American novelists in the 20th century used to be celebrities and, perhaps, men: Hemingway, certainly Faulkner. Now, they might as well not exist, in a situation that might be worse than the 19th century one that led Melville to die drunk and forgotten or Henry James to escape to England. We suffer from a kind of feminism, driven by the pantheistic spirituality of our times, and pushed by elites who can’t handle these decadent times.
It’s against this background that Cormac McCarthy’s work makes sense. He’s not just a novelist, or a chronicler of American decline, but an alternative to the times. He brings back rugged individualism, once the American dream, and, since this is a second look at that former strength, he tests the connection between American freedom and nihilism, as well as the deeper question that comes out of our love of stories, of drama, of conflict, our longing for beauty seen in staring at the ugliness he conjures up in his stories of America’s past and future, Western and sci-fi, the all-American concerns – do the upright people twisted by the times long for God? Did we have to end up this way? Are we fated?
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