Somebody Hug Cormac

Yeah, three month hiatus. The insomnia's been back, but it was the kind where I stay up until 2 am reading ESPN.com instead of shaking my fist at the sky, blog-style, for all my hypothetical readers. Also, there were books to be read and video games to be beaten. So let's start with the books (aka What I Read on My Winter Blog Vacation)...

Cormac McCarthy is one seriously disturbed motherfucker. I pretty much inhaled The Road, which was both my first McCarthy book and my first Oprah Book Club book (had to make sure the Oprah sticker peeled neatly off the front before I bought the thing). Anyway, it's a wildly depressing book about a father and son dodging cannibals and scrounging for food in a post-apocalyptic world that consists mostly of ash and dead things. Given that there's limited ways to describe the aforementioned ash and dead things, and that Cormac's not exactly verbose to start with and just flat out doesn't believe in apostrophes, it was a quick read. I was expecting something dark and haunting that would stay with me and keep me awake at night, which it might have done had I not followed it up with Blood Meridian.

Blood Meridian is the story of a group of Indian fighters who range from appalling to despicable to appallingly despicable. They rape and murder and pillage their way across Mexico, with the closest thing to comedy relief being the character who wears a necklace made of human ears (no, it's not funny, unless every time the necklace comes up you get flashbacks to Dolph Lundgren in Universal Soldier, in which case it'll pass for humor, but I doubt that's what Cormac was going for). Anyway, the entire book passed without a single character for a (non-psychotic) reader to identify with, then came to an abrupt, unclear ending that left me staring at the wall in confused horror. There was some philosphy put forth that I don't even want to begin to contemplate, because the whole book just made me feel dirty. It was kind of a highbrow literary version of that (old?) TV show Fear Factor... a bunch of unlikeable characters doing unsavory things that for some reason you feel compelled to watch.

Next came All the Pretty Horses, which was fantastic. I understand that the movie was terrible (never saw it), but I enjoyed the hell out of the book. It was bloody and dark and all that, but there was at least some humor and a character or two that you'd let walk behind you in a dark alley. Finished off the Cormac kick with No Country for Old Men, which was also terrific. The movie translation is about as true to the book as any I've ever seen, with all the plot points included and only a few small pieces of the backstory left out.

McCarthy's definitely not a populist; I read his four most famous books and there wasn't a happy ending to be found in the bunch. No Country and Horses came the closest, and they pretty much ended in stalemates. He seems more interested in how people react to extreme violence, and in creating the most disturbing characters he possibly can. I'm glad I read his books, but I'd be terrified if I had to make smalltalk with him.