Cormac McCarthy & the Vulnerable Style

Cormac McCarthy, who died on the 13th of June, has been widely remembered and thoroughly eulogized. Refreshingly, it’s McCarthy’s prose that readers tend to remember—his style. In the New Republic, Alex Shepard referred to the “singularity” of McCarthy’s sentences, “which ricocheted—sometimes gracefully, sometimes jarringly—between gruff matter-of-factness and soaring, biblical grandiloquence. His style married Hemingwayean bluntness with the transcendent beauty (and sometimes ridiculousness) of The King James Bible.” In the New York Times obituary, Dwight Garner quotes Saul Bellow, who referred to McCarthy’s “absolutely overpowering use of language,” as well as critic James Wood who called him “a colossally gifted writer” sometimes erring “close to nonsense.” In the Financial Times, Christian Lorentzen noted the pastiche of his style, combining “the declarative directness of Hemingway, with the baroque inflections of Faulkner, comprising allusions that stretched from Beowulf and Shakespeare, through Melville and Hawthorne, up to Robert Frost and Allen Ginsberg.” Even on social media, where users shared passages from several of his books, McCarthy’s prose itself seemed to be the primary aspect of his career as a novelist.