Blood Meridian

[Mark Kohut]

For what it is worth, I'll repeat it here. Suttree was the first novel McCarthy started to write.....and the fourth published, as you know.

The late Roger Ebert liked it most, it seems. Widest and richest were his reasons, as he steadily said. ( do not know if he wrote a singular piece about it--or Blood Meridian. )

Ya know McCarthy's phrase " pandemonium of the sun" was the one Pynchon had JohnLarroqutte use in his show about Pynchon and the new book he was working on. Pretty much All think
Pynchon collaborated with him, this was not John and his writers. 

The Orchard Keeper is the novel, the first published, which frames well most of his lifelong themes and tropes. His Faulkner influence with the widest angle lens--until the later novels. The other two early ones go deeper into the baddest shit.....ESP the unforgettable Dostoevskian scene in Act of God. 

The story of how Sonny Mehta " broke him out" to bestselling success with the campaign, " the greatest unread living novelist" is a good piece of cultural history. 

Sent from my iPad

> On Jun 5, 2017, at 10:15 AM, rich <richard.romeo at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> I would try Suttree, Joseph--a much better book than Blood Meridian (which I highly respect and would recommend but do not love). 
> 
> rich
> 
>> On Mon, Jun 5, 2017 at 12:15 AM, Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net> wrote:
>> First step to get out of hole, stop digging. First step to cooling down, stop starting fires.  We want the evolution of the species to require the sum total of human genius but what does that mean when so much skill has been developed for burning down the house.
>> 
>> There is a certain kind of gnosticism that sees this as a hell planet ruled by deception.  In such a world fiends have a supernatural advantage. McCarthy seems to waver between something like that and a kind of grim survivalism. His is a mind I don’t care to visit ever again despite the  visceral prose style.
> 
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