This week has seen the passing of two of my literary heroes: Cormac McCarthy and Robert Gottlieb. This essay will serve as an inadequate eulogy to two people who have, in different ways, shaped my recent literary tastes and sensibilities.
Cormac McCarthy is today celebrated in the public mind mainly for his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Road, which depicts a father-son relationship in a harrowing dystopian world.
But the core of his oeuvre, and I think what will make his legacy truly lasting, is what I think of as his “cowboy” novels – the Border trilogy (which is made up of All The Pretty Horses, The Crossing and Cities of the Plain), No Country for Old Men, and what many consider to be his masterpiece, Blood Meridian.
All these novels have a shared style and mood: taciturn protagonists, terse dialogue, stark depictions of nature and beauty, and an almost tyrannical approach to punctuation (no quotation marks, no semicolons!)
The distinct style of Cormac McCarthy’s novels have often been described as “cinematic”, which probably explains the profusion of Hollywood productions that have been based on his novels: the Coen Brothers’ No Country for Old Men, The Road featuring Vigo Mortensen, All The Pretty Horses featuring Matt Damon.
Sometime late last year, his final two novels were published, a twinned publication of Stella Maris and The Passenger. I was not impressed by the novels on the whole, sadly: the digressions on mathematics and physics were fascinatingly geekcore, but the fantastical elements felt like a warmed-up version of Blood Meridian’s Judge Holden, and the supposedly-unspeakable love at the core of the story did not feel entirely fleshed out or believable. This does not, of course, detract from Cormac McCarthy’s legacy – I still believe he is one of the most important novelists in the English language of the late 20th and early 21st century.
Robert Gottlieb, in contrast, lived a life mostly in relative obscurity, even though, in the literary world, he is a veritable rockstar. The list of those who have benefited from his wise editing is littered with household names and acclaimed authors: Joseph Heller, Toni Morrison, John le Carré, Michael Crichton, Robert Caro, Doris Lessing. He was editor of the New Yorker. And he had an unexpected side gig as a longtime member of the board at the New York City Ballet.
I encountered Robert Gottlieb for the first time some years ago, when copies of his memoirs, Avid Reader, hit the shelves of my local bookstore. It still remains emblazoned in my mind that he had finished all seven volumes of Proust over the course of one week while in university!
Both of these men, in their lifetimes and in their own way, changed the ways in which people see the world. The community of readers across the world, of whom I consider myself to be an enthusiastic member, will mourn these men and cherish their legacies.
