At nearly 90, the author is still asking readers to confront a tragic yet beautiful world
in one year is an extraordinary feat. To do so just shy of one’s 90th birthday, after a literary silence of 16 years? That’s the stuff of a Hollywood screenplay – or a page out of the life of Cormac McCarthy, arguably one of America’s greatest living writers.
And while both books have been a success by the metric of sales, it has been more than 15 years since McCarthy last flashed across the celebrity author firmament with, catapulted into the commercial stratosphere by becoming an Oprah’s Book Club pick. Even for long-term fans, these two new books signal a moment of reflection and reappraisal.
By almost universal consensus, he’s hailed as one of our greatest living writers. For the uninitiated, what is about McCarthy’s writing that is so, well, great?