When it comes to people who peddle words for a living, Cormac McCarthy has many contemporaries but few peers. The only living one who comes to mind is Bob Dylan, another private octogenarian whose work has less to do with writing than it does with preserving the artist’s belief in a sort of American mysticism.
Like Dylan, McCarthy fashions the country as a cast-iron, biblical land where grand themes play out in vast landscapes around lonely, small people. You can practically hear the rusty gate swaying in the wind, everything made of leather, mud, or simmering flesh. Most of us imagine life as a high-wire act with oneself as the acrobat, but McCarthy acknowledges it as a bridge, an ordinary path of extraordinary consequence with a beginning, an end, and an edge most men don’t ever tempt.
