Cities of the Plain

National Review, Oct 12, 1998 by Chilton Williamson, Jr.

LIKE every writer of the first rank, with each book Cormac McCarthy sets himself unreachable standards and impossible tasks. All the great themes in American literature are his, and he bravely accepts every risk in order to tackle them. He is not simply the finest American prose artist of his generation, but among the best in his tradition as well.

As with previous McCarthy novels, at the heart of Cities of the Plain is technique-literary technique primarily but also its non-literary correspondences in such various activities as patching an inner tube, evaluating a lame horse, hunting with dogs, bidding up a horse auction, and fighting with a knife. From this we might infer that McCarthy views his art as just another sort of craft, like fixing an inner tube or healing a horse. We might infer that, were it not for his modernist ideal of the artist as a chilly Olympian figure, the closest thing the post-modern world knows to the prophets and oracles of the pre-modern one. Otherwise, technique apart, style and subject in McCarthy's novels are polar opposites: an austere and formal art in service to a depraved reality. No matter how depraved, his subject is miraculously subjugated and ordered: the process calls to mind Evelyn Waugh's characterization of his own work as the creation of small systems of independent order from universal chaos. It is testimony to McCarthy's enormous skill as a writer that Child of God -his story of a young man who kills women with a small-caliber rifle and sexually penetrates the corpses before laying them out in a limestone cave, where they become encased like cheeses in cocoons of mold-is a work of literary beauty, confounding by some alchemy the moral and aesthetic strictures of Aristotle and Edmund Burke.

In its centrality for McCarthy, technique is matched by terrain. Twenty years or so ago he moved from Knoxville, Tennessee, to El Paso, Texas, where he learned Spanish and a new, Southwestern milieu simultaneously. The first literary product of this geographical relocation was Blood Meridian, a powerful, eloquent, and unrelentingly horrific novel about the historical John Glanton gang, who worked as Apache scalphunters for the governors of the North Mexico provinces in the late 1840s. His next book, All the Pretty Horses (1992), set in Texas and Mexico a century later, was a breakthrough, artistically and commercially. It is the story of John Grady Cole, a courageous, resourceful, and indefatigable youth who ventures into Mexico on horseback. To use Flannery O'Connor's distinction, the novel is about folks rather than freaks: in addition to being McCarthy's first "humane" book, it is as well a romantic one. This added dimension, in combination with the virtuoso prose, helped make All the Pretty Horses a bestseller, and won its author the National Book Award in 1993. The Crossing (1994), Volume Two of the Border Trilogy, is similarly the story of a brave and spirited young man, born outside his time into a world that, saving the frontier around the North Mexican border, has neither room nor place for him. After attempting to release a trapped she-wolf in the Sierra Madres, Billy Parham rides north again to the New Mexico boot heel for his brother Boyd, with whom he returns on horseback to explore the fabulous medieval civilization of rural Mexico. Now, in Cities of the Plain, McCarthy brings John Grady Cole and Billy Parham together in one time and one place: 1952 near Orogrande, New Mexico, where both men are employed as cowboys on a ranch soon to be appropriated by the U.S. military.

Over three volumes the writing has lost none of its eloquence nor the description its particularist power, although McCarthy does seem to have about exhausted his esoteric, almost private vocabulary. Still, Cities of the Plain in some ways makes a less than fitting conclusion to the trilogistic narrative. The book differs in form and treatment from the two earlier novels. The action, simple yet complete in its dramatic unity, concerns John Grady Cole's love for an epileptic whore and his persistence in pursuing his passion to the end, as a good man should. The rest is episodic, a series of small satellite narratives drawing out the texture of life in the American Southwest at midcentury and evoking its arid, titanic landscape.

The novel's overriding weakness is the similarity amounting almost to identity between John Grady Cole of Pretty Horses and Billy Parham of The Crossing. Though one has a special talent for charming women and the other for handling horses (closely related if not exactly identical skills) they are actually pretty much one and the same person. Also, the recurrent philosophical passages on the nature of fate, destiny, and man as an unfree agent, although poetic, are aesthetically intrusive, philosophically unsatisfactory, and finally annoying. For instance, the blind Mexican musician-a seer in the tradition of a line of McCarthy prophets-instructs John Grady Cole that men have no real choices to make in life, since "Choice is lost in the maze of generations and each act in that maze is itself an enslavement for it voids every alternative and binds one ever more tightly into the constraints that make a life. . . . The world takes its form hourly by a weighing of things at hand, and while we may seek to puzzle out that form we have no way to do so." Yet from the fact that our range of choices is necessarily a constricted one, it does not follow that man has no choice at all, although control-which is something else entirely-may largely elude him.