Long and Winding Road

Revered author Cormac McCarthy’s two new novels are ode and elegy to his remarkable oeuvre.

- HAMILTON CAIN

"Between the wish and the thing the world lies waiting," a character observes in Cormac McCarthy's All the Pretty Horses, and it's this tug between desires-erotic, aspirational, spiritual and stone-cold reality that arcs through McCarthy's decades-long career. Now 89, he's tapped the vernacular roots of our language, improvising on the mythmaking of Faulkner, the cadences of Joyce, and the King James Bible. He's enigmatic and elusive, a Catholic raised in Protestant-centric Tennessee, who traded in an altar boy's faith for a "small c" catholic investigation into the nature of the universe. His sentences-lyrical, electrifying, indifferent to punctuationare often imitated, never equaled. He's the cool flame beneath the hot boil of our era.

That flame burns bright and clear in two new works, his first since The Road, winner of the 2007 Pulitzer Prize and an Oprah's Book Club selection: The Passenger, wondrous in its architecture (and its strangeness), and a companion piece, Stella Maris, an edgy, minimalist novella. McCarthy has always been haunted by the horizon line between morality and mortality, and here he offers his own retrospective, a circus of tormented souls and schizophrenic chimeras aligned with his earlier Gothic novels.