Tag Archives: Cormac McCarthy

'The Counselor' has its moments of detached poetics, its pulse-raising sequences and humorous or insightful moments, but they don’t come together in a satisfying way, which makes this venerable collaboration all the more disappointing.

Although novels will never truly go away, they no longer enjoy the popularity they once did. To reinvigorate the form, writers and publishers should take a cue from serial TV shows and return to the erstwhile popular format of the serial novel.

'The Counselor' will inevitably be a very entertaining movie, but Cormac McCarthy is our greatest living writer, so it is very likely he intends to do more than just entertain us here. Like 'Blood Meridian,' this is about the inner frontiers within us and how we become most alive when we live close to these frontiers and demarcate them within ourselves, staking out the interior territory that we call our souls.

'Suttree' is arguably as good of a book as 'Blood Meridian,' and for some readers, it may be more palatable than the relentless but beautiful dirge of the latter work. It deserves a place alongside the latter as one of the greatest works of 20th Century American fiction.