Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy

First in my summer reading is Cormac McCarthy's Blood meridian.  The book has one lasting virtue and one soft spot.

First the virtue.  McCarthy's writing is elegant throughout.  He never allows the violence to wane, always finding a lyricism in his language of agony and human destruction.  The narrative is bleak, hostile; at times, unrelenting gruesomeness. His skill is to normalize the ongoing misery experienced by most of the characters, without romanticizing it, nor diluting its effecting, arresting shock.  There are no heroes here, few protagonists, just characters who live through a series of deadly encounters. What makes the writing so evocative is McCarthy's ability to constant find seams of beauty in his descriptions.  As if he writes so as to explore and describe the levels of depravity, each scene comes fresh, despite the dulling routine of violence and shared agony.

The end comes abruptly, not because the narrative ends (there is hardly an arc of a story to tell), but as if in recognition that McCarthy could continually find eloquence amid the shower of emotional and physical toil he depicts. He could go on, at ten times the length of the book, finding new insight, new levels of literary expanse and shattered beauty.  But the end brings the quishy thud of the character in the kid.  Now, the man, twenty years on from the main segment of the tale, he seems to have learned nothing during that time.  That is a shame, for while the kid/man need not serve as the allegorical characterization (only a brief coda stumbles there), his lack of psychic change mars the end.  His relating to the Judge demonstrates no growth, no earned human wisdom, no change from the naive, survivalist moralism of his earlier experiences.  The reader is left with no traction on how the slaughter of landscape and human devastation helped shaped the attitudes of a generation of American identity.

Blood meridian should be read slowly, with care and abandonment of expectation. Let McCarthy's writing push you into flow, as he trips along the edges of prose into the unwinding power of poesy.