Et is paradoxical, but one of the greatest contemporary American writers was only noticed by a broader public through the film adaptation of one of his novels: “No Country for Old Men”. Well, the most important cinema brothers of all were responsible for this: Joel and Ethan Coen, and the two secured the film rights immediately after the book was published in 2005. Its author, Cormac McCarthy, was already seventy-two years old.
He was not a late appointed, but a late honored author. His debut, The Orchard Keeper, came out in 1965 (in German it appeared a whopping half century later as Der Feldwarter), but the first truly significant acknowledgment didn’t come until 1992 with the National Book Award for All the Beautiful Horses. . This was only his sixth novel in more than a quarter of a century, while his contemporaries Philip Roth, John Updike or Don DeLillo had published far more books in the same period. Only Thomas Pynchon was as scrupulous.
Long breaks
And there you have the legendary American quintet of his generation, now reduced to two survivors with the death of Cormac McCarthy: DeLillo and Pynchon. Of these, McCarthy was the most scrupulous; even in old age, unlike the others, he did not set a faster pace. After winning the Pulitzer Prize for “The Road” in 2007, there was a fifteen-year break before the two novels “The Passenger” and “Stella Maris” were published at once – which disappointed McCarthy’s admirers.
What made his reputation was the unsparingly realistic view of the American present. There isn’t a hint of Roth or Pynchon’s humor, nor was he sympathetic to his own disaffected heroes, such as Updike and DeLillo cherished. On the other hand, like none of these other authors, he had a literary soft spot for landscape descriptions, which connected him with the nineteenth-century authors he admired: Cooper and Thoreau.
And with a twentieth-century scripture McCarthy was particularly close to: William Faulkner. The foundation he created had given McCarthy its award for his debut novel – a clairvoyant decision, but this Faulkner Award only lasted ten years; Since 1981, the American PEN has hijacked the name of the award and given it to DeLIllo, Updike and three times to Philip Roth, but not once to McCarthy.
He was too uncomfortable and drastic for big audiences, and he wasn’t the man for big performances either. His prose was expressive without being rhetorically ambitious: McCarthy has often emphasized that he wanted to write intelligibly, which for him meant precision. In doing so, he stylistically reconciled the American novel with the American short story – which set him apart from his more famous contemporaries. Cormac McCarthy died yesterday in Santa Fe, New Mexico, just under a month short of his ninetieth birthday.
