If pressed, I would have to say that Fyodor Dostoevsky is my favorite novelist. After reading through the entirety of Dostoevsky’s corpus as an undergraduate student (I was either reading or playing basketball in those days), I finished a Master’s thesis on The Brothers Karamazov (1880). Of course, I liked other novelists too—Cervantes, J.R.R. Tolkien, Flannery O'Connor, and John Kennedy Toole come immediately to mind—but no one else gripped me quite like Dostoevsky, particularly in his ability to use narrative fiction as a means of exploring questions of “ultimate concern.”
That changed, however, when I encountered Cormac McCarthy’s work in the early 2000s. I had long heard McCarthy’s name, usually in connection with Southern Gothic literature. For example, as an undergrad, I was invited to read two of my recently published poems (nothing to see here) during a literary conference at Millsaps College in Jackson, Mississippi. There I listened to much discussion on Southern writers, including William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, and their putative successor, Cormac McCarthy. Imagine my surprise, then, when I picked up The Road (2006) a number of years later. I could perceive a Hemingway-like quality to McCarthy’s prose, and I immediately sensed a Dostoevskian preoccupation with questions about good and evil, but Southern literature it was not. Since that time, I’ve gone through most of McCarthy’s oeuvre (from Suttree [1979] going forward), and I now realize his evolution as a writer, marked by his move from Tennessee to New Mexico—a change that ostensibly facilitated a shift in subject matter and prose style. Still, as mentioned, what immediately seized me about The Road, not to mention other McCarthy works such as Blood Meridian or The Evening Redness in the West (1985) and All the Pretty Horses (1992), was McCarthy’s implication that the beautiful yet often cruel material world gives us a glimpse into the transcendent. He’s an American Dostoevsky, albeit with less dialogue and more violence.
In any case, I was elated to read this week that McCarthy, who is only two years shy of his 90th birthday, is releasing two novels in 2022. The first is titled The Passenger. Due out in October, it is said to be about “morality and science, the legacy of sin, and the madness that is human consciousness.” The second book comes out a month later. Entitled Stella Maris, it is being called a “searching, rigorous, intellectually challenging coda to The Passenger, a philosophical inquiry that questions our notions of God, truth, and existence.” Needless to say, I’m in.
One of my favorite scenes from the 2007 film No Country for Old Men, based on McCarthy’s eponymous 2005 novel:
So much cause for rejoicing. Not even one but two from McCarthy. (Add to the jubilation of my spouse over the breakthrough in MLB). The first Dostoevsky for me was "Crime and Punishment," which I read now as I look back in somewhat amusing circumstances just by how much time has changed. I was an undergraduate and living with two roommates in a small farmhouse, working each day a long shift at potato farm. No computer, no cellphone, just a small room to come back to and a few hours with Dostoevksy. The tragic calculations of Razkolnikov on behalf of his mother and sister, how the novelist could through the mind and heart of the characters bring to life this confrontation with the calculating rationalist ego-centric western mind, then the redemption brought to Razkolnikov of the figure of Sophia - it was something to come back to after the potato farm, and I think prepared me for the coursework I had in the coming semesters. As for Cormac McCarthy, yeah, for me the first one also was "The Road," read at a nadir point in my adult life and the sense of raw courage through commitment to live and to make decisions that "carried the fire" again influenced me in the state I was in to make improvements. Somewhat amusing circumstances again for "Blood Meridian," which I read while teaching English in Slovakia and having undergone an ultracheap 40 euro extraction of my wisdom teeth (by drill, only some local anesthesia), at home spitting out blood and the novel of choice happened to be "Blood Meridian." I can't wait for the new novels to come - some of the critics I've encountered have a compelling comparison for me between McCarthy and Herman Melville (expansive sublime and dreadful landscape/seascape, questions of evil and fate, mostly male characters in isolated circumstances, narrator's voice saturated with biblical echoes). Sorry this was so long.... it was just fun to hear your experiences and the memories they brought from me. I haven't read as much of either author as you and so have more to look forward to in both oevres...