Featured New Authors
Featured Author: Cormac McCarthy
Featured Author: Cormac McCarthy
From the Archives of The New York Times
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| CORMAC MCCARTHY Credit: Marion Ettlinger |
(1965)
“In his ‘The Orchard Keeper’ [McCarthy] has his own story to tell; but he tells it with so many of Faulkner’s literary devices and mannerisms that he half submerges his own talents beneath a flood of imitation.”
(1968)
“Every word . . . is designed to serve Mr. McCarthy’s sharply controlled sense of place and action. There is not a page of this novel which does not depict swift and significant action. . . . Such discipline comes
not only from mastery over words but from an understanding wise enough and compassionate enough to dare tell so abysmally dark a story.”
(1974)
“What we have in ‘Child of God’ is an essentially sentimental novel that no matter how sternly it strives to be tragic is never more than morose.”
(1979)
“The book comes at us like a horrifying flood. The language licks, batters, wounds–a poetic, troubled rush of debris. . . . His text is broken, beautiful and ugly in spots. Mr. McCarthy won’t soothe us with a quiet
song. ‘Suttree’ is like a good, long scream in the ear.”
(1985)
“[W]hile Cormac McCarthy’s fifth novel is hard to get through, it is harder to ignore. Any page of his work reveals his originality, a passionate voice given equally to ugliness and lyricism. Over the past 20 years
the brutality of his subjects may have kept readers away, but the power of his writing has earned high critical repute.”
(1992)
“Cormac McCarthy must be acknowledged as a talent equal to William Faulkner, but whatever he may owe to Faulkner’s style, his substance could not be more different. Faulkner’s work is all about human history
and all takes place in mental spaces, while in Mr. McCarthy’s work human thought and activity seem almost completely inconsequential when projected upon the vast alien landscapes where they occur.”
(1994)
“‘The Crossing’ is a miracle in prose, an American original. . . . a tale so riveting — it immerses the reader so entirely in its violent and stunningly beautiful, inconsolable landscapes — that there is hardly
time to reflect on its many literary and cinematic echoes or on the fact that Mr. McCarthy is a writer who can plunder almost any source and make it his own.”
(April 19, 1992)
A reclusive author who rarely grants interviews or participates in the promotional rituals of the book business, “McCarthy would rather talk about rattlesnakes, molecular computers, country music, Wittgenstein
— anything — than himself or his books.”
(March 1, 1993)
McCarthy won the National Book Award for “All the Pretty Horses,” his sixth book.
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