Cormac Mac Airt

No word yet on when the Cormac McCarthy interview with Oprah Winfrey will take place. (Sweet jesus, did I just write that sentence?)

I still can't believe The Road has garnered all this praise (the Pulitzer Prize, mainstream celebrity, etc.) when earlier, better novels didn't. It seems sort of like Scorcese getting the Best Director Oscar for Faithful Departed when he directed Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, and Raging Bull all over twenty-five years ago. I guess McCarthy's old and those in literary officialdom decided they hadn't celebrated him enough.

He won the National Book Award for All the Pretty Horses back in 1992, and I thought that strange as well. Blood Meridian was published only seven years before, and it was a masterpiece on the order of Absalom, Absalom!. I remebered ATPH as a good novel, and less demanding of the reader, but not as one of his very best. No Country for Old Men, I thought, was better than The Road in certain ways, and I couldn't understand why it won nothing, wasn't on bestseller lists, etc., even though it was published just a year before The Road.

Then I started reading ATPH again (and I'll probably cycle through the rest of the border trilogy) just for comparison with the present Road phenomenon. Holy crap. Listen to this:

"Bye and bye they passed a stand of roadside cholla against which small birds had been driven by the storm and there impaled. Gray nameless birds espaliered in attitudes of stillborn flight or hanging loosely in their feathers. Some of them were still alive and they twisted on their spines as the horses passed and raised their heads and cried out but the horsemen rode on."

Those are just a few sentences buried in a paragraph a third of the way into ATPH. Having read the novel before, I know that the weird image of the birds perfectly foreshadows all of the awful shit about to happen to the protagonists, and even why it will happen. And those are magnificent sentences.

And so I am reminded--even when a McCarthy novel is not his best, it's better than just about anything else. And, in time, I can forget about the Matt Damon movie.

In time.