NEW YORK (AP) â From the moment he read âAll the Pretty Horses,â James Wade knew he was a fan for life and that his aspirations, as an author of Westerns, would never be the same.
âHe really broke free from the traditional Western,â says Wade, a two-time winner of the Spur Award for outstanding Western writing whose novel âAll Things Left Wildâ was billed as âan illustration of the violence and corruption prevalent in our fast-expanding countryâ â a description that could have been applied to much of McCarthy's work.
âHe included all those elements from traditional Westerns, like cowboys and horses, but he also almost single-handedly brought the Western into the literary realm,â Wade said. âAs Western writers we can now take chances on more metaphysical topics, and not just heroes and villains.â
McCarthy has been widely praised as a descendant of and among others, excavators of the American spirit whose biblically influenced prose raised their narratives to tragic and poetic heights. His admirers can be found throughout the literary world and beyond, from such prize-winning fiction writers as and to actor and who faithfully adapted his âNo Country for Old Menâ into an Oscar-winning movie.
âIt's like he was writing meta-Westerns,â says Kushner, author of âThe Flamethrowersâ and other novels. âHe writes about people gripped by existential compulsion, who don't know why they do the things they do.â
âHe was so fiercely dedicated to his own vision that he gave you permission to pursue yours,â says Whitehead, whose books include the Pulitzer Prize-winning âThe Underground Railroadâ and âZero One,â a zombie apocalypse inspired in part by McCarthy's âThe Road,â winner of the Pulitzer in 2007. âI read âThe Roadâ and thought, âIf Cormac can do âMad Max,â I can do âNight of the Living Dead.âââ
For novelists of Westerns, he holds the kind of stature â as a master in the field whose work also transcended, and even reinvented it. The Western, a genre some feared was outdated, seemed new again. Authors remember encountering his work, from his Border Trilogy to âThe Roadâ and âBlood Meridian,â as exhilarating and sometimes intimidating.
âI read âBlood Meridianâ in college and was utterly baffled. I didnât possess the literary vocabulary at that point to understand what he was doing,â Spur-winning novelist David Heska Wanbli Weiden says of McCarthy.
Weiden â an enrolled citizen of the Sicangu Lakota nation whose debut novel, âWinter Counts,â centers on a Native vigilante at odds with the American legal system â came to appreciate the âaudacity and ambitionâ of McCarthy and how he opened the genre to new kinds of stories.
âMost critics focus on his majestic, resplendent prose, but I see McCarthyâs influence on the genre to be his alternative mythology of the West, his aesthetic vision, and the detached, dispassionate presentation of the brutal violence that was (and is) a part of the Western frontier,â he says. "Whenever my own work is criticized for being overly violent, I recommend readers check out some of McCarthy's later work.â
Kathleen Morris, whose novels include âLily of the West,â also read âBlood Meridianâ years ago and remembered being âawedâ and âslightly terrifiedâ by his prose and his storylines. McCarthy became a kind of literary conscience, an author she would find herself summoning â âWhat would the man think of that?â â while working on her own books.
Like Weiden and Morris, author Rudy Ruiz didnât immediately find McCarthy pleasurable or even understandable. He would end up rereading the same page multiple times, making sure he hadnât missed something, and thought the despair and the loneliness of McCarthy's books âmade them hard sometimes to engage with.â
For Ruiz, whose âValley of Shadowsâ is set along the Texas-Mexico border in the 19th century, McCarthy's influence would become literary and geographical. Ruiz is a Brownville, Texas, native who completed McCarthy's Border Trilogy â âAll the Pretty Horses,â âThe Crossingâ and âCities of the Plainâ â and responded to how it captured his own feelings about his native region.
âI was just really influenced by the way he captured the duality of the gritty realism alongside the stark beauty and power of the landscape, how a place can belong to a person as much as a person can belong to the place,â he says. âMcCarthy shows these timeless concerns about identity and belonging, and how we define ourselves. That is very palpable in the Southwest.â
Gordy Sauer, whose debut novel âChild in the Valleyâ came out in 2021, says that McCarthy's presence among contemporary writers of Westerns is so strong that you don't have to read him to be influenced by him â âAnyone coming after that has to contend at least in theory with what he did and what he meant to the genre,â Sauer says.
He remembers working on a story in graduate school about 15 years ago and being told by a fellow student that it reminded him of McCarthy's work, which he'd yet to read. When he did pick up âBlood Meridian,â the effect was âtransformative,â he said, as if he would divide his life between before âBlood Meridianâ and after.
âHe broke down the Western and remade into an image of America unlike anything we had seen,â Sauer said. âHe stripped away the romance and the idea of romance. He forced us to look beyond the fabric of the genre and into the stitching, to understand how it was made.â
Hillel Italie, The Associated Press
