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THE� ‌GREAT� ‌COMPLETIST� ‌CHALLENGE:� ‌In� ‌which� ‌I� ‌revisit� ‌older� ‌authors� ‌and� ‌attempt� ‌to� ‌read� ‌every� ‌book� ‌they� ‌ever� ‌wrote� �
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Currentlyâ€� ‌inâ€� ‌theâ€� ‌challenge:â€� ‌Isaacâ€� ‌Asimov'sâ€� ‌Robot/Empire/Foundationâ€� ´¥â€� ‌Margaretâ€� Atwoodâ€� ´¥â€� ‌JGâ€� ‌Ballardâ€� ´¥â€� Cliveâ€� ‌Barkerâ€� ´¥â€� Christopherâ€� Buckleyâ€� ´¥â€� ‌Jim Butcher's Dresden Files | ‌Lee Child's Jack Reacher | ‌Philipâ€� ‌Kâ€� ‌Dickâ€� ´¥â€� ‌Ian Fleming | Williamâ€� ‌Gibsonâ€� ´¥â€� ‌Michelâ€� Houellebecqâ€� ´¥â€� Johnâ€� ‌Irvingâ€� ´¥â€� ‌Kazuoâ€� ‌Ishiguroâ€� ´¥â€� Shirleyâ€� Jacksonâ€� | ‌Johnâ€� ‌Leâ€� ‌Carreâ€� ´¥â€� Bernardâ€� ‌Malamudâ€� ´¥â€� Cormac McCarthy | Chinaâ€� ‌Mievilleâ€� ´¥â€� Toni Morrison | ‌VSâ€� Naipaulâ€� ´¥â€� Chuckâ€� ‌Palahniukâ€� ´¥â€� ‌Timâ€� ‌Powersâ€� ´¥â€� ‌Terryâ€� ‌Pratchett'sâ€� ‌Discworldâ€� ´¥â€� Philipâ€� ‌Rothâ€� ´¥â€� Nealâ€� Stephensonâ€� ´¥â€� ‌Jimâ€� ‌Thompsonâ€� ´¥â€� Johnâ€� ‌Updikeâ€� ´¥â€� Kurtâ€� ‌Vonnegutâ€� ´¥â€� Jeanette Winterson | PGâ€� ‌Wodehouseâ€� â€�

As I start at the beginning of my Cormac McCarthy completist challenge this week, I've come to realize that he's a lot like his fellow older-end Postmodernist authors like Philip Roth or John Updike, in that they all got their starts by writing very passable versions of stories popular with the previous age (Mid-Century Modernism here), but then got to grow into their own and have their superstar turns during the looser and more permissive Postmodernist age. In this case, in his 1965 full-length debut at the age of 32, McCarthy turns in a book that already sounds like a McCarthy book, but here filtered through the strong influence of the Mid-Century Modernist rural gothic writers of the '40s and '50s he grew up reading, people like William Faulkner and John Steinbeck. It's a little too flowery, definitely overwritten, with McCarthy so obsessed with setting a mood that he threatens to overwhelm the clean and nasty story at the tale's heart; later in his career he would learn to shed the flowery parts and leave behind just the clean and nasty story, which is the point where the books start winning awards and getting made into Coen Brothers movies.

Before he moved to south Texas, though, and started winning all his awards, he first grew up and spent his twenties in Knoxville, Tennessee, which is where his first four novels are set including this one. It's actually more of a look at the small villages and individual tarpaper shacks of the Knoxville region, an elegy of sorts to the hillbillies of the Smoky Mountains during the 1930s, sort of the last age of true independence there before the national government started bringing electricity, indoor plumbing and highways to the sticks for the first time. It's a sort of free-floating ensemble-like examination of a place and time, much like a Robert Altman film, where we hop back and forth between a series of characters who look unrelated at first, but whose lives mingle more and more as the manuscript continues.

McCarthy is so obsessed with creating a scene here that he sometimes goes for five or six pages on the minutiae of someone coming home, getting their boots off, looking through a window, lighting a pipe, ad nauseum; but then he balances this with explosive little scenes of pure plot movement, basically a noir with a lot of filler from a young writer who probably felt then in the early '60s that it needed a lot of that Mid-Century Modernist filler in order to be taken seriously. It probably did, so we should be glad that writers like him, Roth, Updike and others grew in middle-age into the Postmodernist '70s where they could let their freak flag fly, in this case stripping down the prose into its purest noir state, while maintaining all the power of the story itself. McCarthy reached his apex for the first time with this stuff in 1981's Blood Meridian; so you can think of this one and the three following as leads-up to it, where hopefully we'll see him honing his craft a bit more and more with each subsequent title. In that spirit, The Orchard Keeper comes with a limited recommendation, just for McCarthy completists; if you're only going to read a couple of his books and want to skip straight to the best, like many authors you need to jump forward to his now classics from his fifties and sixties.

Cormac McCarthy books being reviewed in this series: The Orchard Keeper (1965) | Outer Dark (1968) | Child of God (1973) | Suttree (1979) | Blood Meridian, or The Evening Redness in the West (1985) | All the Pretty Horses (1992) | The Crossing (1994) | Cities of the Plain (1998) | No Country for Old Men (2005) | The Road (2006)