SOURCE: "Travels with a She-Wolf," in The New York Times Book Review, Vol. CXLIII, No. 49, 725, June 12, 1994, pp. 1, 38-40.

[In the following review, Hass praises The Crossing as an "American original." This in-depth discussion of the novel focuses on description and craftsmanship, and Hass briefly examines McCarthy's play, The Stonemason, with respect to craft.]

How does a writer like Cormac McCarthy—if there is any writer like Cormac McCarthy—follow up on the immense critical and popular success of his novel All the Pretty Horses, which won a National Book Award for 1992 and accumulated extraordinary praise? Mr. McCarthy got compared to William Faulkner—he has often been compared to Faulkner—Mark Twain, Herman Melville and Shakespeare. The answer provided by The Crossing, the second novel in his projected Border Trilogy, is that he writes an even better book.

The Crossing is a miracle in prose, an American original. It deserves to sit on the same shelf certainly with Beloved and As I Lay Dying, Pudd'nhead Wilson and "The Confidence-Man," and if it will put readers in mind of Faulkner, Twain, Melville and Shakespeare, it will also put them in mind of Ernest Hemingway, Flannery O'Connor, Miguel de Cervantes, Samuel Beckett. Joseph Conrad and, for good measure, John Ford, Sam Peckinpah and Sergio Leone. But The Crossing is a tale so riveting—it immerses the reader so entirely in its violent and stunningly beautiful, inconsolable landscapes—that there is hardly time to reflect on its many literary and cinematic echoes or on the fact that Mr. McCarthy is a writer who can plunder almost any source and make it his own.

The novel begins on a small cattle ranch in a New Mexico valley in the last years of the Depression. A wolf has come down out of the Sierra de la Madera to the south and begun to attack grazing cattle. Father and sons set about trapping the wolf, but it is an emblem of their moment in the history of the West that the last trapper who might know how to go about it is gone. They acquire a key to his cabin, long shut down, and the boys are given entry to the workshop of a cruel, immensely practical and almost obsolete art: longspring traps for coyote; larger traps for cougar and bear and wolf, iron-toothed, brutal and jagged; springs and chains and stakes greased with lard and packed in wooden boxes; fruit jars and apothecary bottles in which swim the liver and gall and kidneys of animals, elixirs for the purpose of scenting the traps. From this sudden, arcane, unexpected view into the settling of America the novel proceeds.

Billy Parham, the protagonist, who has dreamed of wolves; finally stumbles on a method and traps the wolf and, also unexpectedly, hogties it, muzzles it, leashes it with a catch-rope—all of this heart stopping to read—and sets off south across the unfenced land to return it to the mountains of Mexico from which it came. And at once we are in the world of romance. If an old man in antique armor on a bone-thin horse, followed by a fat would-be squire on a mule, was once a strange apparition on the highways of Cervantes's Spain, then a young man on a cow pony dragging behind him a wild and recalcitrant she-wolf through ranches, American and Mexican, where wolves are a remembered tale of ravenous ferocity and terror, may well seem to replay that story, with the same mix of comedy, cruelty and philosophical wonder.

This first section of the book reads, indeed, like a cross between Faulkner's novella The Bear and Don Quixote. It is about the length of a novella, and it is written with such force and momentum—the reader is so ransacked emotionally by the end of it—that it seems, one-third of the way into the book, that Mr. McCarthy can have nowhere to go.

And what the novel does at this point is to take a deep breath and repeat itself. Billy Parham, this time accompanied by his brother Boyd, makes the crossing into Mexico again. And in the final section of the book, he makes it again. It is part of the boldness—or obsessiveness—of Mr. McCarthy that The Crossing tells very nearly the same story as All the Pretty Horses. In that earlier novel, set on the Texas-Mexico border in 1949, a young man leaves home and crosses into Mexico in search of his fate. But in The Crossing, fatality has entered the tale. If John Grady Cole, the hero of All the Pretty Horses, heads out like Huck Finn in search of open-ended adventure, Billy has elected, or been elected, to perform a nearly impossible task.

Billy's first crossing is intended to perform this wildly improbable and Quixotic act of—what? honor, reparation—toward the world of his dream. The second is meant to reclaim a patrimony. The third is to complete these two tasks in a different form. All three quests seem impossible, and they are undertaken as if Billy had no choice, and in this they are like fate, like all the things that people have done in their lives that they couldn't not have done, and it is in its meditation on this circumstance that some of the deepest energies of the book reside.

Mr. McCarthy, because he is interested in the mythic shape of lives, has always been interested in the young and the old or, if not the old, then those who have already performed some act so deep in their natures (often horrific, though not always) that it forecloses the idea of possibility. "Doomed enterprises," Mr. McCarthy's narrator remarks, "divide lives forever into the then and the now." So The Crossing is full of encounters between the young boys, who look so much like the pure arc of possibility, and the old they meet on the road, all of whom seem impelled, as if innocence were one of the vacuums that nature abhors, to tell them their stories, or prophesy, or give them advice.

Some of these episodes are quite long, and take the form of those stories-within-the-story that the old romances and the earliest novels were so fond of. Others are quite brief, and they are among the most indelible scenes in the book, partly because, reading them, we are put in the position of the traveler, especially the youthful traveler, for whom the world glimpsed has the quality of revelation. As the young riders traverse poor, rural northern Mexico, in the wake of a bitterly failed revolution, in a landscape of barren and tortuous beauty, what they see on the road becomes an emblem of what the world is. And it is a world of inexplicable kindness, inexplicable cruelty. The kindness—since this is a book of desperate wanderings—often takes the form of shared food, and it is part of the power of the book that the reader, reduced to something like mendicant vulnerability by its more nerve-wrenching moments, reads these scenes as gratefully as if he were eating.

Some of the moments are pure encounter: two people only looking at each other, or exchanging a few words as they pass by, and they stay etched in the mind like blue-period Picassos. Or, to multiply analogies, like throwaway scenes in Bunuel or Fellini. Indeed, if this book is to be filmed, it is a western directed by Fellini or Bunuel that one imagines giving visual equivalents to these portraits of beggars, wanderers, holy fools, the insulted and the injured, and their vatic sayings: an old Mexican trapper dying in a room of half light and necrotically stale air, who tells the young hero that the wolf is a hunter and "a being of great order and that he knows what men do not: that there is no order in the world save that which death has put there"; a kindly Yaqui drover on a mountain road, switching the rump of an ox, who offers the information that "the ox was an animal close to God as all the world knew and that perhaps the silence and the rumination of the ox was something like the shadow of a greater silence, a deeper thought" and that in any case "the ox knew enough to work so as to keep from being killed and eaten and that was a useful thing to know." And there is the world-ravaged prima donna of a down-and-out commedia dell'arte troupe, whom Billy later sees naked, bathing enormously pale breasts in a clear stream, who tells him that "the road has its own reasons and no two travelers will have the same understanding of those reasons." A blind man, who lost his eyes as an object lesson in revolutionary retribution and then outlived his despair, tells Billy that he believes that "the light of the world was in men's eyes only for the world itself moved in eternal darkness and darkness was its true nature and true condition and that in this darkness it turned with perfect cohesion in all its parts but that there was naught there to see" and that it was "sentient to its core and secret and black beyond men's imagining."

One of the most fetching and emblematic scenes in the book is a brief encounter at roadside, when Billy is dragging the wolf beside him and meets and old peasant woman and her 14-or-15-year-old sullen (and probably pregnant) companion. Nothing much happens in the scene. The women smoke—"the way poor people eat which is a form of prayer." They exchange words, the women ask about the wolf, which they take to be a dog, and they spar with each other a little, finding themselves suddenly in the theater of a stranger's eyes. It is like stumbling suddenly onto an allegory of youth and age from a medieval pastoral, or like the emblematic figures turned up on a tarot card, and it catches something of Mr. McCarthy's sense of the comic.

The old woman explains that the young one is married to her son, but not by a priest. The girl offers the view that priests are thieves. The old woman rolls her eyes and says that the girl drinks she is a revolutionary, and that those who have no memory of the blood shed in the war are always the most ardent for battle, and that during the revolution priests were shot in the villages, and that women dipped their handkerchiefs in the blood and blessed themselves and that the land was under a curse.

The young woman tells Billy that the old woman is always talking about priests and curses and that she is half crazy. The old woman says that she knows what she knows. And the young woman says that at least she herself knows who the father of her child is, and the old woman says, ay, ay. Then she remarks that the wolf is pregnant and that she will have to be unmuzzled to lick the pups and that all the world knows that this is necessary. The young woman regards the wolf and says that she would like to have a watchdog like that to drive off anyone at all who was not wanted. And she makes a gesture, Mr. McCarthy writes, "that took in the pines and the wind in the pines." Then the boy says he has to go, and the scene is over, except that Billy Parham looks back and sees that they have not moved, they sit staring at whatever they were staring at when he appeared, and they seem diminished by his departure.

There are more than a dozen of these scenes in the book. They seem to have no meaning other than the human gesture they describe, and at least half of them have a vividness, a sense of mystery that is the mystery of a thing or person being nothing other than itself—as if the road made all of life a parable. The book teems with action, and with spectacle and surprise; the life of the towns, the work camps, the haciendas, the peasants and miners and cowboys and drovers. Indians and Gypsies lives ruined, thriving, bent under labor, bent to every conceivable shape by circumstance. And the boys travel through this world, tipping their hats, saying "yes sir" and "nosir" and "si" and "es verdad" and "claro" to all its potential malice, its half-mad philosophers, as the world washes over and around them, and the brothers themselves come to be as much arrested by the gesture of the quest as the old are by their stores of bitter wisdom and the other travelers, in the middle of life, in various stages of the arc between innocence and experience, by whatever impulses have placed them on the road.

Mr. McCarthy is a great and inventive storyteller, and he writes brilliantly and knowledgeably about animals and landscapes—but finally the power and delight of the book derive from the fact that he seems incapable of writing a boring sentence. Reading him, one is very much in the hands of a stylist. His basic mode in this book—it is a considerable intensification of the manner of All the Pretty Horses—is a version of high modernist spareness and declarative force. The style comes from Joyce and Hemingway out of Gertrude Stein. It is a matter of straight-on writing, a veering accumulation of compound sentences, stinginess with commas and a witching repetition of words: "He was very cold. He waited. It was very still. He could see by his breath how the wind lay and he watched his breath appear and vanish and appear and vanish constantly before him in the cold and he waited a long time. Then he saw them coming. Loping and twisting. Dancing. Tunneling their noses in the snow. Loping and running and rising by twos in a standing dance and running on again."

Once this style is established, firm, faintly hypnotic, the crispness and sinuousness of the sentences of what would otherwise be quite ordinary description gather to a magic: "The snow in the pass was halfway to the horse's belly and the horse trod down the drifts in high elegance and swung its smoking muzzle over the white and crystal reefs and looked out down through the dark mountain woods or cocked its ears at the sudden flight of small winter birds before them." These rhythms pass into even the most workmanlike business of the novel, getting from here to there, moving characters about: "There was still snow in the upper stretches of the road and there were tire tracks in the road and horse tracks and the tracks of deer. When he reached the spring he left the road and crossed through the pasture and dismounted and watered his horse."

Of course, Mr. McCarthy is capable of lifting out of this hypnotic and lapidary directness into high Faulknerian crash-and-burn:

He woke all night with the cold. He'd rise and mend back the fire and she was always watching him. When the flames came up her eyes burned out there like gatelamps to another world. A world burning on the shore of an unknowable void. A world construed out of blood and blood's alcahest and blood in its core and in its integument because it was that nothing save blood had power to resonate against that void which threatened hourly to devour it. He wrapped himself in the blanket and watched her. When those eyes and the nation to which they stood witness were gone at last with their dignity back into their origins there would perhaps be other fires and other witnesses and other worlds otherwise beheld. But they would not be this one.

A curiosity and signature of the style is the occasional use, faintly mocking, of something like antique legal diction. It gives Mr. McCarthy's descriptive prose an odd taste of necessity and judgment. The wolf again: "Her eyes did not leave him or cease to burn and as she lowered her head to drink the reflection of her eyes came up in the dark water like some other self of wolf that did inhere in the earth or wait in every secret place even to such false water holes as this that the wolf would be always corroborate to herself and never wholly abandoned in the world."

This language could easily seem affected but it rarely does; or, as with Faulkner, readers will find themselves yielding to the affectation and to the barren landscapes it describes, and to the carnival of figures encountered on the road. Who make a world that is at once unlike anything in American fiction and deeply familiar, since it is the site of one of the oldest of stories, the one about having a task to perform in the world and learning what the world is from trying to perform it.

It is Mr. McCarthy's gift that he can signal his literary intentions to his readers without archness. If he seems post-modern in his sense that everything is a quotation of a quotation, he parts company with post-modern practice in thinking, not that everything therefore refers to nothing, but that in human life certain ancient stories are acted out again and again. A writer's moral relation to these stories is like nothing so much as a craftsman's relation to his tools, and nothingness is not to be counted for the pleasure of merely circulating, but built against, sentence by sentence—and here certain Faulknerian adjectives might come into play—if hopelessly, in the knowledge of the doom of all human intention, then indefatigably, in the knowledge of the skills of a trade that has been passed down to one and that will be passed in turn to other hands.

This is a male ethic. It may be the American male ethic, but it descends to us from sources as old as the Odyssey and the Aeneid—those primers of maleness—and it came to the heroes of our popular fiction, cowboys and urban detectives by way of Joseph Conrad before it got to Hemingway and Faulkner. Mr. McCarthy has apparently chosen in his Border Trilogy to examine it yet again.

The Crossing is, in this way, a book about the artist's task, or any workman's task. This is also the subject of The Stonemason, a play by Mr. McCarthy also just published, as if to emphasize the prodigality of the author's talent and nerve. It concerns several generations of a black family in Louisville in the 1970's, all living under the same roof, and it reads, perhaps, like a version of A Raisin in the Sun conceived by Eugene O'Neill.

The main character is Ben Telfair, a college-educated 32-year-old man, who has taken up, from love of his 101-year-old grandfather, his trade of freestone masonry. A good part of the play is concerned with Ben's descriptions of the beauty and saving power of his grandfather's art. It is not a play about race. The main character's name, which seems a pun on "tell fair," suggests that it is as much about the novelist's craft and the passion of that craft as is about the mason's. To make the world. To make it again and again. To make it in the very maelstrom of its undoing." And future critics are likely to interpret Ben Telfair's relation to his grandfather as a kind of ironic, morally ambiguous allegory of Mr. McCarthy's relationship to William Faulkner and to the traditions of the novel.

I can imagine that some African-American readers may feel that Mr. McCarthy has displaced his own concerns onto his black characters. The rhythms of Ben Telfair's speech seem distinctly Irish Catholic, rather than African-American. But the play certainly avoids stereotypes, and it tries to think about work in America. The grandfather, perhaps because he has nothing else to call his own, practices his craft as lovingly as if it were a religion. Like the genes of the timber wolf in The Crossing (and the art of the trapper), his craft, with its lore and its fidelities, is passing away.

In one lovely scene, the old man refuses to lay an honorary cornerstone in Louisville because the Old Testament enjoins against building with hewn stone and because he knows, from the story of the Hebrew people in Egypt, that such labor is the work of slaves. The old man's son, Ben's father, has made a business of the craft and sent his son to college, and the son has rejected whatever his education might have given him and taken up the old man's art. And the play is about what this old ethic of work, a male ethic undertaken in pity and desperation, can and cannot sustain.

It is very near to the ethic that leads Billy Parham of The Crossing and John Grady Cole of All the Pretty Horses to cross over a border from what they know to what they need to know. I can also imagine some readers feeling that Mr. McCarthy has displaced the epidemic of violence in American culture onto a half-legendary state of Chihuahua. Displacement has always been a condition of the romance. And the Mexico in Mr. McCarthy's novels, if it is half dreamscape, is not unlike the Mexico of the novelists Juan Rulfo and Carlos Fuentes. Perhaps the western, which was always a sort of American Protestant morality tale, a Pilgrim's Progress made out of simple virtues and simple tests, needs, as the century ends, an older and darker Arcadia in which to be enacted. In any case, it is clear that the form is not through teaching us, since it has given us in The Crossing a masterwork. And, most interesting of all, Mr. McCarthy is not through yet. We can await the conclusion of the Border Trilogy.