Quintessentially American novelist Cormac McCarthy died on Tuesday, June 13, 2023. Since his death, tributes have poured in from virtually every major media outlet around the world.
In one sense, praise for McCarthy, who, in the aftermath of his death, is being called the greatest “stylist” of American literature as well as the greatest Western novelist (his Southern novels being overshadowed by those of William Faulkner), is fitting. At the same time, praise for the late novelist seems out of place in the contemporary press.
Our “post-Trump” era is one of extreme pressure upon artists to conform to the ideology of the millennial left. McCarthy, who is rumored to have had conservative political leanings, certainly does not fit the mold of contemporary artists feted by the establishment. Throughout his oeuvre, McCarthy was concerned with deep existential and theological issues as opposed to the celebration of a largely manufactured and artificial ethic or gender identity.
His early work Child of God (1973), clearly in the vein of Faulkner is a profound, but deeply disturbing and perhaps, for some religious readers, unreadable meditation on the evil in present the human heart. Set in Tennessee, the work’s title is clearly a play on the popular Christian notion of the baptized as adopted children of God. The book’s main character, Lester Ballard, is a deeply disturbed individual who collects the corpses of his murder victims.
The novel is thus a meditation on the violence that remained in America after it was settled and
