A Brutal Cosmos

Cormac McCarthy seems firmly established as a canonical American novelist, but it may be several decades before we determine the precise nature of his achievement. His career has taken an odd shape. His early, Faulknerian novels, set in his native Tennessee, bore ample evidence of his talent but didn’t find an audience. His first Western novel, Blood Meridian (1985), set in the mid-­nineteenth-century borderlands, is now widely regarded as his greatest achievement, but it initially confounded critics, who recognized its brilliance but were puzzled by its apparent celebration of violence. His next book, All the Pretty Horses (1992), the first volume of his Border Trilogy, brought him broad recognition. ­Unperturbed by success, he completed the trilogy, erecting his monuments even as he remained pointedly aloof from public life. And then, following the publication of the noir No Country for Old Men (2005) and the visionary, apocalyptic The Road (2006), he stopped publishing.