Where to start with McCarthy
Child of God is brief and brutal; it shows how McCarthy's sentences hold landscape, violence, and moral distance before Blood Meridian.
Blood Meridian's reputation and punctuation have kept you outside it, but you want to know whether the prose earns the ordeal.
Starting with Blood Meridian, hitting the violence cold, and either treating it as horror to be endured or as nihilism to be admired — both readings miss that McCarthy is asking a moral question about the American West that the violence is the only honest form for. Or quitting after fifty pages and concluding the unpunctuated prose is a pose.
Books in order
- Child of God — Read it slowly, in two or three sittings. The novel is short, and the prose is McCarthy already finding his sentence — biblical cadence, no quotation marks, every line carrying more weight than the surface admits. Lester Ballard is the test case for the moral imagination the later books will scale.
- Blood Meridian — The deep-end book — a teenage runaway joins a scalp-hunting party in 1849 and the West does its work on him. The Judge is one of the great figures of American literature; read his speeches as arguments, not as horror set-pieces. Read slowly. The point is not to be impressed; the point is to ask what cosmology the violence is asking you to take seriously, and whether you do.
Further reading
- Suttree — McCarthy's long Knoxville novel, the warmest and funniest of the early period. Worth reading after the major books; the comic register surprises readers who arrived through the violence. Not in this catalog yet.