The Crossing

Rating:
Summary: RICHER, SADDER AND MORE RESONANT THAN ALL THE PRETTY HORSES
Review: Easily the finest contemporary book that I have read in ten years. Too long and heart-breaking to be an easy read, but well worth the effort

Rating:
Summary: The Great American Western In Burnt Sienna
Review: The scenes rhythmically unfold into a desert dying on the vine. We think of T.S. Elliot's "The Wasteland;" we think of "The Grapes of Wrath." Everything that's real and unreal about America is spelled out onto a portrait of a border crossing. The youth and the old, the innocent and the guilty are painted like a canvas in classic western colors. Yet what is found across the great chasm to Mexico is as uncivilized as we are. McCarthy is rapt with language like a man obsessed. Slowly and deliberately, the young cowboy is made brutally aware that in the desert, it is each man for himself. We are reminded once again of that distincly American notion of manifest destiny. It is a seamless book without end or beginning. Characters are distinctly lost in America. They only pause briefly to wipe the sand off their trousers and troll on through the desert. People have compared McCarthy to Faulkner. His prose is unsurpassed. Even the jacket reviewer called it, "luminous and appalling." Here's a little brush stroke: "He woke all night and at each waking the signature of Cassiopeia had swung further about the polestar and at each wakening all was as it had been and would forever be. At noon the following day he rode into Lordsburg."

Rating:
Summary: A stunning display of prose mastery.
Review: McCarthy evokes American myth, and writes of its death, with prose that is Biblical and starkly beautiful. His work is perhaps as close as anyone will ever come to writing the "great American novel."

Rating:
Summary: Gussied-up Louis L'Amour
Review: I wouldn't normally be bothered to write a review of a book like __The Crossing__, but since so many people seem to have convinced themselves that Cormac McCarthy is the second coming of Will Shakespeare, I thought it my duty to try to set them right. I mean, c'mon, just take one whiff of the overwrought prose of this book! And that's not the half of it!

Indeed, there's much more: Billy and Boyd--I was halfway through the dang book before I could keep them straight--rescue a damsel in distress. That sort of rescue was fodder for parody four hundred years ago. But with McCarthy there's not a hint of irony or parody anywhere about the episode. (For a while, when Billy--or Boyd, I can never remember which--sleeps all night with his shotgun in his arms and wakes up to ask the rescued damsel, in Spanish, if she knows how to ride bareback, it looked like things might get interesting. But they didn't.)

And by the way, while McCarthy may have good Spanish, he also makes lots of mistakes. Minor ones, but if he's going to make a show of using a foreign language he ought to get it perfect. And he doesn't come close.

There's almost no humor in the book either. And what little there is is mostly inadvertent: the laughable philosophical dialogues with aging Indians, sextons of abandoned churches, former revolutionaries with gouged-out eyes, or wandering gypsies. Just thinking about it--gypsy philosophers!--is enough to make me laugh out loud. Or get a load of this one, from the end of chapter one: "But which cannot be held never be held and is no flower but is swift and a huntress and the wind itself is in terror of it and the world cannot lose it."

Still, the book has some things going for it. The first section about the wolf is good storytelling; it's clichéd and manipulative but effective even so, much, I fear, like the westerns of good old Louis L'Amour and his ilk. And besides, today's Friday and I don't have to get up quite so early tomorrow morning. So I'm feeling generous enough to award that third star.

Rating:
Summary: A World Apart
Review: Volume two of McCarthy's "Border Trilogy," draws the reader into its early pages with a tale right out of Disney - a boy's quest to save a wolf from the everyday depredations of man.

It's New Mexico ranch country in the late 1930s, although it could as easily be the late 1800s, but for the intrusions of an occasional rattling truck. Billy Parham, 16, is being admitted to adulthood by degrees of trust and responsibility.

When a she-wolf crosses from the mountains of Mexico and begins preying on the Parham calves, Billy and his younger brother, Boyd, learn the intricacies of trapping - as does the reader. The laborious boiling, cleaning and waxing of the traps to remove all human scent from them; their placement and disguise and the baiting with wolf scent, all meticulously described.

McCarthy's pace and language is Faulkneresque; mannered and measured and consciously rhythmic. At first this seems stiff and artificial. But the details of particular moments and actions and the careful attention to pacing create an atmosphere that separates the reader from the common world outside its western landscape and establishes a mood of dogged, admirable determination that is central to the book.

Billy and his father sacrifice a full two days to the preparation and setting of the traps. Point of view then switches to the wolf. Driven from her mountain home, her mate caught in a leg-hold trap, she is pregnant and dismayed by the lack of wolves in the area. When she catches the scent of wolf she heads for it directly. And as quickly sniffs out the trap. And all the rest of the traps. Each is neatly, almost contemptuously sprung when the Parhams return.

Says a neighbor, quoting the area's master trapper, "Echols one time told me that tryin to get the best of a wolf is like tryin to get the best of a kid. It aint that they're smarter. It's just that they aint got all that much else to think about."

As the likelihood of trapping the wolf recedes, Billy grows more determined. His father lets him take over and Billy spends his days tracking and studying the wolf without ever catching sight of her. And finally, inevitably, his observations pay off. Billy traps the wolf. And discovers he can't bear to kill her or turn her in for the bounty.

In a moment of heroic, foolish decision, Billy turns his back on everything his father has tried to instill in him. At the same time he adheres strictly to an upbringing that fosters faithfulness to principle.

So begins his first crossing into Mexico, to return the wolf to her mountain home. The journey is so wonderfully outlandish, so romantic, the reader is drawn into Billy's passionate, stubborn persistence. His difficulties with the wild dangerous animal seem insurmountable, but Billy contrives with ingenuity and painstaking contrivance to keep the wolf alive and himself unscathed. His meetings with people are more problematic. But Billy is not one to give up. Or to reflect on the consequences of his actions.

Billy emerges from the adventure a sobered but no less romantic figure. He has two more crossings to make, two more quests into Mexico.

The second is with his brother, Boyd, who chafes under the yoke of "younger brother," following Billy's lead, his own more reflective nature silenced under the older's authority. Theirs is a more complex adventure, its passions vivid, its goals obscure. But Billy's last quest is the most vague of all. Even its romanticism is muddied and uncertain.

It's important not to give away too much of the plot. Suspense and inevitability reveal the depths of human nature, hope and cruelty. McCarthy creates a certain mystical feel with digressions along the way - the tale of a religious hermit, a blind revolutionary, a band of Gypsies towing an old airplane. Billy and his brother meet characters of endless generosity and hard-shelled savagery and are touched by both in ways that deflect and nurture the course of their lives.

McCarthy has created a sweeping panorama of a vanished west: dusty, dangerous, lawless and indifferent. And he's forged an intimate link with an inarticulate ardent soul. Billy's life is nothing like ours, his character entirely his own, yet we identify with his flaws, his short-sightedness, his aspirations and nobility. "The Crossing" captures the heart and mind with the beauty of its prose and the breadth of its story.


Rating:
Summary: The Wolf
Review: I found all the reviews missing one essential element in this powerfully moving work. I sat in the chair and wept at the end, even the last paragraphs projecting the fate of the wolf which began Billy's quest.

The Wolf, Billy, and the disfunctional dog in the very last page represent eloquently the disappearance from our pre-packaged and sterile society a raw emotion and freedom represented by the disappearance of the wolf from our landscape and the struggles of Billy, his brother, Boyd, and other characters in old Mexico and the Southwest of America to find traction in a society increasingly predictable and unreal. Billy's tragic rejection of the broken dog in the last paragraphs and the morning attempt to find her are wrenching.

In this sense, I found Cormac's adventure tale the opposite of An American Tragedy by Dreiser in its reality relative to a way of life that is essential to our American character: devotion to family, independance, persistance, and raw simple frontier intelligence. To anyone who wishes to be challenged by a poetic and emotionally moving tribute to the Southwest contribution to our National character..read this book!