Beyond the Vision of Dreams by Stella Price

The narration therefore registers as omniscient in both a literary and theological sense-a voice of a merciless God, speaking in tones and language meant for his own purposes and not for ours. The omniscient narrator makes no concession to readers unfamiliar with 19th-century saddlery, obscure geological terminology, and desert botany. Characters speak untranslated Spanish and, in The Passenger, a bit of German.

But still too much punctuation.) His language is archaic.

That amused me: Looks good, McCarthy must have decided. I found that he’d struck just a couple of commas from the final text. (I once compared an uncorrected proof of Blood Meridian with the finished book. He abjures quotation marks and most commas and apostrophes, so even his text looks denuded and desertlike, with the remaining punctuation sprouting intermittently, like creosote bushes. The weirdness of McCarthy’s style is hard to overstate. McCarthy’s God is a deranged psycho who not only tolerates his world’s atrocities but conceives of them in strange and inhuman terms.

McCarthy haters, equally passionate, find his writing mannered, his characters tediously masculine, and his plots-well, not really plots at all so much as excuses to find ever-fancier ways to rhapsodize about murder and carnage and the sublime landscape of the frontera. That verdict came down back when Bloom favorites Thomas Pynchon, Philip Roth, Toni Morrison, and Don DeLillo still dominated the literary scene. The late critic Harold Bloom, who spoke for superfans of the writer everywhere, wrote that “no other living American novelist … has given us a book as strong and memorable as Blood Meridian,” McCarthy’s relentlessly bloody 1985 Western. McCarthy’s fervent admirers are bound to come to these novels with impossible expectations. To twist a line from the poet Vachel Lindsay: They were lucky not because they died, but because they died so dreamlessly. For that matter, neither do most of McCarthy’s previous human victims, who were too busy getting hacked or shot to death to see the darkness coming and philosophize about their condition. At least when a horse dies, it doesn’t spend a week beforehand in the French Quarter musing about existence. McCarthy throws the reader an anchor of this sort every few pages, the kind of burdensome existential pronouncement that might weigh a lesser book down and make one long for the good old-fashioned Western equicide of McCarthy’s earlier work. Check out more from this issue and find your next story to read.

Beyond the Vision of Dreams by Stella Price