Prerequisite: Last Name Starts With McC

Book: Carson McCullers: A Life by Josyane Savigneau
In my brief foray into literature I’ve discovered two things: Firstly, I find most interesting and enjoyable classic American literature, particularly of the South. Secondly, Carson McCullers is my favorite of this type of writer. Of her few novels that she’s written and of the fewer that I’ve read, she touches me in a deep, dark way that no other writer has been able to do so. She writes underwater, underneath my skin. Speaks to places few know even exist. She was very much aware and very much good at portraying the isolation and loneliness that some of us as human beings feel. Her weird, fascinating, and morbid characters continually revealed this isolation, this loneliness. If you’ve not yet read The Heart is a Lonely Hunter please do so. If you’ve not read more than a couple of her books I wouldn’t really recommend this biography of her to you just yet. I know biographies are about the most popular kind of book and that is good fine I guess but one will get much more out this biography after having developed a love for her writings. What I find most intriguing about McCullers was her being just past twenty years old she wrote The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. By literary standards, this is ridiculous. Unlike music, which is obsessed with youth, writers are usually much, much older before they are capable of writing a successful novel. One usually has to have much more life and much more time at their craft in this particular art form, which made McCullers a literary phenomenon. She was considered genius for being able to do this, and one can’t help but respect that at the least. Her life, though, was what could be considered typical of the prevelant idea of the troubled artist. The woman definitely had issues, and this book goes into them, revealing that her characters were not to far from her own home. For me one of the most intriguing things to me about her was her struggle to write despite her being crippled most of her life from around age 30 to her early death at just 50. She was bedridden and unable to care for herself during most of that time. She said she had to write and that it was writing that had kept her alive, even writing on the day of her death. I could go more in depth but like I say, if you like McCullers you will dig this look into her life and ways otherwise I don’t know that outside of that why anyone would read this. It’s not really going to inspire you like a Helen Keller biography or anything.

Sidenote: I do feel much more cultured after reading this biography because the author was a French woman and I’ve never read a book by anyone French before.

Book: All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy

Cormac McCarthy is apparently a big deal in the modern American literary world and to be honest I had no idea. I knew him as the writer of the novel No Country For Old Men but I had only seen the movie (and loved and was disturbed by it for a full three days afterwards). On tour my drummer and guitar player at the time were crazy about The Road written by McCarthy so I read that but didn’t find it all that special. But I like cowboys. And I knew he had written a few books with cowboys in them, and I’ve wanted to read them for some time. I’d go to the library and look at them, always wanting to read them, but never doing so because the time was not right. I believe there is a time for everything, a season, and books are no different. One could read any book at anytime but that doesn’t mean that he was meant to. Books are powerful, and if not handled carefully I think they can be a big waste of time so I am very particular about what books I expose myself to at certain times. So until a few weeks ago it wasn’t yet time for me to read McCarthy, and then it was. Now it is. It’s springtime. The weather is warmer. The wind is blowing. I can sit outside by a stream. Perfect for reading of happenings in the southwest. So I read All the Pretty Horses, the first book of a trilogy known as the Border Trilogy. Now this is less a review of All the Pretty Horses as much as an introduction to me diving into the writer and his works himself. I dug All the Pretty Horses, I really did. I found it a good story that gave me a bit of wanderlust and further cemeted my dream of riding a horse everywhere I go, making love to beautiful Mexican women, and eating beans and tortillas for every meal. But I don’t personally find it anymore than that: a good story. Unlike much of the classic literature I’m getting into, which has the power to change one’s view of the world, it’s people, it’s workings, and one’s own self, my experience with McCarthy is that he is just a good storyteller but beyond that little else. If a Steinbeck novel weighed a ton then you could carry a McCarthy novel in your back pocket. I don’t mean this to be an insult, hardly. For example, I appreciate music that changes my life but not every song is meant to. Sometimes I just want to hear something nice and easy. Sometimes I read to find pearls in the ocean, other times I just wanna sit on the beach. Same with books. So my interest in McCarthy is why there is such an interest in his writings to begin with. He’s won some hefty literary awards, has a society and journal named after him, and has around ten books written just about the books he’s written even though he has only written about ten novels himself…but why? As far as I can tell his stories just don’t have the depth that I would expect them to have for people to pay $30 something a year to join the Cormac McCarthy Society where they are exposed to news about his art and writings other people are publishing about his art. So I’m intrigued. I wonder to myself if I’m just missing something. And I wonder what it is about this writer that makes him so successful. And given the content of his novels, cowboys of the southwest and the extreme violence contained therein, I wonder what it says about the culture that follows his work. So, this begins my exploration into the work of Cormac McCarthy and the reasons for his success. I invite you on the journey as well if you’d like. And should you already have an opinion of him I’d like to know your thoughts as well.

By the way, though some of his books have cowboys in them, it’s not really John Wayne type stuff so don’t be put off by that idea. It’s much more modern.