I decided to find out all I could about a contemporary American writer who is very reclusive. He has granted only one interview in a career that is over 30 years long. He is also a writer I admire very much. I went on-line and, using Google, found home pages dedicated to him and maintained by some of his fans. His biography is very sketchy. He was born in Pittsburgh in 1933, one of 6 children. His family moved to Tennessee when he was four. All of his early fiction is set in Tennessee. Later in life he moved to El Paso, Texas and his focus switched to the western novel of the great southwest. He is most famous for his Border Trilogy. All the Pretty Horses was published in 1992, followed by The Crossing in 1996 and Cities of the Plain in 1998. The border is a reference to the international border between Mexico and certain states, such as Texas and New Mexico. His characters are male teenagers who venture south of the border. The further they go into the mountains of Mexico, the more mystical their experiences become. I have read the first novel in the trilogy and am about half-way through the second novel. I plan to complete the trilogy eventually.

Cormac McCarthy is best known for his florid prose, his attention to local detail and scene setting and for his mostly objective point of view. Seldom does he enter the minds of his characters. Often we come to know what they do, but not why they do it or even how they feel about it. The reader, awash in the details of the scene, must infer the motivations and emotions of the characters. Though this technique is closest to Hemingway, the style itself is derivative of William Faulkner. The genre would be the southern Gothic novel. Any reader of McCarthy will recognize the cowboy who sat his horse on a plain with a backdrop of the ‘blood-red sky.’

The Crossing tells the story of Billy Parham, a 16 year-old boy who lives on a ranch. He and his father attempt to catch and kill a wolf that has been attacking their cattle. Billy finds the wolf in a trap but cannot bring himself to kill it. Instead, he subdues the wolf and takes it with him back to Mexico where it came from. This was the reason for the journey across the border, but much more happens there.

When the wolf is first introduced the point of view shifts to the natural world for the only time early in the story:

"The wolf had crossed the international boundary line at about the point where it intersected the thirtieth minute of the one hundred and eighth meridian and she had crossed the old Nations road a mile north of the boundary and followed Whitewater Creek west up into the San Luis Mountains and crossed through the gap north to the Animus range and then crossed the Animas Valley and on into the Peloncillos as told. She carried a scabbedover wound on her hip where her mate had bitten her two weeks before somewhere in the mountains of Sonora. He’d bitten her because she would not leave him. Standing with one forefoot in the jaws of a steeltrap and snarling at her to drive her off where she lay just beyond the reach of the chain. She’d flattened her ears and whined and she would not leave. In the morning they came on horses. She watched from a slope a hundred yards away as he stood up to meet them." (p. 24)

This passage is very typical of McCarthy, both thematically and stylistically. It describes a naturalistic and fatalistic world of death and acceptance. The style is objective. The bond between the two wolves is stated but described in only minimal detail, the fact that she would not leave her mate, dying in a trap, and that he had bitten her to drive her off. She stayed close enough to watch him rise up to meet his captors and accept his fate with dignity.

I conducted an internet search on Ebsco and found the following information on the novel from the Explicator, Vol. 58, Issue 1, p. 57, from Fall 1999. The author was Kenneth Hada. He quotes from a hunter whom Billy met while they were trying to trap the wolf:

He said that the wolf is a being of great order and that it knows what men do not: that there is no order in the world save that which death has put there. [. . .] he said that if men drink the blood of God yet they do not understand the seriousness of what they do. He said that men wish to be serious but they do not understand how to be so. Between their acts and their ceremonies lies the world and in this world the storms blow and the trees twist in the wind and all the animals that God has made go to and fro yet this world men do not see. They see the acts of their own hands or they see that which they name and call out to one another but the world between is invisible to them. (The Crossing, p. 44)

Works Cited:

Hada, Kenneth, Explicator, Fall, 1999, Vol. 58 Issue 1, p57, 4p

McCarthy, Cormac, The Crossing, Vintage International, New York, New York, 1995