A Review of Cormac McCarthy's Cities of the Plain
B. Renner

"Center Stage"

Cormac McCarthy doesn't talk to reporters, critics, fans, or disciples. But he makes an appearance in the epilogue to Cities of the Plain, masquerading as a homeless Mexican man. If you want to know what McCarthy thinks about fiction (or, if you prefer, narrative) and its place in readers' lives, read the epilogue. And you may even be rewarded with a smile--Billy Parham, talking to McCarthy's doppelgaenger, wonders if the man might be Death, which may be McCarthy's comment not only upon his reputation for casual violence in his writing, but also upon his hermetic persona. That the double is both homeless and an "alien" should need no comment.

"Crimes Against the Language"

Since McCarthy's greatest admirers repeatedly cite his usage of language in their paeans, it must be noted that Cities of the Plain (especially part one) is full of cliche and what used to be called "purple passages," as well as diction slippages and inaccurate syntax.
A. Cliche

"rain danced on the steel tops of the cars"

"the horse went by as if the barn were afire"

"the deer were pale as ghosts and as soundless."

"Stars were falling everywhere."

"a sea of waiting vendors"

"A tall woman in a diaphanous gown passed through the salon like the ghost of a whore." [This is, in fact, a description of a whore.]

"Above all a knowing deep in the bone that beauty and loss are one."

B. Overwrought imagery

"A large owl lay cruciform across the driver's windshield. [. . . H]e lay in the concentric rings and webs of the wrecked glass like an enormous moth in a web."

"lost hieroglyphics whose meaning no man would ever know" [description of petroglyphs]

"Like madwomen dressed for an outing."

"like a child holding by a string some struggling and gasping chimera" [description of John Grady Cole holding a roped horse at a studding]

C. Various

1. Diction slippage. "Troy had walked up the road and was standing taking a leak." I don't know when the phrase "taking a leak" entered the language, but whether it is chronologically acceptable in 1952 is not the issue: the issue is the jar upon the ear created when one moves from McCarthy's almost forbidding narrative style into this bit of bland contemporaneity. Noting that Troy is standing is simply redundant, since it is most unlikely that he would be squatting, kneeling or sitting to take a leak.

2. Dangling participle. "Flooded salt flats shining in the evening sun seventy miles to the east." Where exactly does one stand in order to have the evening sun 70 miles east of him?

3. Diction error. "What are you all havin?" This and other conversational instances of "you all" seems to be an example of McCarthy allowing West Texans and New Mexicans to speak like Southerners. "Y'all" would seem to be more accurate.

4. Flat-out bestseller-style tedium. Turn to page 79 and read the first full paragraph. Then ask yourself if you need to know about a desk of polished glass and fruitwood, a white leather sofa, a coffeetable [low] of glass and chrome, and carpeting of "a rich cream color."

"Stylish or Stylized?"

He walked into the pawnshop with the gun in the holster and the holster and belt slung over his shoulder." Why not just write, "He walked into the pawnshop with the holster slung over his shoulder," and assume the reader is smart enough to figure out the gun and the belt? Apparently that would be too direct for McCarthy.
Throughout Cities of the Plain (and much of McCarthy's other work) there is a rigidity of style which has become, a la the later Hemingway, a self-parody. "Late that night lying in his bunk in the dark he heard the kitchen door close and heard the screendoor close after it." When tenth-graders write like this, their teachers lower their grades and tell them to be less repetitive. When McCarthy writes like this, critics swoon.

"Dialogue and Humor"

Much of McCarthy's dialogue is freighted with meaning. (I refer you again to the epilogue.) But just as often his dialogue moves the way actual conversation moves, and is as quick and lively as a Neil Simon comedy--with the exception that McCarthy's characters are speaking believably, as "real people" speak, and not like scripted actors. An especially notable example occurs at the outset of the book. John Grady Cole ("hero" of All the Pretty Horses), Billy Parham ("hero" of The Crossing), and two other cowboys are in a Mexican whorehouse, discussing the whores on the other side of the room and which cowboy will choose which whore.

"You better pick you one out, John Grady.
The boy turned and looked across the room at the whores.
How about that old big'n in the green pajamas?
Don't be puttin him on my gal, said Troy. You'll be the cause of a fight breakin out here in a minute.
Go on. She's lookin over here.
They're all lookin over here.
Go on. I can tell she likes you.
She'd bounce John Grady off the ceilin.
Not the all-american cowboy she wouldnt. The cowboy'd stick like a cockleburr."

As is common in McCarthy, exactly who is speaking when can be problematic. But in this episode, the confusion is appropriate because-- with the exception of John Grady (silent here) and Billy--the cowboys are often interchangeable anyway. A few lines later they begin to discuss the issue of "value per pound on a dollar basis" and the advantage of a "hefty" whore. Though the situation is not new to literature, it is handled with a zest and panache that few writers achieve. Dialogue is one of McCarthy's greatest gifts, to be prized far above his much vaunted descriptive skills.

"The Hero and the Border"

According to some folklorists, the hero is he who can cross boundaries and come back alive with new information and abilities--a man both of us and beyond us. The original boundary is probably that between man and god, later degraded to that between "earth" and "fairyland." By entitling his trilogy The Border Trilogy and one of its books The Crossing, McCarthy invites us to consider these ideas.
He offers us two prospective heroes, John Grady Cole (books 1 and 3) and Billy Parham (books 2 and 3). In book one, John Grady is accompanied by a friend named Lacey, who both crosses into the "other" land (Mexico) with John Grady and returns. But Lacey is not "hero" material--he experiences, but does not learn, or at least not deeply enough to be sufficiently changed. He is "just a sidekick." John Grady makes the requisite trip; he learns the other world; he returns to this one--but he brings no report. What he has learned he keeps to himself. He is, in this sense, a failure as a hero because he has turned so within himself--the rugged American individualist--that he admits of no responsibility to his "people."
Likewise in The Crossing, Billy and his younger brother Boyd both cross into Mexico. But Boyd remains there, becomes a "hero" of another sort among some rural Mexicans, and meets his death there. Thus he cannot fulfill the hero's role. Billy, of course, returns--but like John Grady, he maintains an aloofness that short-circuits his possibilities as prophet or savior.
When Cities of the Plain opens, in a whorehouse, we learn that the two so far failed heroes have become coworkers and friends, though Billy is about a decade older. We cannot help but wonder how they will fare in their final chance to become heroes. McCarthy sets John Grady up as the star of the show (he is, after all, the "all-american cowboy"), but in so doing he also tends to make John Grady a type--an intention announced from the very beginning. As the story proceeds we see no tendency on McCarthy's part to retreat from this position, so that-- before too long--we grant John Grady the role of ostensible hero, but gravitate to Billy as the authentic character. John Grady is too unbelievable, too perfect, and too perfectly tragically flawed. Billy, on the other hand, is a man--a laconic man, to be sure, but one who carries his losses tenderly, feels deeply, and recognizes the rules by which the world operates and the lunacy of attempting to operate in violation of them. John Grady's flaw destroys him, as of course it must, but it also destroys Billy, though in another sense, so that the "fall" of one hero carries another alongside. And thus, finally, McCarthy relinquishes the mythic romanticism which is rampant in this book and delivers to us an "ordinary" man who has never pretended to be anything else--almost, one is tempted to say (thinking of another famous trilogy), surrendering Frodo to give us over to Sam.

"The Set Piece"

About halfway through the book, the cowboys discover that a group of wild dogs are killing and eating calves. This situation provides McCarthy with the opportunity for a set-piece, a small scale tour-de-force, a way to show off his narrative writing moves. And he rises gracefully, if cruelly, to the occasion. The boys go dogroping. Horses trained to chase down and wear out ornery cattle, while their riders are twirling and aiming their reatas, performed as trained, even if the prey is canine. Since dogs, however, are so much lighter than cows, their necks often snap when the rope draws tight, and the cowboys feel no compunction in dragging the dead or dying for a while before stopping to release them. The writing here is lean and vivid, and these pages will quite likely be excerpted for representation in anthologies. The coda to this effortlessly violent episode, though, returns to the almost idyllic romanticism that threads throughout the novel. John Grady, in full savior mode, drags Billy back out into the desert to find the pups of one of the dead dogs which was obviously nursing.

"Is John Grady Jesus?"

You bet. First, he has the requisite initials, though McCarthy downplays them by emphasizing the given name John Grady over the family name John Cole. Second, he falls in love with a whore named Magdalena. Third, she has epilepsy, a disorder which many theologians equate with demon possession. Beyond this, he wants to marry Magdalena and "save" her from prostitution. He is the perfect cowboy and horseman, near enough to being "the good shepherd," and he's a man of sorrows.
You can also play number games with John Grady. He is not the canonical thirty-three years old, but he was born (like McCarthy) in 1933 and is 19 in Cities of the Plain (which begins in 1952). Furthermore he dies (spilling a great deal of blood) in a to-the-death battle with the ostensibly evil figure who is responsible for the death of Magdalena. Jesus, at 19, was seven years into his "time of mystery" between the ages of 12 and 30. John Grady, unlike Jesus, dies in his time of mystery, a mysterious figure who never has the opportunity to come into full manhood. The pieta, if you will, takes place when Billy carries John Grady from the hut in which he dies--an event witnessed by nuns and schoolchildren.

"Sodom and Gomorrah"

The biblical "cities of the plain" are Sodom and Gomorrah and their sister cities, renowned for wickedness and lack of hospitality. McCarthy's cities are El Paso, Texas, and Juarez, Mexico, though El Paso barely registers. Juarez is the center of the non-ranching action, the site of the whorehouse in which Magdalena works, and the city to which the cowboys go for a night on the town. We see it, therefore, almost solely in terms of its "immorality," though the cowboys themselves clearly do not view their behavior as immoral--a characteristic, of course, of the inhabitants of Sodom and Gomorrah. In Cities of the Plain, however, McCarthy reverses the biblical parallel and destroys the wayfaring stranger, John Grady, rather than the evil city.

"Art or Genre?"

If you have read other reviews of Cities of the Plain you have doubtless "learned" that the novel is a masterwork. Of course it is not, at least not in the sense the reviewers mean. When one reads Moby-Dick, one has no doubt, at any point, that one is reading the work of one of the greatest writers in history, at the very apex of his form. Cities of the Plain does not move with such assurance. It flows almost relentlessly forward, but one realizes, even while caught in the flow of the events, that McCarthy is making mistakes, aesthetically and literarily. He is trying, apparently, to make art of material which has not been considered "art" before--like, perhaps, Dvorak including melody lines inspired by spirituals in his symphony From the New World. But McCarthy does not succeed. As engaging a character as John Grady is, he is not "real": he is "mythic," unfailingly polite, unfailingly "true to his heart," the Michelangelo of cowboys. McCarthy works to undercut the effect of his characterization by having the other cowboys affectionately mock John Grady's abilities, but there is no question that they also more or less adore him. McCarthy tries to undercut the foolish Romanticism of John Grady's love for Magdalena by having Billy and other men discourage him or even tell him he is crazy. But John Grady's characterization is left intact--he still moves through the novel in a sort of state of grace, by which I do not mean that nothing untoward happens to him, but rather that he is never at any point less than he expects himself to be. By this standard, the Romantic standard of truth to the self, John Grady is sinless. What this means finally is that John Grady, as fully developed as he is, is nevertheless a "genre" character rather than a literary character (or a real man.) He is a "hero" in the popular culture sense, rather than in the deepest sense discussed above.
The plot of Cities of the Plain also moves in a "popular" way, as a "page turner"--this is not to say that McCarthy does not from time to time deliberately pull in the reins and slow the pace to a crawl, but even those scenes, arguably, can function as "breathers." The cliched or popular elements of the tale include : fated or star-crossed lovers; the saintly man too good for this earth; the older, wiser, but less "gifted" surrogate brother; the oh-so-reasonable antagonist (Satan tempting Jesus?); the clash of rural and urban lifestyles; the final good-versus-evil conflict; and the philosophic coda which is somehow supposed to bring it all together for us. If one reads and reviews Cities of the Plain as a popular novel, or even as a popular novel with literary overtones, then it is indeed a work of great skill. But Cities of the Plain has not been so offered to us. It is offered to us as a masterpiece, as a breathtaking achievement by an important contemporary writer, as the astonishing conclusion to a lengthy and significant modern work--and it simply cannot bear the weight of such praise or the kind of minute investigation such praise elicits. We don't, as readers, care if Robert Louis Stevenson sends a horse running past us as if the barn is afire--because we are not reading Stevenson for artistic mastery of language. But we have been told that we must so read McCarthy. We don't, as readers, care if J. R. R. Tolkien's characters are mostly types--because we are not reading Tolkien for insightful depiction of authentic human beings. But we expect to find such beings in McCarthy. We don't mind if Caleb Carr or Michael Crichton writes melodrama instead of reality--but we expect more of McCarthy.
Cities of the Plain has moments of visceral power and emotional involvement, including the gripping but totally unbelievable climax, but too many of them--once surrendered to, passed through, and considered in retrospect--show themselves to be something other that they first seemed to be: rather than insightful, understanding, evocative depictions of moments of "eternal" human truth, they are instead re-enactments or recastings of "big moments" from earlier literature. Cities of the Plain is popular fiction of a very high order, but it is indeed popular fiction, and dare not ask to be placed on a shelf with Ulysses or Moby-Dick.

"Goodbye?"

There is something unavoidably swan-songish about Cities of the Plain. It is not simply that it is the closing volume of a trilogy by a man who had, until now, written only determinedly separate novels. It is not simply that the trilogy's completion comes in the author's mid-sixties and that this is an author who works very slowly. The bit of children's verse that ends the book, and is labeled "Dedication," has something to do with creating this feeling as well. The "sweetness" in the midst of the violence with which the trilogy opens (All the Pretty Horses) and closes (Cities of the Plain) lends the whole the feeling that its writer has reached some kind of gentlemen's agreement with the universe and has finished his quarrel--and perhaps his need to write of it. Or maybe it's just that John Grady--whom I cannot help but see as some kind of dream vision of the Cormac who might have been--is now gone, and so is the necessity to memorialize him. And when the now-elderly Billy-- the final witness to John Grady's perfection--goes to bed at novel's end, in the third millenium which has not yet arrived for the rest of us, it is as if McCarthy himself is also, finally, ready to rest.

1996 © 2004