Literary Life

Santa Fe Author Cormac McCarthy Wins Pulitzer Prize

By Emily Esterson, 4-17-07

He’s so reclusive, most people don’t even know Cormac McCarthy lives in Santa Fe, although if you hang around the Santa Fe Institute, you’ll undoubtedly run into him. Yesterday, the Pulitzer Prize committee announced that McCarthy’s The Road received this year’s prize for fiction. McCarthy’s won popular acclaim lately, too. Oprah chose The Road for her book club in late March.

My taste for fiction has waned over the years--there’s too much telling and not enough showing, to use the old writing teacher’s mantra. I always try to finish a book, but lately I’m bored with most of the fiction I read--the stories don’t engage me enough, or the writer will suddenly break from the story line to explain the context, sometimes using a transparent writerly gimmick to do so (flashback, etc.). McCarthy’ prose is so detailed, yet spare. There’s not a single extraneous detail. He bends and breaks words, he leaves the sentences to flow free of punctuation (oh, the freedom from commas!). The Spanish is untranslated; the background unexplained; the scenes harsh and sad and sometimes horrifying.

It is not necessarily his stories, his plots, that grab me. I read as a writer, sometimes too much. I read to admire the technique--bits here and word choice there, marveling over phrases and usage more than clever twist in plot.  McCarthy inspires discussion, and I believe that once you love him, you do so rather unconditionally. I loved No Country for Old Men as much as All the Pretty Horses, although some said it was his weakest work. The New Yorker described him thusly :  He is swarmed over by fans, devotees, obsessives, Southern and Southwestern history buffs, and fiercely protective academic scholars. Yes, if you asked me which author alive today I’d most want to emulate in my own work, I wouldn’t even have to think about it.  Fact is, I’m probably too cheery to have McCarthy-esque edges to my writing, but perhaps I have yet to discover my literary dark side.

Critics wonder if McCarthy “sold out” in All the Pretty Horses (his breakthrough to popularity). Compared to his early Appalachian works (McCarthy lived in Tennessee many years), the novel was highly digestible. We found compassion for the characters and a complicated love story (simplified greatly in the Matt Damon pic). (Women are often absent, or playing largely supporting roles, in McCarthy’s writing).

McCarthy’s prose is as spare as the landscape about which he writes, his stories as raw as the creosote bush brushing skin (okay, tortured, I know, but I’m trying). McCarthy’s such a recluse that McSweeney’s, the literary magazine behind which is po-mo lit king Dave Eggers, once published McCarthy’s letter to the editor of the Santa Fe New Mexican about the new traffic light at Castillo and Grand Streets. Granted, this was no normal letter to the editor. Here’s an excerpt, where McCarthy’s wife is explaining why he should be careful at the intersection:

Well just a week ago the Johnsons got sideswiped by that guy who sells those turquoise stickpins in his shop on Esmeralda.
I forgot about that, I responded. And sure enough, I was careful at that stop sign. But the driver in back of me wasnt.
A truck carrying a load of lumber down from the old ancient pine forests or the newfound wrath of a somnolent god or just the terror of fading memories hit the driver square on the left side of his Volvo.

McCarthy has hung out at the prestigious Santa Fe Institute since he moved to Santa Fe in 1999 (to be closer to it, according to a Wired story) from El Paso. And his interview with Oprah (yes, he agreed) will apparently take place there, as well.  With the Pulitzer and Winfrey’s attention, McCarthy’s myth may be unearthed, just a little, from its confines in the rarefied air of Santa Fe and the institute.

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