The myth of Cormac McCarthy is the myth of hard knocks endured and surmounted. There were long, lean years when novels now seen as brilliant were unable to find an audience. The author acquired a reputation as a drifter, a misfit and an uncompromising solitary. And then, in 1992, came a double play. All the Pretty Horses, the first volume of McCarthy's projected Border Trilogy, won two of the major fiction prizes. All of a sudden everybody knew the writer and always had. Through the alchemy of retrospect, the sorry sales figures became dues paid, and McCarthy emerged as one of our grizzled eminences.

McCarthy's arrival at highbrow stardom may have seemed like a happy accident, but of course there are good reasons why it happened. Through sheer persistence, the author had begun to attain critical mass within the literary establishment. No less important, a decade or so ago the prose style changed, became more action-centered and accessible. Finally, that inchoate thing known as public taste seems to be shifting in McCarthy's favor, our fluctuant appetite for hard-bitten realism spiking up as hard-biting nature itself disappears.

Born in 1933, raised mostly in East Tennessee, McCarthy published his first novel, The Orchard Keeper, in 1965. It was a dense book, disturbing and lyrical. McCarthy found few readers and most of the reviews he got compared him to, inevitably, Faulkner and O'Connor. But to make this point about a Southern writer is to make no point at all. The critics might just as usefully have invoked Melville, Beckett, Joyce—or for that matter, any one of the whole dark chorus from Sophocles and Jeremiah to Nelson Algren and Juan Rulfo. Truer still would have been to downplay the genealogies and say, as Robert Coles (one of McCarthy's few perceptive early readers) did, that here was an author with a deep imagination of evil, a sharp sense of human limitation and a love of both austere and grandiloquent expression. But critics are generally uneasy without their slots and readers have never cottoned in large numbers to any grim vision of the truth of things. McCarthy's trio of Appalachian mountain folk—a murderous bootlegger, a fatherless young man and a half-addled old orchard-keeper—was left to wander in the limbo of the written about but unread.

The same fate befell his subsequent two novels, Outer Dark and Child of God. The oeuvre was tending from brutal and pitiless to more so. McCarthy stayed in the Tennessee mountain setting, concocting scenarios as primal and stark as anything in literature. In Outer Dark a baby born of incestuous coupling and left to die in the woods is rescued; it lives long enough to draw its parents, brother and sister into a web of horrifying consequence. Child of God inverted the sense of its title, tracing the gruesome track of an accused rapist after his release from prison. There was nothing in any of these books to suit the predilections of a refined readership. Nor did McCarthy do anything to further his cause—he gave no interviews, made no exertions toward wooing a public.

Brutal and harsh as these first novels were, they were also stunningly well-written. From the first McCarthy has commanded a prose style of singular precision and intensity, a style that draws upon two very different idioms. One is unadorned yet finely graded and seems to extend onto the page from the landscape itself:

Half a mile farther and the road turned up a hilt, emerging from the woods to poke through a cornfield where a brace of doves flushed out and faired away to the creek on whistling wings. Beyond the field and set back up from the road was a small board shack with the laths curling out like hair awry, bleached to a metalgray.

Then there is the more ornate style, a studied baroque, that every so often threatens to choke the more solid growth like some kudzu:

… a dozen jerry-built shacks strewn about the valley in unlikely places, squatting over their gullied purlieus like great brooding animals rigid with constipation, and yet endowed with an air transient and happenstantial as if set there by the recession of floodwaters.

To talk about McCarthy is to talk about style every bit as much as subject matter. His novels, for better and worse, are not much occupied with the intricacies of plot. Things do happen, of course, important things, but so often it seems as if they happen because the writer has willed it so. His gift, and his true fascination, are for beholding the world; for establishing page by page the densities of presence—of people as well as places and things. McCarthy meditates on creation, stares at it. He does not look past appearances, he looks through them. Describing a pair of boots, he writes: "They were cracked and weatherblackened and one was cleft from tongue to toe like a hoof." It is as if we are looking at the famous Van Gogh painting: we see the boots, but what we register are the weary miles, the human sorrow. The dynamics of this are hard to explain, but readers of McCarthy often testify to his ability to create a spell. He works by a process of steady engulfment, first putting new ground under the reader's feet, then a sky; then he pulls forth his myriad particulars from some place of dreamlike familiarity.

In 1979 McCarthy published Suttree, a massive novel in every way different from the pared-down works that had come before. He moved his setting from back-country to city, in this instance Knoxville, and at the same time indulged to the maximum his penchant for the hypertrophied style:

He could hear the river talking softly beneath him, heavy old river with wrinkled face. Beneath the sliding water cannons and carriages, trunnions seized and rusting in the mud, keelboats rotted to the consistency of mucilage. Fabled sturgeons with their horny pentagonal bodies, the cuprous and dacebright carp and catfish with their pale and sprueless underbellies, a thick muck shot with broken glass, with bones and rusted tins and bits of crockery reticulate with mudblack crazings.

Like the earlier novels, Suttree is less an orchestrated set of plot developments than a serial progression, sequence after sequence showing forth the damnations of modernity—the waste, the venality, the hypocrisy—all images and episodes held together in the battered psyche of Cornelius Suttree, wastrel son of a wealthy Knoxville family. Suttree lives on his ramshackle houseboat on the Tennessee river and studies the world, suffering along with the derelicts he tries to help out, immersing himself in the tides of corruption until he can stand it no longer and must leave.

Suttree can be viewed as McCarthy's valediction to the Appalachian settings of his early career. In the 1970s he moved to El Paso, Texas, and took his fiction with him. In 1985 he published Blood Meridian, a violent chronicle of scalping raids in mid-nineteenth-century Texas and Mexico. This was his most savage expression yet and it may have effected a kind of purge, for the novels that follow are conspicuously different in focus and vision. With Blood Meridian there is also a distinct change in style, as if the new terrain were calling forth a new way of setting sentences to the page. From this point on McCarthy begins writing in a more tightly flexed and more colloquially rooted idiom—a complete turnaround from the language of Suttree. Now he builds his scenes with quick strokes, mostly outward narration and unpunctuated conversation; when images are used, they are charged and evocative. McCarthy's terse economy suggests a worldview by turns unsentimental and pitiless. The effect is—to resort to those traditional poles of comparison—more Hemingway than Faulkner:

The kid lay listening. There were no new riders. After a while the judge called out again. Come out, he called. There's plenty of water for everybody.

The kid had swung the powder flask around to his back to keep it out of the creek and he held the pistol up and waited. Upstream the horses had stopped drinking. Then they started drinking again.

But this is mild. More characteristic might be a passage like this: "The explosion filled all that sad little park. Some of the horses shied and stepped. A fist-sized hole erupted out of the far side of the woman's head in a great vomit of gore and she pitched over and lay slain in her blood without remedy." The reviewers of the novel spoke of it as a revisionist Western, Louis L'Amour rewritten with a bloody pen. But again McCarthy seemed to be using history to look beyond history—as if what really drove him were the desire to see human nature plain. Which, to judge by that novel, meant exacting a look at the worst.

In the two novels written since Blood Meridian, first All the Pretty Horses and now The Crossing, the writer seems to have changed his approach. Not that he has softened his estimate of the human capacity for evil, but he has established that estimate within a larger spectrum, one that also has room for redemptive forces. All the Pretty Horses, his story of two teenaged boys riding through the countryside of northern Mexico in search of stolen horses and adventure, is distinguished far less by scenes of bloodshed or intimations of horror than by the frank exuberance of the narration and the breathtaking descriptions of the natural world. We find violence, of course, and scenes of gratuitous cruelty, but also moments of tenderness and humor. Battered by circumstance, John Grady and his friend, Rawlins, never lose a certain expectant readiness. McCarthy reminds us of his darker view of things only at strategic moments, though when he ends the book it is with an ominous intimation:

He touched the horse with his heels and rode on. He rode with the sun coppering his face and the red wind blowing out of the west across the evening land and the small desert birds flew chittering among the dry bracken and horse and rider and horse passed on and their long shadows passed in tandem like the shadow of a single being. Passed and paled into the darkening land, the world to come.

The Crossing is in many ways similar to All the Pretty Horses. The characters may be different, but the terrain is the same, and the narrative inscribes the same vast circle: departure from home, extended wanderings in Mexico and return. And so long as we think of narrative as essentially incident and complication, as action tending toward a resolution, McCarthy's can be recounted quite concisely.

The novel basically tells the coming-of-age story of Billy Parham, a young man we first see growing up with his family in the rough range country of New Mexico in the early 1940s. In the opening scenes Billy is obsessed with trapping a marauding she-wolf that has crossed over from the mountains of Mexico and is attacking their cattle. He begs his father to be allowed to set the traps himself and one morning has success. With the extreme restraint that has become characteristic, McCarthy writes: "He rode out the gate before his father was even up and he never saw him again."

When Billy reaches the trap, the wolf is there. But instead of killing her—he sees that she is pregnant—he is moved to take her back over the border and free her. In this wrinkle of his character, this feeling for the maligned creature, lie the seeds of his fate. The journey that he undertakes is harsh, full of privations and difficult makeshifts. McCarthy stays with the external narration. We learn about Billy only by reading the signs of his actions. But through these we gradually arrive at a comprehensive sense of who he is. When the wolf is taken from him by a group of self-appointed authorities—hijacked for bloodsport—he follows. He watches the wolf fight off savage dogs for as long as he can bear it, then makes his move: "He stepped over the parapet and walked toward the wolf and levered a shell into the chamber of the rifle and halted ten feet from her and raised the rifle and took aim at the bloodied head and fired." The string of conjunctions in that sentence gives us a precise sense of how Billy wills his action forward in stages.

After killing the wolf Billy journeys back home, arriving to find the farmstead empty, suspended in a desolate silence. He walks from room to room, looking:

He walked into his parents' room and stood. He stood for a long time. He saw how the ticking of the mattress bore the rusty imprint of the springcoils and he looked at that for a long time. Then he hung his hat on the doorknob and walked over to the bed. He stood beside it. He reached down and got hold of the mattress and dragged it off the bed and stood it up and let it fall over backwards. What came to light beneath was an enormous bloodstain dried near black and soaked so thick it cracked and splintered like some dark ceramic glaze…. He looked at it all and he fell to his knees in the floor and sobbed into his hands.

Billy understands now. His parents have been killed, the horses have been stolen; if he cannot find his brother, Boyd, he has nothing in the world. But miraculously Boyd has survived—Billy tracks him down—and the two brothers set off on Billy's horse, back to Mexico.

In the long sections that follow, the brothers patrol the mountain country of northern Mexico. McCarthy creates what feels like a dream of slowly unfolding days lived through hour by hour, mile by mile. The boys ride themselves to exhaustion, make camp. They eat when they can, mostly when some good person takes pity and offers them a plate of beans or some bread. During the course of their obscure journey, they find some of the horses and steal them back. Later they find others—there are standoffs, skirmishes with marauders. We find ourselves in a kind of frontier version of The Trial. It is never clear who serves whom or where the power comes from. Men on horseback ride up in clouds of dust, pistols are brandished. And with a minimum of conversation—never once speaking about the murder of their parents—the brothers push on.

The shape of the journey is determined by certain developments. Boyd falls in love with a 14-year-old girl, another of McCarthy's drifters, and she joins their entourage. Then Boyd is shot in a raid and nearly dies. When he is finally mended, when Billy has reunited him with his girl, he and she disappear, never to be seen again. Billy drifts disconsolately north, returns to the United States and tries to join the army. But the doctors discover a heart murmur and he is turned away. With a shrinking sense of options, Billy heads back to Mexico. When he arrives he learns that Boyd has been killed. The novel ends as he completes his last mission, finding his brother's bones and bringing them back home for burial.

Described thus, in terms of core episodes, The Crossing might not sound terribly compelling, especially since the characters do not interact on any level of sophistication; nearly all of the affect must be inferred. The theme, moreover, is one familiar from previous books: McCarthy maps again the brutal terms of existence and argues the unceasing need to be stoical and resourceful in the face of pain and certain loss. And yet, like All the Pretty Horses—more, I would say—The Crossing achieves resonance. By structuring the narrative as he has, by writing with such unflagging lyrical power, McCarthy displaces our focus from the outer events to the primal archetypes that underlie them. The novel shifts us constantly from the physical to the metaphysical, creating a recursiveness of action in which we suddenly catch the ozone whiff of human souls eking their way forward under an indifferent sky. The Crossing is only incidentally about the wolf or the horses or the many unexpected encounters. The message is more chillingly basic. An old man whom Billy meets unfolds the truth:

He told the boy that although he was huerfano [an orphan] still he must cease his wanderings and make for himself some place in the world because to wander in this way would become for him a passion and by this passion he would become estranged from men and ultimately from himself.

He tells this to Billy before the boy discovers that he is literally an orphan. The old man is speaking in the Heideggerian sense: we are all solitary, plunged into being and made to suffer it.

The power of the novel depends entirely on McCarthy's ability to immerse us in the time and place, and this he does through his prose—through the cadences and word-sounds and the lightness of the images. The world is set before us with fever-dream clarity. McCarthy establishes density and mass; he incises detail as with an engraver's needle. And then, with simile and metaphor, he sweeps everything into profound animation. His descriptions can range from the earthbound and homely ("The wolf was standing bowed up in the road with its hair all wrong like something pulled backwards out of a pipe….") to the more ethereal: "When the flames came up her eyes burned out there like gatelamps to another world." This is poetry, and one reads it with a sort of covetousness, returning to passages just for their beauty:

The sun was low in the west and the shape of the light from the window lay suspended across the room wall to wall. As if something electric had been cored out of that space.

His eyes were very blue and very beautiful half hid away in the leathery seams of his face. As if there were something there that the hardness of the country had not been able to touch.

The horse's ears quartered the compass for the source of the noise.

He was perhaps a mile out and he approached in a series of thin and trembling images which in those places where the foreground was flooded would suddenly augment in their length and then shrivel and draw up again so that the rider appeared to advance and recede and advance again.

McCarthy is writing entirely against the grain of our times, against the haste and the distraction and the moral diffusion. This doubtless has much to do with his appeal: we crave what we hasten to evolve from. As we lose the deeper sense of space and time, as we become riders of the information highway, creatures of call-waiting and tax-deferred annuities, we cannot but see works like this as a kind of amber in which older ways of life have been immobilized. We become aware as we read of weather, distances, the grain and heft of implements; we feel the envelope of silence around each person. And how eloquent are McCarthy's encounters and partings—they define a sense of space most of us have never even glimpsed. Men and women in doorways, watching as riders reduce to pinpoints in the distance, and watching still. As an old, more spacious world rises up, we experience a more vivid and consequential feeling about human destiny. We are in a place where questions about good and evil and matters of the spirit do not sound forced or literary.

McCarthy has been, from the start, a writer with strong spiritual leanings. His orientation is Gnostic: he seems to view our endeavors here below as a violation of some original purity. But a sensibility so attuned to earthly beauty cannot be oblivious to the higher promptings of the soul. His intuitions are of the most primary sort, never even remotely doctrinaire. In the early books we heed his exacerbated awareness of violence and cruelty, of evil, without finding much place for the good. But now, in these most recent works, we meet up quite often with decency. There are venal killers, yes, but they are outnumbered by the poor who emerge from their dwellings to offer succor. Time and again Billy and his brother are taken in, fed and humanly honored:

At dawn the day following while he saddled his horse the workers came out bringing gifts of food. They brought tortillas and chiles and carne seca and live chickens and whole hoops of cheese until they were burdened with provisions beyond their means to carry them. The Muoz woman gave Billy something which when she stepped back he saw was a clutch of coins knotted into a rag.

At moments like this, McCarthy attains the dense simplicity of parable. Indeed, he includes in the novel an extended interlude that could have come directly from one of the God-possessed writers of an earlier day. Before he returns from his ill-fated mission to free the wolf, Billy meets another old man, a hermit of sorts, who tells him a lengthy tale about a priest and a visionary outcast. It is given to the latter to embody the true holy spirit and the priest must humble himself considerably before he can learn the lesson intended for him:

The priest saw that there is no man who is elect because there is no man who is not. To God every man is a heretic…. Every word we speak is a vanity. Every breath taken that does not bless is an affront…. In the end we shall all of us be only what we have made of God. For nothing is real save his grace.

One would think such words would sit strangely in this rude context of vigilantes and drifters, but they don't. McCarthy's vision of silences and spaces consorts readily with the movements of the religious imagination. It is for us to square the sense of the embedded parable with Billy's meandering track. We must factor in as well these words from a mysterious rider Billy meets on his way back north. In what is one of the last exchanges of the novel, the man addresses him: "This world will never be the same, the rider said. Did you know that?" Billy replies: "I know it. It ain't now." We can read this as a secular counterpart to the visionary's message: it identifies the principle of change and rebirth without ascribing it to a deity. The two perspectives stand like shifting background panels. In the foreground Billy Parham, who has fought and ridden and looked for a way home, lays his brother's bones to rest in a small graveyard. Then, like John Grady, he sets off again, more orphaned than ever.