THE ORCHARD KEEPER by Cormac McCarthy

Surely one reason for the European popularity of Faulkner, Hemingway and now Cormac McCarthy is that these writers show Europeans an America that conforms to stereotype: violent, elemental, primitive, gruff, laconic, anti- and non-intellectual. Of course, if read carefully and critically, the works of these writers would be a poor fit for the stereotype, but few readers read that closely.

A reading of Ol' Cormac's (as they still call him in Tennessee) first novel, The Orchard Keeper, shows that while he has always been a beautiful writer, he has over the course of his career gained greater control of his prose instrument and become a tighter, somewhat less elliptical storyteller. The Orchard Keeper, telling a simpler story than No Country For Old Men (CM's worst book, by the way; some passages read like the winner of a Bad Hemingway contest), tells it in a much more elliptical and puzzling manner, although at the end there is an old-fashioned readerly satisfaction as the various puzzle pieces lock into place. There's also, amidst the beautifully lyrical prose, a chilling roadside murder scene that's one of the best things McCarthy has ever written. It's not a great book, but it is a very impressive first novel, a sure-handed signing of the promissory note McCarthy has spent the rest of his career paying.

A possibly interesting tangential thought: Reading No Country for Old Men and The Road, I was struck by the thought that I was reading books that had been conceived and/or initially drafted in some form in the early 1980s. I wonder if McCarthy, reeling from the commercial failure of Suttree, might have conceived these two novels in the 1980s as 'quicker' and more commercial projects that might bring in a little cash while he researched and wrote his Great Western Novel(s). No Country, as I recall, seems to take place ca.1980, and the post-apocalyptic world of The Road is straight out of the 1980s discourse of nuclear winter. I may be completely off base, but I suspect Ol' Cormac has had these ideas lying around in his notebooks for quite some time--not that there's anything wrong with that.