The Achievement of Cormac McCarthy

Now back in print, Vereen M. Bells The Achievement of Cormac McCarthy was the first critical book devoted to an author who would become one of the most celebrated American writers of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. Published in 1988, before McCarthy won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award and had his novels adapted into acclaimed films, Bells study offered the first systematic review of the authors work.

According to Bell, part of the difficulty of analyzing McCarthys fiction is that the novelist by design works against all conventional ways of seeing and dealing with the world. Any formulaic readings, particularly those associated with the traditional schemes of southern literature, will be distorted. McCarthys novels are provocatively mysterious yet specific and vivid as well. They are also freestanding and unclassifiable

Bell shows how McCarthy transforms the world through language, how he reconstitutes both urban and rural settings so that otherwise barely articulate and unheroic people live vividly in a context that is both modernist and antimodernist. In this respect, Bell argues, McCarthys work is about the tension between visions of the world and the intractable, opposing materiality of it, between the mysteriousness of an individuals private engagement with experience and social normalitys tendency to flatten it out. At the same time, Bell shows McCarthys infatuation with the reality of evil, how the evil in human form in his novels is as inexplicably gratuitous and violent as the inhuman form of random and destructive natural events. Such violence, for McCarthy, is built into existence and cannot be evaded or rationalized away.

With detailed readings of McCarthys first five novels--The Orchard Keeper, Child of God, Outer Dark, Suttree, and Blood Meridian--Bell demonstrates the novelists faith in the protean capacity of language to disclose the layered possibilities and richness of being. Widely cited by scholars, Bells book established many of the foundational critical frameworks for approaching McCarthys work. It is now available in an affordable paperback edition.