Cormac McCarthy: Mash Up Artist

Fair warning: There are some spoilers here, but all the books have been out for a while, so deal.

One night, Cormac McCarthy was sitting in his dorm room at the University of Great American Novelists, working his way through a bottle of whisky. He stared at the computer screen, swore at the endlessly blinking cursor. Smoke from a mostly forgotten cigarette curled up past his face, and he waved it idly away.

This is ridiculous, he thought. Or maybe he muttered it. The pressure was definitely starting to get to him.

I wrote All the Pretty Horses. No Country for Old Men. I won the National Book Award! But he couldn't get any words on to the page, and hadn't in weeks. The whisky was beginning to take hold.

What I should do, he muttered or thought, is redo On the Road as if it were written by Ernest Hemingway. A new perspective. Toughen that beatnik drivel up. People will appreciate how originally I've combined two previously existing, seemingly unrelated things.

The pages flew by as McCarthy's whisky-wobbled fingers struck at the keys with a newfound sense of purpose. Carefree cross country jaunts in search of kicks in post war America became a perilous journey in a post Apocalyptic future to horrible to even contemplate, let alone survive.

The characters were easy to transition. Sal Paradise, Kerouac's stand-in/narrator, knows the only people he's interested in are The mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a common place thing, but burn burn burn, like fabulous yellow Roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars. The only person who matters for this new, unnamed narrator is his son, God's own firedrake, tending to the fire whose sparks rushed upward and died in the starless dark. Not all dying words are true and this blessing is no less real for being shorn of its ground. And we have no time for Roman candles, no sir. No time for metaphor, either.

Rather than discussing the limits of human potential and the wonders of existence on a mad-dash car ride along the eastern seaboard, repeatedly curse the futility and wretchedness of a world where the sky is full of ash and civilization has disintegrated. Think of the hopeless, stoic perseverance of The Old Man and the Sea, only if the ocean were poison and all the fish were dead.

And in the end, instead of having the protagonists simply drift apart and outgrow one another with the passage of time, let's kill off the narrator and leave the child to fend for himself amongst a band of unknown survivors who may or may not be carrying the fire themselves (Damnit, one metaphor slipped through. But that's the only one.). Robert Jordan (For Whom the Bell Tolls) would be proud.

And you know what, Cormac? So would the kids on collegehumor.com. Congratulations - you've successfully juxtaposed two completely different things, like this Bear Grylls mash-up, Man vs. Girls Gone Wild. (Note: You probably shouldn't watch this at work. Or if you have an IQ over 80.) I can't wait to see Veggietales characters dialouge spliced into the No Country trailer.

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In all seriousness, The Road is a great book, and just incredibly written. McCarthy paints an intimate portrait of a father-son relationship, and describes about as beautiful an ash-strewn apocalyptic wasteland as could ever exist.

I preferred No Country for Old Men, mainly because I was more able to relate to the characters in it. I may still be stuck in the concrete jungle Bob Marley sings about, but the thing hasn't burnt down yet. I'm not contending with deranged, cannibalistic mobs (although some days on the subway it can feel like it). So there you go.

I'd recommend either book, though, and you can't go wrong either way. And if I ever find my way back to the library, I might just start in on the Border Trilogy as well...Not that I don't have enough to read already.

Enjoy.