McCarthy, Cormac Books

The Road (Oprah's Book Club)

Cormac McCarthy

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 1513 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Best known for his Border Trilogy, hailed in the San Francisco Chronicle as "an American classic to stand with the finest literary achievements of the century," Cormac McCarthy has written ten rich and often brutal novels, including the bestselling No Country for Old Men, and The Road. Profoundly dark, told in spare, searing prose, The Road is a post-apocalyptic masterpiece, one of the best books we've read this year, but in case you need a second (and expert) opinion, we asked Dennis Lehane, author of equally rich, occasionally bleak and brutal novels, to read it and give us his take. Read his glowing review below. --Daphne Durham

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Guest Reviewer: Dennis Lehane

Dennis Lehane, master of the hard-boiled thriller, generated a cult following with his series about private investigators Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro, wowed readers with the intense and gut-wrenching Mystic River, blew fans all away with the mind-bending Shutter Island, and switches gears with Coronado, his new collection of gritty short stories (and one play).

Cormac McCarthy sets his new novel, The Road, in a post-apocalyptic blight of gray skies that drizzle ash, a world in which all matter of wildlife is extinct, starvation is not only prevalent but nearly all-encompassing, and marauding bands of cannibals roam the environment with pieces of human flesh stuck between their teeth. If this sounds oppressive and dispiriting, it is. McCarthy may have just set to paper the definitive vision of the world after nuclear war, and in this recent age of relentless saber-rattling by the global powers, it's not much of a leap to feel his vision could be not far off the mark nor, sadly, right around the corner. Stealing across this horrific (and that's the only word for it) landscape are an unnamed man and his emaciated son, a boy probably around the age of ten. It is the love the father feels for his son, a love as deep and acute as his grief, that could surprise readers of McCarthy's previous work. McCarthy's Gnostic impressions of mankind have left very little place for love. In fact that greatest love affair in any of his novels, I would argue, occurs between the Billy Parham and the wolf in The Crossing. But here the love of a desperate father for his sickly son transcends all else. McCarthy has always written about the battle between light and darkness; the darkness usually comprises 99.9% of the world, while any illumination is the weak shaft thrown by a penlight running low on batteries. In The Road, those batteries are almost out--the entire world is, quite literally, dying--so the final affirmation of hope in the novel's closing pages is all the more shocking and maybe all the more enduring as the boy takes all of his father's (and McCarthy's) rage at the hopeless folly of man and lays it down, lifting up, in its place, the oddest of all things: faith. --Dennis Lehane

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No Country for Old Men (Vintage International)

Cormac McCarthy

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 410 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

An Engaging and Thought-Provoking Book 4 out of 5 stars.
4 of 4 people found this review helpful.

"No Country for Old Men" is a unique book. Utilizing a staccato and direct writing style, Cormac McCarthy covers many weighty topics under the umbrella of a disarmingly direct and powerful storyline.

Topics such as life and death, good and evil and choice versus chance are all touched upon over the course of this novel. Beneath the veneer of this action-driven story lie many questions of significant scale and scope. The combination of "big questions" and parsimonious verse make this an engaging and thought-provoking book.

Blasphemy - the movie is better than the book! 3 out of 5 stars.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful.

No Country for Old Men was fascinating storytelling, but not easy to read. It was riveting, stark, violent, and very suspenseful. The author created unusual characters - Bell, Moss, and Chigurh. Bell and Moss both were offered with different levels of character flaws, and both were likable in their own ways. Chigurh was a machine with only slight glimpses of humanity, very well drawn. The drawback of the book is that Cormac McCarthy didn't use quotation marks around the dialog, a literary device that drives me crazy when trying to read. After finishing it, I watched the movie. While I could answer questions that my companion had about the story that wasn't explained well, I liked the screen version better. Perhaps though, reading the book first is the way to better enjoy the movie. This book is recommended, especially to fans of Cormac McCarthy.

Editorial Review:

In No Country for Old Men, Cormac McCarthy simultaneously strips down the American crime novel and broadens its concerns to encompass themes as ancient as the Bible and as bloodily contemporary as this morning’s headlines.

All the Pretty Horses

Cormac Mccarthy

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Total reviews: 294 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Definitely a Acquired Taste 5 out of 5 stars.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful.

I have looked at some of the reviews here, and am a bit surprised as the number of people who hated this book. It is a challenge to read, but this is no "Ulysses." The main themes can be understood with a little careful attention. Some have compared McCarthy's style to Hemingway's but this is not a fair comparision. McCarthy's prose is far more complex. Hemingway wrote arresting prose, but at times his minimalist style was cartoonish. McCarthy is simple the way Picasso is simple -- that is to say, only if you do not look hard enough.

McCarthy's skill with language is unequalled among living American authors. It is the language that is the star of this book, and if you cannot appreciate the language itself the story will not bear the weight. Yes, I found myself re-reading passages and puzzling out the construction of some sentences, but I did it with the same pleasure a sports fan looks at a replay of a spectacular play. This is a book for the patient. Not every book pays off like a James Bond novel.

Editorial Review:

Part bildungsroman, part horse opera, part meditation on courage and loyalty, this beautifully crafted novel won the National Book Award in 1992. The plot is simple enough. John Grady Cole, a 16-year-old dispossessed Texan, crosses the Rio Grande into Mexico in 1949, accompanied by his pal Lacey Rawlins. The two precocious horsemen pick up a sidekick--a laughable but deadly marksman named Jimmy Blevins--encounter various adventures on their way south and finally arrive at a paradisiacal hacienda where Cole falls into an ill-fated romance. Readers familiar with McCarthy's Faulknerian prose will find the writing more restrained than in Suttree and Blood Meridian. Newcomers will be mesmerized by the tragic tale of John Grady Cole's coming of age.

Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West

Cormac McCarthy

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Total reviews: 301 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

America's God 5 out of 5 stars.
2 of 3 people found this review helpful.

Blood Meridian is worth reading if nothing else than for McCarthy's multi-dimensional portrayal of Judge Holden. The judge becomes the nexus where the powerful forces which created the American character, the impulse to control, to dominate, to wage genocidal war in the West, to mirror the refinement and accomplishments of Europe, meet, and the results are mesmerizing. There is a part where the judge, a hefty man, lifts a meteorite used as a blacksmith's anvil and his men wager how far he can hurl it. What McCarthy is saying is clear and disturbing. Here is our American god. Here is the embodiment of our national, historical woes. As the central pivot of this violent, nearly obscene novel, the judge is a perfect creation.

Editorial Review:

"The men as they rode turned black in the sun from the blood on their clothes and their faces and then paled slowly in the rising dust until they assumed once more the color of the land through which they passed." If what we call "horror" can be seen as including any literature that has dark, horrific subject matter, then Blood Meridian is, in this reviewer's estimation, the best horror novel ever written. It's a perverse, picaresque Western about bounty hunters for Indian scalps near the Texas-Mexico border in the 1850s--a ragged caravan of indiscriminate killers led by an unforgettable human monster called "The Judge." Imagine the imagery of Sam Peckinpah and Heironymus Bosch as written by William Faulkner, and you'll have just an inkling of this novel's power. From the opening scenes about a 14-year-old Tennessee boy who joins the band of hunters to the extraordinary, mythic ending, this is an American classic about extreme violence.

The Border Trilogy: All the Pretty Horses, the Crossing, Cities of the Plain (Everyman's Library)

Cormac Mccarthy

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 40 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Adventure! 3 out of 5 stars.
4 of 12 people found this review helpful.

I love All the Pretty Horses and have read it three times. The other stories aren't quite as good as the first in the trilogy but the package is a good value.

the single most influential series i've read in my life 5 out of 5 stars.
2 of 2 people found this review helpful.

Cormac McCarthy has the amazing abilitly to envoke emotion using description of action and place. One never gets inside of his characters heads directly (at least not in this particular series) and yet it is the most emotionaly powerful series i have ever encountered. McCarthy taps into the very core of the human life force, our relationships with nature and change.
I first read All the Pretty Horses when i was thirteen, having heard my father talk about the effect the book had on him, specifically the way McCarthy contrasted the rappidly changing United States and the little changed Mexico. i enjoyed the story, although i found the narrative a bit dense. Jimmy Blevins, the runnaway who ends up traveling with John Grady Cole and Lacey Rowlins, made quite an impression as a fully fleshed out character and a very confused and truly destructive adolesent. He is the source of much of the trouble Grady Cole and Rawlins are presented with. Also there is a scene in which John Grady Cole and The Mexican girl who he falls in love with go swimming in a lake a night which has stuck with me. Her hair, blacker than the night, floating about her.
I read the Crossing about year later, and found it much more difficult to get through. Billy Parhams relationship with the wolf is so strong that when she dies it is difficult to continue sheerly becuase the main meat of the story seems to have vanished. the rest of the book is sparse and seemingly aimless. Billy is has lost most everything that is dear to him and cant land anywhere. the reader gets to be with him through his uncertainty and the search for his younger brother who has run off with a Mexican girl and dissapeared deep into Mexico. The novel does have conclusion however, and definately packs an interesting punch.
i didnt read Cities of the Plain until I was eighteen, ironically enough working on ranch in the middle of nowhere. It is the single most influential and moving book that i've read in my life. Watching the demise of John Grady Cole, and his friendship with Billy Parham (who is ten years older) is incredible. The contrast between Billy Parham who is very observant but also very uncertain and John Grady Cole, who is completely whole, and gifted and certain in everything he does, is staggering. The difference in the way they approach the rappidly changing world is both depressing and enlightening. I suppose the verdict is that people as whole as John Grady Cole cant survive in our culture today. There's no place for people who wont compramise their ideals, purhaps merely becuase they arent concious of the fact that ideals can be compramised. Either way the book wripped along for me, and it was a terribly painful experiance. Never have i fallen in love with a fictional character the way i fell in the with John Grady Cole in Cities of the Plain.
The love story is also quite nice, despite it's tragic qualities. The Whore that John Grady Cole falls in love with is perfectly suited for him and the scenes between them are beautiful. They're both trying to survive in a world that will never hold them. For me it is the book that best describes the compramise of the late teenaged years and young love, in a real way. The story exposes the world the way it actually is, Billy Parhams reaction to John Grady Coles death being another side of things. The conversation at the end of the book between an old Billy Parham (now a bum), and another bum under a bridge raised some interesting questions for me.
On the whole the Border Trilogy is very dense, very raw, has very strong characters and is not easy to get through but is very worth reading.

Editorial Review:

(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed)

Available together in one volume for the first time, the three novels of Cormac McCarthy's award-winning and bestselling Border Trilogy constitute a genuine American epic.

Beginning with All the Pretty Horses and continuing through The Crossing and Cities of the Plain, McCarthy chronicles the lives of two young men coming of age in the Southwest and Mexico, poised on the edge of a world about to change forever. Hauntingly beautiful, filled with sorrow and humor, The Border Trilogy is a masterful elegy for the American frontier.

Suttree

Cormac Mccarthy

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 56 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Suttree 5 out of 5 stars.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful.

I've just read Suttree. As did McCarthy's later book, The Road, Suttree gave me the feeling of knowing, or having known, the protagonist, and liking him very much.

Suttree by Cormac McCarthy 5 out of 5 stars.
0 of 1 people found this review helpful.

I enjoyed this book very much. I have enjoyed all the books I have read by Cormac McCarthy. They don't always end happily but are true to life.

Definitely in my all-time 5 favorite book list. 5 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

In my opinion, this is Cormac McCarthy at his absolute finest. The story of Suttree, the homeless vagabond, is so utterly compelling that time just falls away as you're reading it. If you've never read McCarthy (*gasp!*), this would be a helluva great place to start. This story haunts me.

Editorial Review:

By the author of Blood Meridian and All the Pretty Horses, Suttree is the story of Cornelius Suttree, who has forsaken a life of privilege with his prominent family to live in a dilapidated houseboat on the Tennessee River near Knoxville.  Remaining on the margins of the outcast community there--a brilliantly imagined collection of eccentrics, criminals, and squatters--he rises above the physical and human squalor with detachment, humor, and dignity.

The Crossing

Cormac Mccarthy

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Total reviews: 81 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

The opening section of The Crossing, book two of the Border Trilogy, features perhaps the most perfectly realized storytelling of Cormac McCarthy's celebrated career. Like All the Pretty Horses, this volume opens with a teenager's decision to slip away from his family's ranch into Mexico. In this case, the boy is Billy Parham, and the catalyst for his trip is a wolf he and his father have trapped, but that Billy finds himself unwilling to shoot. His plan is to set the animal loose down south instead.

This is a McCarthy novel, not Old Yeller, and so Billy's trek inevitably becomes more ominous than sweet. It boasts some chilling meditations on the simple ferocity McCarthy sees as necessary for all creatures who aim to continue living. But Billy is McCarthy's most loving--and therefore damageable--character, and his story has its own haunted melancholy.

Billy eventually returns to his ranch. Then, finding himself and his world changed, he returns to Mexico with his younger brother, and the book begins meandering. Though full of hypnotically barren landscapes and McCarthy's trademark western-gothic imagery (like the soldier who sucks eyes from sockets), these latter stages become tedious at times, thanks partly to the female characters, who exist solely as ghosts to haunt the men.

But that opening is glorious, and the whole book finally transcends its shortcomings to achieve a grim and poignant grandeur. --Glen Hirshberg

Child of God

Cormac McCarthy

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Total reviews: 54 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Sick! But interesting and a dark and desperate adventure. 5 out of 5 stars.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful.

"Child of God" is a story of a poor, lonesome and demented redneck named Lester trying to survive in a poor redneck town. From the beginning we see that he has gotten the boot from society (be it as it may) and has been forgotten and left on his own to survive and pursue his own interests, which are very sick and wrong. But he doesn't seem to realize he is doing anything wrong. I am not going to go into it but the thing is, as he hides from his pursuers living in caves, I root for him! I almost like him and find myself snickering at his horrific behavior!! What is wrong with me?

I think this is a good story. It contains a lot of contrasts, the actual plot is dark and there is evil and violence and desperation, but at the same time, there is humor and a little lightness and some action. If you like Cormac McCarthy you should read this book. It's a weird one but it keeps your interest and stengthens your grasp of Cormac's dark and desperate edge-of-humanity with maybe-a-smirk landscapes.

Editorial Review:

"Scuttling down the mountain with the thing on his back he looked like a man beset by some ghast succubus, the dead girl riding him with legs bowed akimbo like a monstrous frog." Child of God must be the most sympathetic portrayal of necrophilia in all of literature. The hero, Lester Ballard, is expelled from his human family and ends up living in underground caves, which he peoples with his trophies: giant stuffed animals won in carnival shooting galleries and the decomposing corpses of his victims. Cormac McCarthy's much-admired prose is suspenseful, rich with detail, and yet restrained, even delicate, in its images of Lester's activities. So tightly focused is the story on this one "child of God" that it resembles a myth, or parable. "You could say that he's sustained by his fellow men, like you.... A race that gives suck to the maimed and the crazed, that wants their wrong blood in its history and will have it."

Cities of the Plain

Cormac McCarthy

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Total reviews: 102 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

On a ranch in southeastern Texas, soon after World War II, a group of solitary, inarticulately lonely men gathers to work animals as the sun sets for good on the mythic American West. All of these men nurse losses both personal (siblings or wives) and collective (a shared lifestyle and philosophy). Among them is John Grady Cole, the adolescent hero of the first book in Cormac McCarthy's Border trilogy, All the Pretty Horses. John Grady remains the magnificent horseman he always was, and he still dreams too much. On the ranch, he meets Billy Parham, whose own tragic sojourn through Mexico in The Crossing, the second book of the set, continues to quietly suffocate him. The two form a friendship that will nurture both but save neither from the destiny that McCarthy's characters always sense lurching to meet them.

Soaked in storm-heavy atmosphere but brightened by the ranch-hands' easy camaraderie and gentle humor, Cities of the Plain surprises with its sweetness. The awkward doomed-romance plot at the center of this tight, concise novel fails to convince, but, remarkably, does little to undercut the book's impact. What lingers here, and what matters, are the brooding, eerie portraits of the plains and the riders, glimpsed mostly alone but occasionally leaning together, who slip across them, over the horizon into memory. --Glen Hirshberg

Outer Dark

Cormac Mccarthy

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Total reviews: 29 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

A gripping, taught, harrowing read 5 out of 5 stars.
5 of 5 people found this review helpful.

A sister gives birth to her brother's child. The brother takes the infant into the woods, where it is found by a travelling salesman. When the girl finds out about her brother's deception, she heads out to find the salesman, as her brother heads out to find her. All the while, they are pursued by three murderous, mysterious strangers, hellbent on an agenda all their own.

There's a lot in "Outer Dark" that is just plain confusing; I'm still not entirely sure who leaves home first, the sister or the brother, or even the brother's reason for leaving. It doesn't matter, though; this novel isn't supposed to be an easy read. No McCarthy novel is. It's supposed to be an HONEST read--and it certainly is that. So honest you will sometimes wince; the cannibalism scene, while never fully stated, is still so disturbing you'll cringe in disgust and fear as you read. And the final scene around the fire...well, I won't go into more, for fear of spoiling it for you. Save it to say that this one will cause you some nightmares; hopefully, it'll get you thinking about your own life as well. What would you do for the ones you love? What would you do for yourself?

Editorial Review:

Outer Dark is a novel at once fabular and starkly evocative, set is an unspecified place in Appalachia, sometime around the turn of the century.  A woman bears her brother's child, a boy; he leaves the baby in the woods and tells her he died of natural causes.  Discovering her brother's lie, she sets forth alone to find her son.  Both brother and sister wander separately through a countryside being scourged by three terrifying and elusive strangers, headlong toward an eerie, apocalyptic resolution.