![]() ![]() For a would-be novelist struggling under my own debilitating anxiety of influence, no more valuable lesson existed. It didn’t matter that McCarthy’s literary models were obvious, because he wrote as well as they did and occasionally better. But although I registered the novel’s considerable stylistic debts both to Hemingway and Faulkner - not to mention “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” - I was so intoxicated by its music that the point seemed academic. Part of what makes it so memorable, of course, is its odd, self-consciously archaic cadence - the oft-cited ‘biblical’ loftiness of McCarthy’s prose, which may be one reason few writers of my generation care to cite him as an influence. That line has lost none of its mystery, its austerity, its elegant foreboding. What neither of us imagined was that the glossy trade paperback with its attractively minimalist black-and-white cover would act as the catalyst for my entire professional life. I’d recently lost both my job and my apartment, and a friend thought a book about cowboys might distract me from my woes. When McCarthy’s sixth novel swept into my life, I was 24 years old and living in a tent I’d pitched in the basement of a warehouse under the Manhattan Bridge. I might never have finished a book if not for “ All the Pretty Horses” - and I don’t mean this in some vague or sentimental sense. The omission wasn’t due to any lack of impact on my writing, that’s for certain. Le Guin - even, just a few weeks ago, whoever ghost-wrote David Lee Roth’s memoir, “Crazy From the Heat.” But one name I’ve conspicuously avoided all these years has been that of McCarthy, who died last week at 89. Burroughs, Amos Tutuola, Lydia Davis, Toni Morrison, John Berger, Ursula K. In the two decades since my first book was published, I’ve fielded the boilerplate question about my influences no end of times, name-checking an almost absurdly ragtag crew: Shirley Hazzard, Denis Johnson, William S. In spite of the enormity of his shadow, however, I’ve never before written about the author of so many novels I’ve studied and admired. But virtually all of us, whatever our position or attitude, existed in its shade. Some of the novelists of my generation found the mountain beautiful others found it oppressive. For the entirety of my writing life, Cormac McCarthy has been a mountain. ![]()
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