THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, July 17, 1994 TAG: 9407130448
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY MICHAEL PEARSON
LENGTH: Medium: 96 lines
THE CROSSING
CORMAC McCARTHY
Alfred A. Knopf. 426 pp. $23.
CORMAC McCARTHY IS becoming a celebrity malgre lui. Just 2 1/2 years ago he was known only to a loyal group of readers - a few English professors, some fellow writers, a select scattering of people around the world with a taste for grim scenes and grand writing. In 1992, with the publication of All the Pretty Horses, that changed.
All the Pretty Horses won both the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction and sold nearly 200,000 in hardcover and more than 300,000 in paperback. Before it McCarthy had published five other novels - The Orchard Keeper (1965), Outer Dark (1968), Child of God (1973), Suttree (1979) and Blood Meridian (1985) - but none of them had sold more than 2,500 copies in hardcover.
After the publication of All the Pretty Horses McCarthy broke a long-held silence, one reminiscent of J.D. Salinger and Thomas Pynchon, and gave an interview to The New York Times Magazine. Thus far, although his new novel, The Crossing, has attracted much attention, McCarthy has not repeated the performance. For the past 20 years he has made one thing clear: It is in his fiction that he says what he has to say - the books will have to suffice. And, of course, they do.
All the Pretty Horses, the first volume in what his publisher called ``The Border Trilogy,'' deserved all the praise it received. In it McCarthy created an American hero, John Grady Cole, a scion of Huck Finn, in a story that showed a lineage from James Fenimore Cooper and Zane Grey through William Faulkner. The narrative blended Hemingway with filmmaker Sam Peckinpah in a poetry that laid bare the bone. It was an achievement that would have been difficult to duplicate. So McCarthy didn't.
The Crossing may surprise readers of All the Pretty Horses. It is not a continuation of John Grady Cole's story. We do not discover where his solitary journey through the blood-red desert led him. McCarthy has left Cole where he belongs, passing into the darkening land, in our imaginations, in ``the world to come.''
The Crossing is the story of Billy Parham, another ancient in the body of a boy, a 16-year-old who seems too good to be true, but true enough to be the stuff of myth. Billy takes three journeys into the terrifying dreamscape of pre-World War II Mexico. It is a dark, violent geography, bleak and soaked in blood and random cruelty.
A young man of action, not words, Billy traps a marauding she-wolf near his home in New Mexico and sets off to return it to the mountains to the south. McCarthy never explicitly says what motivates Billy, nor does Billy seem capable of explaining it to himself or others. But the reasons are clear; they have to do with what Faulkner called the old verities: love and honor, pity and pride, compassion and sacrifice. In his quixotic journey with the she-wolf Billy, who already has a strength and wisdom beyond his years, crosses a threshold. He returns to New Mexico a gaunt, ghostly figure with not much left to lose.
But more loss, we discover, is possible, loss upon loss until there is nothing left for Billy to do but face the ``inexplicable darkness.'' Billy returns to Mexico with his younger brother, Boyd, on a hunt for murderers and horse thieves, but all he finds is sadness and death. Yet Boyd finds a reason to stay. In his third journey into Mexico Billy again leaves something behind.
The Crossing is a dark, beautiful novel, and even though it is not as accessible or as cohesive as All the Pretty Horses, the fragments of plot strike to the same deep mythic source. It is not Billy Parham who is the hero but, as in Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, the earth itself. McCarthy writes of Billy: ``He took off his hat and placed it on the tarmac before him and he bowed his head and held his face in his hands and wept. He sat there for a long time and after a while the right and godmade sun did rise, once again, for all and without distinction.''
What constitutes heroism in a world devoid of meaning is one of the central questions in McCarthy's work. The road in The Crossing is filled with unresolved action, with stories within the story, with dimly lit scenes, with mysterious characters. McCarthy, like the blind man that Billy encounters on one of his travels, seems to know what he is after: ``He said they had no desire to entertain him nor yet even to instruct him. He said that it was their whole bent even to tell what was true and that otherwise they had no purpose at all.''
But it is in the character of Billy Parham, ``something in off the wild mesas, something out of the past,'' that McCarthy reminds us that the purpose of our lives may be found in the old verities and in just such crossings. MEMO: Michael Pearson teaches journalism and English at Old Dominion
University and is the author of ``Imagined Places: Journeys into
Literary America'' and ``A Place That's Known.'' ILLUSTRATION: Photo
MARION ETTLINGER
Cormac McCarthy continues his ``Border Trilogy'' with ``The
Crossing.''
by CNB