused on young American men coming of age in the early-to-mid-20th century on the border with Mexico. Unlike its popular precursor, … Continue reading Cormac McCarthy, The Crossing
All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy My rating: 4 of 5 stars All the Pretty Horses is apparently to Cormac McCarthy's corpus what The Crying of Lot 49 is to Thomas Pynchon's or The Ghost Writer to Philip Roth's: it is the appealing vestibule to an oeuvre of appalling heights and depths, a prolegomenon to any … Continue reading Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses
The Road by Cormac McCarthy My rating: 4 of 5 stars The Road, like many other novels in the broad speculative tradition from ancient utopias to modern science fiction, designs a whole fictional world around the expression of a single thesis. Cormac McCarthy hints at this thesis when his nameless protagonist, sick with fever during … Continue reading Cormac McCarthy, The Road
Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy My rating: 5 of 5 stars Cormac McCarthy's fifth novel and putative masterpiece, Blood Meridian (1985), describes a murderous spree undertaken in Mexico in 1849 by John Joel Glanton and his crew of irregulars; they are contracted by Mexican governors to hunt for Apaches—they will be paid by the scalp—but they end … Continue reading Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian
