All Intensive Purposes

To read Cormac McCarthy is to enter a climate of frustration: a good day is so mysteriously followed by a bad one. McCarthy is a colossaly gifted writer, certainly one of the greatest observers of landscape. He is also one of the great hams of American prose, who delights in producing a histrionic rhetoric that brilliantly ventriloquizes the King James Bible, Shakespearean and Jacobean tragedy, Melville, Conrad, and Faulkner.

There is intense disagreement about McCarthy's literary status, which his new novel, "No Country for Old Men" (Knopf, $24.95),* an unimportant, stripped-down thriller, will only aggravate. Some readers are alienate by his novels' punctual appointments with blood-soaked violence.... Others think his work bombastic, pretentious, or claustrophobically male-locked: McCarthy has a tendency to omit half the human race from serious scrutiny. But a balanced assessment has been hard to come by, because his reputation, at least since the publication of "Blood Meridian," in 1985, has been cultic. He is swarmed over by fans, devotees, obsessives, Southern and Southwestern history buggs, and fiercely protective academic scholars. He lives quietly in New Mexico, and has given just two interviews in the past decade. His granitic indifference to his readership only feeds it almost religious loyalty.

James Wood, in The New Yorker (July 25, 2005), page 88.

Fame has not made McCarthy more reclusive. Fifteen years ago, I knew a Tennessee writer who knew McCarthy years ago, before anyone had heard of either, and this fellow told me that he had great respect for the way that McCarthy had always eschewed the whole bookselling business and its demands for publicity.