The Ghosts and Jokes of Cormac McCarthy

I have lately come into possession of a fact that threatens my very sense of things. It is this: Cormac McCarthy is funny. Not just incidentally, not just as a bit of leavening in an otherwise unrelieved gloom, but through to his core. A gallows humor was always right there, a fascination with the unspeakable and the obscene that quickly compounds into camp, and a satirical vision of American history that, in its nasty accuracy, approaches the work of Armando Iannucci, George Romero, or the Coen brothers (who made a masterpiece from one of his least substantial novels). I am looking again at the man’s entire career in the light of this revelation, noticing sharp bits of dialogue, nice ironies to which the overall blackness of his fictional universe blinded me.