by Cormac McCarthy
I wish I could tell you I loved this as much as some BM admirers. No dice. I remember the day I picked this up at a bookstore, I mentioned it to a friend of mine. Here is the brief conversation:
Me: Hey, I picked up a copy of Blood Meridian.
Friend: (Way too excited) Yeah you did!
This is the type of reaction I would expect if I had told him I had won a spicy food eating contest, met a celebrity, built my own canoe, or even had a request played on Delilah. All I had done was mention, in an offhand way, that I had picked up a copy of a book. I don't recall if he had ever mentioned liking this book before, or if, at this particular moment he was feeling more optimistic than a Kindergarten teacher on arts and crafts day (which I guess is everyday). I do remember this friend would get very excited if he saw a movie and afterwards could describe it thusly: "That was about America." He got very excited about There Will Be Blood. "That was about America." One thing you can say about almost any work by Cormac McCarthy, or any that I have encountered (I think the exception may be The Road), is that they are about America.
I read Blood Meridian as part of a summer reading book club with another friend of mine from graduate school. I think that if I had not agreed to read it beforehand, I would have put it down early on. This book is extremely gruesome, opening with a battle scene where a group of men are killed, and then mutilated, and then it proceeds to get grosser from there. The main character is a runaway who joins up with a gang of men that massacre Indians along the Texas/Mexico border in the mid 1800s, shortly before the Civil War. As the men commit more atrocities, we see the violence that the United States was built on during westward expansion.
By making the book stomachchurningly violent, McCarthy reminds the reader that the mythos of the American west, especially the one we see in John Wayne movies, is a construct. What is real are the corpses, and there are a lot of them. McCarthy does write good characters (good as in virtuous, not well-drawn), but they are not on display here. The difference between good and evil is decided by the litmus test of: took part in a genocide/orchestrated a genocide. The book is also written in a rather archaic style, very unlike the stripped down prose that he has been using lately.
Harold Bloom, a critic and professor at Yale, said that Blood Meridian was an example of a "sublime text." To which I say, look Dr. Yale, perhaps we differ in the definition of sublime, but when I think of sublime things I don't usually think of graphic descriptions of viscera. Is this a telling bit of personality you're letting us in on? Was Hostel sublime, too? You sicken me Harold Bloom.
And as much as Harold Bloom deserves our scorn, other notable people like this book, too. It was featured on the Time Magazine list (which is why I'm talking about it here), and that's something.
There is a film adaptation of Blood Meridian in the works. Hopefully, in terms of McCarthy adaptations it will be more No Country for Old Men and less All the Pretty Horses or The Road (because the former was awesome, and the latter two were lame). Right now James Franco is set to direct, which is interesting, and it may mean that there is a part in here for Seth Rogan and Danny McBride. Let me rephrase. I hope it means that.
Coming soon:
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