On My First Reading Cormac McCarthy

Not since Faulkner…

A staggering talent dwarfing rivals.

Flora and fauna. West Texas plain. Nothing missed.

Vernacular of everyday people, wrestling with life, each day’s sameness, yet not without hope of life’s longshot lottery breaking their way.

Sensory, escalating, you-are-there cumulative syntax, landscaping America’s dark soul, foregrounded in cosmic indifference to individual fate of man and beast.

At the very least, Faulkner’s equal:

As he turned to go he heard the train. He stopped and waited for it. He could feel it under his feet. It came boring out of the east like some ribald satellite of the coming sun howling and bellowing in the distance and the long light of the headlamp running through the tangled mesquite brakes and creating out of the night the endless fenceline down the dead straight right of way and sucking it back again wire and post mile on mile into the darkness after where the boilersmoke disbanded slowly along the faint new horizon and the sound came lagging and he stood still holding his hat in his hands in the passing ground-shudder watching it till it was gone (Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses).

—RJ