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Finally, after seemingly endless decades of waiting, America can celebrate the death of Cormac McCarthy, the worst novelist ever.
McCarthy was known for such repulsive hack tripe as “Blood Meridian” and “The Road.” Along with edgy and predictable shock shlock, he also wrote kiddie romance novels.
Born to an Irish Catholic family, McCarthy, like many of his ilk, joined the Jews to help them destroy everything. Reading a Cormac McCarthy novel is humiliating and brings deep shame on a person. As you read the foul and unnatural arrangement of words, you feel as though McCarthy might as well have just broken into your house at night and pissed in your face while you’re sleeping.
Everything he wrote was utter garbage. It was sold to stupid peasants because it was simplistically written and filled with titillating scenes of violence and depravity.
For example, in “The Road,” you have a post-apocalypse scene where a father and son are traveling. At one point, they are hiding in a ditch from roving rapist cannibals, and the father holds a gun in his son’s mouth, telling him to pull the trigger if anyone sees him.
The underlying message of his work is that everything is completely meaningless – except kiddie style romantic love (i.e., sexual infatuation).
Why would such work exist? We are supposed to believe this man was some kind of genius because he was depraved? Are we to believe that the great writers of history couldn’t have written such disgusting scenes, if they had lacked all morals?
I will tell you this: virtually anyone with a sick mind and fifth grade writing skills could have written this gross, saccharine, self-indulgent, and above all repetitive prose. When you look at the “edgy” syntax, you are reaching below the fifth grade level. Any moron with a thesaurus can write broken sentences without correct punctuation. Mixing transgressive imagery with an assault on the written language, and underwriting it with themes of nihilism and blasphemy, should have been viewed as an abomination, an affront to God and man. Yet this worm was given awards, and he was given a top place in the literary hierarchy by the odious Jew Harold Bloom and his cult.
McCarthy was handsome as a young man, which no doubt played a role in his success, which was largely among women. However, if you were to see his soul – as Satan is now seeing it in Hell – it would look ratlike, like the startling visage of Bloom. The people who work in this Jewish system, perpetuating the Jews’ agenda, take on the radical Jewish spirit, and it swallows their humanity.
If you are an educated man looking at his body of work, you realize that he never learned basic sentence structure. He leaned on “stylistics” in the same way we are supposed to believe abstract artists are real artists that only choose to create works that look like they were produced by children because they are so smart. It was truly an “emperor has no clothes” situation, where a dim-witted pervert is writing like a child and everyone was looking around at each other, seeing if anyone else noticed that this “celebrated” work was absurdly, uniquely primitive.
The one thing that McCarthy spawned that was potentially worthwhile was the Coen Brothers’ film adaptation of “No Country for Old Men.” This was also likely McCarthy’s best novel, though it was still garbage, featuring crime novel tropes that were largely pulled whole cloth from Elmore Leonard and then made more gross. The Coen Brothers film was so cinematically stylistic, however, that the source material was virtually irrelevant. There are thousands of crime novels – two dozen from Leonard alone – that could have served as the jumping off point for the same film.
In some ways, McCarthy was the logical end point of American literature, following William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway. These are complete hacks, one after the other. Of course, after McCarthy, there was no lower you could fall, so popular literature has largely simply ended.
In the wake of his death at home in Mexico at the age of 89, the Jewish American media is celebrating McCarthy as one of the greatest American novelists. Some of these people are calling him the single greatest of all. This should not surprise anyone.
Cormac McCarthy, maybe the greatest American novelist of my time, has passed away at 89. He was full of years and created a fine body of work, but I still mourn his passing.
— Stephen King (@StephenKing) June 13, 2023
The reality is that most of the greatest novelists were Russian. Moby Dick is the only American novel that compares with the Russian greats. There are no good modern novelists, except for Michel Houellebecq. The problem is, there is no meaning to life anymore, so there is nothing really to write about.
What I will say of the dead bastard and fiend McCarthy is this: he certainly embodied the spirit of the age.
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Great article (thank you for recognizing how good the MOVIE ‘No Country For Old Men’ is) until the claim about the Russians.
Don’t get me wrong, Russian literature is justly legendary, but English literature is just as good, and some of the older American novelists were good, besides Melville.
No respect, not even a mention, for Hawthorne? Seriously?
(Also, despite his shitlibbery, some of Larry McMurtry’s novels are at least fun to read. Like ‘Lonesome Dove.’)
That was good, you should do literary criticism on a regular basis.
I haven’t read enough of McCarthy to know — just a few chapters of Blood Meridian — but yeah.
Most “post-modern” American literature is crap. And if he’s being celebrated by the media and by the likes of Stephen King…
While Houellebecq is a good writer, his subject matter is so depressing that I could also not finish any of his novels either.
Yes, that’s the main problem. I think most of the greatest novels of old were written by Catholic or Orthodox Christian writers (even if lapsed).
Our age is so nihilistic that the basic point of view is just, “nothing means nothing, everything is random, so writing is also meaningless and random.”
One case is Ian McEwan, a good prose writer but who usually writes about trite, trivial things with no deep meaning. His book about robots was so bad.
There are no good modern novelists
Hey, not so fast. What about Annie Proulx? The Shipping News, Postcards, Accordion Crimes, That Old Ace in the Hole, they’re all fine novels. Her short stories are excellent too.
Ignoring all the literature snobs who say his writing style was bad, the greatest American author was Lovecraft, in terms of the atmosphere and brand new genre he created. He was also not your typical liberal author, writing things that are very anti other races.
Sure an’ begorrums, Bloom liked him some hearty goy cock to suck, so of course the fat faggot crushed on young Cormac’s perky ass cheeks and Dick-Sucking Lips. Bloom wished the dreamy Celt would squeeze his flaccid member like a ziplock baggy fulla jello.
Despite his queer-bait appeal, McCarthy’s real secret to success was popularizing the anarchy-as-chaos canard for the lower-middlebrow market. CIA loves that shit because it lets them pretend that their impunity is all that stands between you and Hobbesian war of all against all. (Cops try the same shit, only stupider, in ominous letters to small-time editors.) In actuality, humans self-organize to perform functions that inadequate states cannot perform, and David Graeber showed that centralized totalitarianism of the CIA variety is a recent anomaly.
If Steven King blew Bloom we would all be bullshitting about The Stand instead. Same thing.
The reality is that most of the greatest novelists were Russian. Moby Dick is the only American novel that compares with the Russian greats. There are no good modern novelists, except for Michel Houellebecq. The problem is, there is no meaning to life anymore, so there is nothing really to write about.
I say:
French guy Houellebecq seems to be able to use the perceptions of things as they are in a way that is entertaining and illuminating at the same time. A lot of people can accurately describe the tension between globalization and patriotism, but few can turn those perceptions into creations that other people can understand.
Houellebecq is rightly riling up the average Frenchy with taunts and books about the tension that is being applied to regular French people. I assume Houellebecq would like the tension to snap, thereby accelerating the new ruling class to be installed in France. Maybe the French bastard Houellebecq just wants to smoke some more cigarettes and write some more books. Who knows?
The best thing about the French Yellow Vest Patriots is that they are about as close to explicit Whiteness as you can get. The Muslims in France will not matter when the treasonous French ruling class is removed from power by the French Yellow Vest Patriots. Just the same as the Blacks won’t matter when the White Core American Patriots remove the treasonous ruling class from power in the United States.
Houellebecq says he’s from Normandy and Marine Le Pen is from Normandy, so there’s that.
The Houellebecq comedy movie The Kidnapping of Michel Houellebecq is a good movie to watch while drinking beer or gin.
The “meaning to life” is to recognize yourself as soul; the purpose of life.
Here, on earth, every body is going to die.
Earth, the valley of death, where everything dies, is just an intermezzo.
See what is free from foul & death: Soul! Soul is eternal.
Soul breathes the body. Soul is the real driver.
Soul changes vehicles like Americans change cars & women and/or houses.
In reality – soul life – nothing is free and everything else is most expensive.
There is no money for nothing and no chicks are for free.
Every thing costs and usually another life cycle here in the valley of death,
where the negative force rules. God is not the ruler of earthly meddlings.
Again: see soul! See “your” soul in you while alive.
That is the purpose; to recognize yourself as soul (in essence) while conscious in a human body; the crown of earthly livings.
Good and/or God luck to you.
Remember: never lay hand on yourself.
To kill the other idiot is bad. To kill youself is the worst.
Why? Because man should only destroy what he can recreate.
Man can not create life – soul. Soul is S O U L – SO YOU (are) ALL.
Soul is God. God is soul. God is life – that which makes your heart beat and your lungs breath.
God is breathing you. Never cut his breath off.
You are blessed, because he gave you a human body to recognize yourself as him in HIM(mel).
is the road to hell paved with bad cormac mccarthy books?
i’m not a lit snob, but lovecraft’s writing style was horrifyingly bad.
Anglin,
The movie adaptation of “The Road” has one potentially very important use: Getting your family and friends to understand the abject horror of what a potential nuclear war with the East would look like for 99.9% of us. Few of us have impregnable mountainside bunkers with 20-years worth of food, fuel and generators, and munitions to outlast what would be zombie-humanity in 6 months. The aftermath would be about 10 years of crazy-weather Mad Max replete with real cannibalism, just like the movie. That movie, with the fantastic Viggo Mortensen, could be the one really good thing that came from McCarthy. Show it to your pro-war-with-Russia acquaintances folks. Dis-abuse them of neocon notions.
I tried to read The Shipping News and couldn’t get past the first 10 pages or so. Perhaps a few more. I just didn’t care at all about a single one of the characters.
I had no curiosity at all as to what would happen to them on the next page.
IMO no novel is better than the best-written nonfiction.
And the best novels are about history.
They are part of history and their characters, too, are part of history.
A marvelous novel, possibly unknown to many here, is Generations of Winter, by Vassily Aksyomov.
Cormac should have taken S. King with him.
Blood Meridian might be the greatest American novel of the twentieth century. For sure it is a great example of the art form. I can’t imagine ever forgetting the experience of reading it. Never read the later books. Also I will never re-read Blood Meridian. What Coppola was trying with Apocalypse Now, McCarthy set the bar with that book. Realistic horror beyond anything anybody else could ever care to imagine.
Have you read anything about about Houellebecq’s adventures in pornographic film with his wife? Apparently half of France is laughing their ass off at him.
Lonesome Dove is arguably the greatest American novel of the last century, and a wonderful, unwoke miniseries was created from it…Larry McMurtry was a noted historian of the West, and he can really bring it on that subject….
Yes, I plan to read Blood Meridian…I didn’t like No Country for Old Men, but this one is highly recommended…
King’s only real value was his early exposure of MKUltra and the Bio-weapons industry, with best sellers….
This only proves that Anglin has areas of total blindness. McCarthy knows what evil is, and that is the very thing that the Modern world began by denying.
So in “All the Pretty Horses,” which won the National Book Award, McCarthy uses the oh-so-very-clever technique of never using quotes for dialogue. Just… words. Some examples of his scintillating prose:
It was dark outside and cold and no wind. (High school Hemingway)
Anyway you’re sixteen years old, you cant run a ranch.
Yes I can.
Ooooh, no apostrophe for “can’t” and no quotes. Such genius!
The first drops of rain hissed in the fire. He looked at Rawlins.
You ain’t sorry you come down here are you?
Not yet.
He nodded. Rawlins rose.
You want your fish or you aim to just set there in the rain?
I’ll get it.
I got it.
There are endless pages of this thudding dialogue. It’s painful. But there are Deep Thoughts!
She raised her eyes and looked at him. He’d never seen despair before. He thought he had, but he had not.
Oooof, enough punishment. What did the critics say?
“Surely one of the great American novels.” USA Today. Surely!
“A major achievement.” The New York Times
“A genuine miracle in prose.” Chicago Tribune
You get the idea.
The best modern novelist is John Williams, who wrote a fantastic Western called “Butcher’s Crossing.” And who wrote an absolutely heartbreaking romance set in a university, called “Stoner.” And who wrote an almost unbelievably fantastic story of Rome, “Augustus.” That’s all.
But did McCarthy sink to the level of Dong and Dog?
https://nypost.com/2023/06/14/penn-state-professor-themis-matsoukas-accused-of-performing-sexual-acts-with-his-dog/
Sour grapes, anyone? Mr. Anglin’s own customary offerings here, obsessively “self”-referential/-aggrandizing and relentlessly mono-dimensional, render his “literary” criticisms of not only Cormac McCarthy but of just about any scribe he squirts his vitriol at, almost comical in their twisted malformation and reflexively “self”-abusive tedium. That is no mean accomplishment for the “self”-admitted smartest guy in any room at any time. Just ask him if you don’t believe it.
Death to all novelists. These people flood the world with their shit to such an insane degree that useless novels are the only thing the idiot goyim think of when you think of books. Them and comics anyway…
Instead of giving kids real stuff to read to broaden their minds, people only ever foist garbage like roald fucking dahl and j.d. salinger onto them. School and home libraries are filled with nothing but waste of time novels. Then they wonder why the kids grew up dumb. Reading fiction as an adult is almost as bad, when you realize how short life really is yet you choose to throw the time away reading novels.
Novels: a zero return investment.
Sweet!
So now I can strike “Blood Meridian” off my list of future “must reads”.
Ok, McCarthy can be depressing, but you are wrong about No Country for Old Men. The book is about the sheriff, a good man, whose guardian angel is his little daughter, dead many years. The movie changes the emphasis completely, and in an evil and subtle way. In the movie, the main character is the murderer. Now we are supposed to think the evil murderer is interesting and cool, like Xavier Bardem. The sheriff dies before the murderer is caught, because evil always appears to win in this fallen world. Hollywood picked up his books because his books look squarely at evil, and Hollywood thought evil was all they were about, but Hollywood is stupid.
‘In the wake of his death at home in Mexico at the age of 89, the Jewish American media is celebrating McCarthy as one of the greatest American novelists. ‘ — Andrew Anglin
Speaking of sentence structure, let’s fix the dangling modifier above:
‘In the wake of his death at home in Mexico at the age of 89, McCarthy is being celebrated by the Jewish American media as one of the greatest American novelists.’
Andrew Anglin’s spittle-flecked sass is in a class by itself. But if he’s going to trash a well-known author for leaning on “stylistics,” he really needs an editor to make sure his stinging malediction is stylistically beyond reproach.
At the Mountains of Madness is a decent read. And I wouldn’t know what the word “eldritch” means if it weren’t for him. I saw there was some streaming series called “Lovecraft Country” but I gave it a pass because I could tell from the trailer that it looked heavily negrofied, and I wondered what the hell negroes and their issues have to do with the work of Lovecraft.
I don’t share your good opinion of Blood Meridian, but I salute you for addressing the thread in a responsibly adult fashion—that is to say, by saying what you think and what you like without sneers and snarls at people who might think otherwise. Cf. comment no. 5,* where the commenter’s insecurity is plain to see.
For what it’s worth, I think Anglin is mistaken about Faulkner or is at least needlessly harsh. To take just a single example, As I Lay Dying is a beautifully written and often very funny novel, nor is it so “modernist” in its construction as to put off nonprofessional readers. On the other hand, almost nothing by Melville ever touched me, and I never felt the power in Moby Dick that a great many others have felt. When I had a second go at it about twenty years ago, I kept thinking of what Samuel Johnson wrote about Paradise Lost: no man ever wished it longer.
_________________
*No. 6 is much more disgusting with its delight in filth, but its author is simply working overtime to prevent readers from seeing that filth is the only thing that appeals to him.
“joined the Jews”….that’s right:
anyone who receives a (((Pulitzer))) prize
is either a Jew, or in CM’s case,
a grotesque shabbatz goy.
Annie Proulx also wrote Brokeback Mt. Because
she’s a Lez.
You read pulp fiction authors for their imagination, not their writing ability. Almost all of them were bad at it.
Like some people in this thread, were stuck in the “keep piling up fancy words until they think I’m clever” phase you get with adolescents and twenty-somethings. It’s charming when Lovecraft and Howard do it, not so much when it’s people on the internet.
You’re the kind of person who tells people “Actually, the sun doesn’t rise or set, it’s the Earth that moves,” aren’t you?
Ask and ye shall receive. Lovecraft’s 1912 poem “On the Creation of Niggers”.
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/On_the_Creation_of_Niggers
More about novelist AA would approve of, like Lovecraft, Henry James, and Melville:
The Eldritch Evola . . . & Others: Traditionalist Meditations on Literature, Art, & Culture (San Francisco: Counter-Currents, 2014)
https://counter-currents.com/product/the-eldritch-evola/
A semi-literate, one-man screed factory calling Hemingway and Faulkner hacks.
Haha!
TUR needs to cut this guy loose.
Schopenhauer counselled not letting children read novels or poetry (or the Bible) before they completed their real education, studying real facts about the world, so that time would not be wasted later removing one false idea after another from their minds (and likely leaving many others behind).
He considered The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin to be ideal reading for kiddies.
Even adults shouldn’t waste their time reading any novels but four: Don Quixote, Tristram Shandy, Emile, and Wilhelm Meister, since all four teach that the world is a dream, which is the conclusion of Schopenhauer’s own book. Of course, the only “philosophy” one should bother with is Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation, which sums up, completes, and puts an end to all “philosophy.”
I see nothing wrong in any of this.
Houllebecq puts all the “Lovecraft can’t write” poseurs in their place. Ring the bell, school’s out, suckers.
Not having read the novel, I am in no position to comment on it or on your reading of it. Yet your capsule summation, quoted above, of the movie’s subtly evil savor is surely correct, and I thank you for offering it here. Anglin’s praise for the film struck me as incomprehensible. (((Hollywood))) indeed worships evil.
In 1990 Miller’s Crossing opened the New York Film Festival. Like many other employees of Lincoln Center, I was able to attend the premiere gratis. My primary interest was in seeing Albert Finney, of whom I was a long-time fan. The film engendered a profound revulsion in me toward the Coens, and I have never seen any reason for a change of heart or mind.
I don’t know why I keep returning to read the demented and seething Andrew Anglin. I think the pleasure in reading Anglin is about the same as watching Beavis and Butthead. You laugh despite your upbringing. And you’d be ashamed if anyone found out. But, you watch.
Anyway this time, in addition to the shame and embarrassment I feel, I also feel gratitude for the references to what look like some good novels. I’ve been groping for some good new reads. Now I have a huge list. Thank you again!
I’ve never read anything by this Cormac character, for whatever that’s worth. I probably never will, he just doesn’t sound that interesting.
The sentence you quoted does not contain a dangling modifier. The sentence begins with six prepositional phrases that establish the place and time of what is to follow, but it is sophistic to claim that they have a necessary syntactic link with the main clause that follows them.
If the sentence had been freestanding, it might have been reasonable to object that the sentence’s fifth word should be “McCarthy’s” and that “him” would more aptly stand in for the later use of the name. The sentence isn’t freestanding, however, and since McCarthy’s name appears prominently in the immediately preceding sentence, there is no danger whatsoever of a misunderstanding of what Anglin means to say, just as there really are no grounds for objection to his harmonious syntax.
editors note: this andrew anglin article was written by jung-freud.
Me thinks thou protests too much
I enjoyed James Clavell’s books, particularly Tai Pan.
How many novels have you written Andrew? The man just died, have some sense of decency and respect.
Lotta talent, though, lez or not
I forgot to mention Charles Portis. Portis is amazing. True Grit is as good as advertised.
Thanks for bringing Williams to our attention. I will probably read those 3 books.
Man, are you LAUGHABLY off-base.
In both the novel AND the movie, Sheriff Ed Tom does NOT die.
Try again.
No Country For Old Men is a GREAT movie and Chigurh, whether you like it or not, IS an interesting character.
The movie ends by letting Ed Tom have the satisfaction of his dreams.
It is important to note also that Harold Bloom HATED No Country For Old Men.
What about Evelyn Waugh?
Video Link
This has got to be the most up to date book I’ve ever read. Even though it is set in the late 1920s.
Azania even anticipates Wakanda and Obama. How did he foresee it all? It even has cannibals.
I found No Country For Old Men overwritten and without a logical plot – why does Anton Chigurh keep killing after recovering the money? – and I haven’t read anything else by Mccarthy. But he’s not the worst writer in America now. That’s Stiff-em King the liberal nazi, no doubt at all.
Don’t knew about Anglin but I’ve written six.
Not that this matters. Roger Ebert never made a film. So?
McCarthy sucks and Houllebeq sucks. And I don’t care how they’re spelled.
Griswold Q. Leidecker: ( Son of a single mother who was a Navy veteran,animal porn actress ,circus freak and rabbinical student,and a 1/4 black trans dwarf and one time Republican candidate for Congress,who was himself the product of the rape of a lesbian Episcopal priest by U Thant)
“I like reading about Hitler. ”
Cormac reminded me of that other schlockmeister: Tarantino.
I dunno. I guess I just grew tired of adults who think being a nihilist downer, sarcastic fuckwad, and despair-mongering turd-dropper is somehow bold-brave-hip. To me, it’s the false façade of someone terrified of feeling, lest they be hurt. Frankly, I think it took more balls to be Mr. Rogers than Howard Stern. After all, it’s easier being a pain-free rock:
Video Link
Also, easy to be hard:
Video Link
In the stellar movie, Inherit the Wind, Spencer Tracy plays lawyer Clarence Darrow. Gene Kelly plays cynical reporter HL Mencken. In the final scene, the former reads the latter the riot act:
Video Link
Finally, if you want some yucks, check out Sound Guy. This is his take on No Country For Old Men:
Video Link
It’s been years since I saw the movie or read the book. I thought the sheriff died at the end. Oh well. But I do remember the reader is left knowing the sheriff is old and worn-out and probably won’t catch the killer. The movie was fine as a crime thriller but still morally off-kilter imho.
My daughter read ‘The Road’ as assigned reading in (expensive private, to avoid the half-black crime-ridden bussed public alternative) middle school, and I happened to read it too. Truly an awful book, as I recall there were several other awful books she was assigned. I couldn’t comprehend why such perverse garbage was being assigned in middle school. I’m surprised anyone has voluntarily read the book.
There was a phrase in the book that was so bad I remembered it for a long time, a spider with something or other, I can’t remember it now, that I quoted it for months after ready the book as an example of the worst writing ever …
I did like French writers. English not so much. I did like breakfast at Tiffany.
I have seen No country for old man. I do not remember from it anything. So it was a shit movie.
No soul empty. On the other hand I do like Steven King. There is a soul.
From Williams, I have read only “Stoner”, but it is indeed brilliant.
Perhaps he didn’t become so famous because his name, John Williams, is so common? Some may confuse him with the film soundtrack composer. Sometimes, choosing a good pseudonym is a good marketing strategy? Cormac’s original name is really Charles.
Bloom was goofy, but he wasn’t so bad. At least he was against most deconstructionism and such. I see him as (mostly) on the good side. Or at least, not as bad as later Jewish critics such as Sontag, etc.
I didn’t know he was a homo. Wikipedia says he had several affairs with female students, including an attempt on Naomi Wolf, but I find that hard to believe. He was not good looking at all, even considering the general ugliness of most people in academia.
I tried to read “Blood Meridian” and found the first few pages quite nihilistic. I understand that Lin Dinh views it as a well-deserved takedown of the myth of American “manifest destiny”. But there are better ways of doing it, instead of painting one’s ancestors as complete fools and evil knaves – they gave birth to you man. I read “Gravity’s Rainbow” to which Cormac’s works are often compared. But even Thomas Pynchon mellowed in later years with books such as “Mason & Dixon”, which came across as a celebration of the American spirit for all its flaws. But apparently not Cormac, who kept on droning like this till the end.
A novel like Blood Meridian bears no comparison with Moby Dick, where flawed though Ahab was, he was at the end of day railing against a force of nature that the whale, Moby Dick, was. Taking off from D.H.Lawrence’s review, Moby Dick was America leading the nations of the world in an assault on Nature. Which may well be the case, but that doesn’t make America evil, merely stupid and arrogant.
Nonetheless I still intend to read the book to see if the subtext that Cormac was driven to a kind of sacramental experience through all that violence is carried through in a technical sense, being some kind of Catholic like I am.
James Clavell was a master story teller and I have read all his major books. Most of his books don’t have a denouement and you’re kind of left dissatisfied at the end but I guess it’s to get you to go and grab the next tome. “Whirlwind”, based on true events of the Iranian revolution, is my favourite. Also the autobiographical “King Rat” is very good.
I love reading novels set in the Far East, and James Clavell follows in the tradition of Joseph Conrad and Anthony Burgess. Many others have tried but I think these three stand out above the rest. Then there are individual works like “Saint Jack” by Paul Theroux and “The World of Suzy Wong” by Richard Mason.
That is indeed a very fine novel, but for those who are steeped only in things WASPy it may prove a difficult read. And it is a far cry from a Dostoevsky or even Tolstoy. Or even the best of Solzhenitsyn’s fiction.
If you are stupid and arrogant – filled with hubris – then you are going to do a great deal of evil.
That became America because the specific Americans that both Melville and Hawthorne saw as being defined that way – New England Anglo-Saxon Puritans – would win control of the country’s future during the Civil Wr and then proceed to run its first Cultural revolution: Reconstruction.
Just as Flannery O’Connor always laughed at how the professional book review crowd and the academics saw her work as celebrating wild individualism and evil deeds. To her such stupid and childish pontificating only proved the evil.
God. Damn. I had to look back at the byline to make sure it was written by Anglin, so different is this article from most of his unhinged, though entertaining, rants about the anal Jew conspiracy to do whatever it is he thinks they are up to.
My God. Anglin, more of this, please. But keep writing the anal Jew stuff, too. I especially liked how you recently started one of your columns with the word “anal”. Very first word in the headline. Brilliant.
I was too chickenshit to ever actually attempt writing a novel, even though my heroes have always been writers. Hemingway, Twain, etc. Glad to see the shout-out to Elmore Leonard. An underappreciated craftsman whose work I thoroughly enjoy. No love for Russell Banks? I can see why not. Interesting that Banks’ best novel, in my opinion, was one he knocked out merely to blow off steam before he started work on Cloudsplitter, a turgid turd reminiscent of Infinite Jest. I refer, of course, to Rule of the Bone, a sort of modern, slapstick version of Huckleberry Finn, which is my own nominee for Great American Novel. Which is a good place to end this self-indulgent post. Adios, amigos!
Of that era, Fitzgerald is brilliant, Virginia Wolf too, in a different way. Faulkner is an ancestor to the masturbatory 1960s writers, and Hemingway writes generic clunky alcoholic minimalism like Carver.
If the movie was anything like the book, I totally agree. Its saving graces were the camerawork under Lasse Hallstrom’s direction and the offbeat Celtic music on the soundtrack.
“The Road” is no kid’s book.
The author is right in his comparison between American and Russian novels, which in the former case are mostly filtered to allow only edgy (ie, morally subversive) trash to get published. Generally speaking, if it’s not subversive of Western values and America in particular, obviously the Jews who control book publishing wouldn’t publish it in the first place.
By way of comparison, a person can be transposed into an entirely different world, and one of high moral purpose, in one of the great Russian novels, while most recent American novels’ prose and themes smell of the Freudian couch and are written in a style that’s so archly contrived that it’s painful to read even a few paragraphs.
For those interested in Russian novels, those by Dostoevsky, the Russian Shakespeare, are the place to start. For a deep look inside the structure and themes of his novels, you won’t find a better guide than Victor Terras’s short and brilliant Reading Dostoevsky.
Proulx and Cormac McCarthy get savaged by The Atlantic (from long ago): https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2001/07/a-readers-manifesto/302270/
Well, I can see where the author is coming from.
The CIA has nothing to do with Cormac McCarthy. I think Bloom was genuinely all in on Cormac due to the highfalutin language, and that’s it. I would argue Bloom’s most subversive (yet unsurprising) move was trying to elevate his co-tribalist Phillip Roth to god-tier literary status.
Russian literature took a huge bloody hit once writers who spent their formative years in pre-Soviet Russia died out. It has been only slowly recovering since, though I have to admit, Pelevin is one of the few actual novelists of our time in the whole world (despite him tripping on Buddhism and bad English translations).
That said, American literature always was a bastard child of English literature, which in turn was a poor sibling of French literature – the French writers have invented nearly of the modern literary genres and formats. Its attempts to do anything but pure brainless entertainment without any sort of actual themes or social commentary have always been lackluster, even as it pretended to be serious.
Roger Ebert absolutely made films. He collaborated with Russ Meyer on Beyond the Valley of the Dolls and a couple of others.
Half the posters on here would read Shandy and realise, “oh god I’m uncle Toby!” Literature’s first right wing uncle?
It’s quite an interesting long standing theme in Anglin’s writing. Cormac McCarthy is a repeated target.
Lovecraft wrote a story about a man who married a woman who turned out to be part alien. But, the real horror was that the other part of her was black. So, you can’t say that negroes had nothing to do with his stories.
Hence their hysterical utter hatred of Tom Wolf’s attempts to revive the 19th century novel. Not that he succeeded, but it was an admirable attempt, while their reactions were almost Trump-derangement levels just because some chap decided to try and write a real book.
Isn’t AA really into Kanye West? That alone should convince you to take his opinions of artistic quality with a grain of salt…
I’ll say this for Roth, you know what you’re getting: the same book, the same reviews, every few years. I think current AI technology can already replace him and his reviewers — it just wants a tougher challenge.
Actually, though I disagree with your comment, it does direct attention to something worth talking about. And that is this:
When it comes to literary criticism, or anything for that matter, the easiest thing in the world is to call a writer, or book, good or bad. This is why literary criticism has earned itself such a bad reputation.
Again, though your comment does direct attention to something worth talking about, you didn’t say anything of substance, even about Fitzgerald or Wolf. And now we’re back to why the easiest thing in the world is to call something good or bad.
If you could point to something in Faulkner’s or Hemingway’s work that could substantiate your view I’d be genuinely interested to read it.
There’s a good detective fiction writer left: James Lee Burke, author of “In the Electric Mist With the Confederate Dead”. A few of his novels have been made into films that kind of ruined his stories and used douchebag actors like Alec Baldwin and John Goodman He made a few libtard statements in his early novels, but isn’t that way now. McCarthy wasn’t ever a total asshat, either. AA hasn’t read anything by him, probably. In case nobody here has noticed, AA is an entertaining writer who is full of shit on many subjects.
I’m glad you feel such strong literary rage, Andrew. My loathing for T. S. Eliot is equally fierce. I despise that man for what he did to English poetry. I strongly believe in the spiritual inspiration of all the arts, and that every generation produces its unique angelically-inspired works and its unique demonically-inspired works. I trust your judgment that McCarthy was in the devil’s camp, just as I’m certain of my own judgment that the work of T. S. Eliot has been a curse on the legacy of Anglo civilisation. Despite Eliot’s pretensions to Christianity, I can’t find a single Christian sentiment expressed in his writing. Instead it’s the weary, bleak, flaccid sentiments of a Stoic but decadent and without the sobriety of the Roman Stoics. All he did was endlessly whine about the decline of civilisation and sulk like a passionless, bourgeois cuckold — and passed it off as some grand, apocalyptic revelation. Utterly disgusting.
The greatest failure of Bloom’s generation of literary critics is their failure to recognise, and their constant counter-signalling of, the legacy and canonical status of Tolkien. They went all in on Joyce/Eliot Modernism as the standard of literary brilliance, fetishising mere literary style. They were unable to absorb the great literary grandeur and breakthrough Of Tolkien’s mythopoetic method, because they were too absorbed on the surface level text. They will be proven to have been fools in a hundred years time 3hrn
Not a genius:
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Don’t be too harsh on Andrew, he’s young (comparatively) anyone who still reads good novels will always be able to sift the chaff from the grain. Many American writers are underrated.
“On the Road” by Jack Kerouac is a very good book, so are many by
Henry Miller, who was another great American writer. He saw the bullshit early on (1930’s) and moved to France. I find some of his writings almost hypnotic.
I have a big fat compilation of Anton Chekhov’s short stories, but keep in mind this is a translation and part of the credit should go to the translator.
When I was a teen, my father bought me a stack of Zane Grey’s novels, and I was hooked on the America of 1800’s. Thank the Lord I never took any active steps to move to America.
Cormac McCarthy most certainly does not embody the spirit of the age. The spirit of the age is Jew pukers whining at great length in asshole magazines
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/personal-history/my-adventures-in-deconstruction
What’s your complaint about Melville?
The two best American prose stylists of the twentieth century, sans doute, were Shirley Jackson and MFK Fisher, who wrote mostly about food. Coming up in third place is Flannery O’Connor, dragging Dorothy Parker behind her. Best poet however is Frank O’Hara, by a country mile.
I will not be contradicted in this: pistols at dawn if you dare to disagree.
After Wallace Stevens.
He said ‘besides Melville’ — which means ‘in addition to Melville’.
Eat shit and die.
Waugh went to Ethiopia/Abyssinia three times and several other parts of black Africa as well. He went the first time as a correspondent for the London Times in 193o. His observations then were the basis for Black Mischief. (Waugh kept his eyes open and his wits clear in all his travels, of course.)
Waugh was again in Ethiopia in 1935, that time as a correspondent for the Daily Mail. His hilarious nonfiction account, Waugh in Abyssinia,* of his experiences there during the lead-up to the Italian invasion was published in 1936. Fictionalized versions of some of the things he saw and the people he met turned up later in Scoop.
_________
*The title itself is a pun. Educated Brits would have pronounced “Waugh” and “war” identically. Some white Brits still do.
I don’t think you could have read Four Quartets with care to say what you have said.
Frank O’Hara was an undisciplined, self-indulent mess. If that’s what makes a poet, then he was a great one.
His style was in reality brilliant — and perfectly in accord with his themes. My only complaint is that he used the incorrect form “octopi” as the plural of “octopus.”
Yes, but that was a poor phrasing on my part, which led to the confusion.
Ebert never had the fire to make his own films. He wanted to just stand back and mock others.
Of course he won’t catch the killer, but guess what? Lots of murders don’t get solved. It’s been that way for a long time. The whole point of the ending for Ed Tom is that he gets something like the satisfaction of knowing that his efforts at being a good lawman will be rewarded in the next life. So the ending does, in fact, state that the good will be rewarded.
That is a pretty good summary of southern secession.
You have no idea what you’re talking about.
I found “No Country for Old Men” utterly depressing and completely devoid of any redeeming quality.
Nice obituary. Cormac McCarthy is just garbage like most American writers. Good to see someone calling him out.
Well, it’s really quite a close call between Frank and Wally. (as in, an astonished insurance executive saying, “Wally wrote POETRY?!”) They’re both pretty amazing, but they work in such different veins that a strict comparison is hard to do. Frank may seem to a casual observer like he’s just bluffing, but he was a war veteran and a classical pianist and a professional art museum curator, he’s got more up his sleeve than he lets on. (“My heart is in my pocket, / It is Poems by Pierre Reverdy.” Ever try reading Reverdy en francais? When was the last time you translated Catullus?)
Put it this way: when I was a kid I loved Wally for both his playfulness (“blackbird”) and his intellectual weirdness (“an ordinary evening in New Haven”). But when I got older, I found that what I had thought in Frank was playfulness was actually intellectual depth, and what I had thought was intellectual was really playful. Shall we win at love, or shall we lose…
In the neighborhood I grew up in, there’s a particular tree with a particular view of the waterfront, and when I was a kid, I sat there under that tree and read Wallace Stevens, and wrote the poems that got me into Harvard, so I could walk down the same streets as Wally. That was ages ago, and I am different, but the tree is still there. Now, when I have the time, I sit under it and read Frank O’Hara, and write the stuff that would now get me kicked out of Harvard.
Glad nobody’s giving me a fight about Shirley and Mary Frances, though.
“The whole point of the ending for Ed Tom is that he gets something like the satisfaction of knowing that his efforts at being a good lawman will be rewarded in the next life. So the ending does, in fact, state that the good will be rewarded.”
Okay. I should re-read the book. I do remember that McCarthy looks at evil straight on, but is never blind to the existence of pure goodness, however fragile. Went to Amazon and read reviews for Blood Meridian, though, and it sounds like too much, too cruel.
Russell Banks? I recall really liking Continental Drift . It was one of the last novels I read where I felt physically transported to an alien environment. Paul Theroux’s Mosquito Coast was like that too, but not nearly as good.
I think that was before the Israeli prison guard took over.
McCarthy certainly had a rub your nose in it philosophy of artistic integrity.
“I’m tough and honest. I rub your nose in IT because IT is TRUTH and if you don’t like IT, it’s because you are AFRAID of TRUTH and you are NOT TOUGH and HONEST.”
The fact that so many were taken in by such sentimental pseudo artistry is testament to a profound lack of confidence in artistic assessment that exists and is promoted in our society.
The weakest novel of Henry James is ten levels better than anything by Cormac McCarthy. But James in fact never wrote a weak novel. Modern readers cannot really delve deeply, they have no appreciation for the subtle.
McCarthy however was not a nihilist. He was something much worse, a sentimentalist who pretended to be a nihilist.
But most people are not going to understand what I am talking about. So be it.
Watch and feel the hair stand on the back of your neck.
Video Link
Never heard of Cormac McCarthy and don’t care if he’s dead. I also won’t waste any time looking him up as Anglin has told me all I need to know.
Love this. Good aim. bravo. amen. carry on. be careful. Christ is King. (respect yourself.)
Pynchon, James, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Kerouac, McCarthy, O’Connor, Joyce, Eliot, Melville, Sterne, Goethe, Rousseau, Proulx, Hemingway, Faulkner, Roth, Cervantes, Waugh, Chekhov, Jackson, Miller, Stevens, Woolf, Fitzgerald, Wallace, Conrad, Twain, Hawthorne, and Schopenhauer are all fine writers and thinkers, novelists, short story writers, poets, and philosophers.
But then I’m not picky about my literary authors.
Also, I’ve been published in literary magazines. Hell, I’ve also written books! And I publish in peer reviewed academic journals. Can anyone else on here make any of these claims?
So I know a thing or two about this stuff.
One of the benefits of literature is that it exposes you to what would otherwise be alien concepts and situations.
You will never be in a boat, in the middle of the ocean rowing out to kill the largest predator in the world, but reading Moby Dick you can get a sense of what it was like and a sense of what the people were like.
Whether an inward journey or an outward journey, literature can take you places and show you things. Some of which, you may prefer not to know.
Someone closer to Nietzsche once opined that Africans are living the epos:
You come of age, you fight, you procreate, you die; The End.
… while Westerners are living the novel: Everything is “feelz” and
“development” – and this is the true reason the West is over 😋
I highly recommend them. “Augustus” in particular is fascinating. It’s a kind of epistolary novel, where Williams makes up journals, government documents, letters, memoirs, etc. from the Romans at the time. Somehow he perfectly delineates the characters and their voices across these varied and seemingly jumbled artifacts. The characters are largely all real historical people. It covers the same ground as Robert Graves’ “I, Claudius,” but it’s much better.
Full disclosure, I’ve not read McCarthy and have no interest in doing so. It seems to me that about late 60s-mid70s or so, writers who had interesting and fun stories to tell began turning to genre fiction, SF and mystery in particular. Following on the success of novels like Payton Place and its’ imitators, American publishers decided they wanted tales of sexual depravity, and I believe it was about that time that American readers began buying and reading the sort of books that had previously been relegated to the so-called pulps.
While I do agree with Mr. Anglin about Hemmingway, a truly loathsome writer and person, I wonder why he is so eager to overlook American women writers, such as Carson McCullers, Dawn Powell, M.F.K. Fisher–she did not only write cookbooks–and Joyce Carol Oates. Oates is particularly interesting to me because she managed to combine the sexual obsession publishers wanted with the non-emotional, non-sensationalist realistic style of what I consider the best of midcentury American fiction.
My personal nomination for best American novel of the 20thC is The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by McCullers, with Chandler’s The Little Sister and Robert Penn Warren’s novel based on the life of Huey Long, I have forgotten the title, as runners up.
I am currently reading the Milagro Beanfield War and finding it far better than I had thought it would be. Nichols does not waste his or the reader’s time with whining about manhood, or feminism and such; he instead describes the two forces which condition life in the inter mountain west, land grabs and water wars. I am surprised he found a publisher.
Could you please make the case about why should I read McCarthy?
Waugh in Abyssinia was my first read of Waugh’s work.
Also Ezra Pound was Eliot’s editor.
Even more I hope you are not that ignorant and posted a parody for the dunce Anglin.
Here is a must read:
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/mccarthy-joyce-and-the-culture-of-death/
I agree. I’ve read most of Cormac’s books and my favorite is Child of God. Anglin has a problem with the depravity of Cormac’s characters but recommends Houellebecq? Lol.
Another author I take a guilty pleasure in reading is Palahniuk. Wonder what Anglin thinks of him? Palahniuk said on the Joe Rogan podcast: “I read the Daily Stormer. Andrew Anglin cracks me up.”
How about reading this for a start:
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/mccarthy-joyce-and-the-culture-of-death/
And then this might help a bit:
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/land-of-unconscious-genius/
Back when King was slamming 24 beers a day he was an entertaining storyteller: Pet Sematary, The Dark Half (my favorite), The Body, Misery, Salem’s Lot. Once he sobered up, not so much.
He’s a great writer, one of the greatest American novelists of our modern era! And yes, he does read like Faulkner and he’s not a lot different. Or even O’Connor.
Of course it depends on your taste and he might not be to your tastes. I imagine he’s too much for a lot of women.
But you’re talking to a guy who has read all of William Burroughs’ novels, so I don’t have an issue with objectionable content.
I also tend to think that fiction is devoid of morality. Fiction’s there to tell a story. Maybe some writers have weird attitudes. Burroughs was an obsessed homosexual who loved teenage boys and hated women. His books are full of explicit homosexual sex. I don’t agree with any of that but I read them anyway. I sort of skipped over the gay sex parts but even that was well-written. I’m a writer so I read for style. I don’t think novelists have any particular message nor should they. And a lot of times I don’t agree with them.
PS Pound, Oates, Palahniuk, McCullers, Nichols, Warren are also all very good.
McCullers was a dyke who probabably hated men. Pound was a narcissist ass who later became a raving Nazi antisemite. Palahniuk is a degenerate homosexual who litters his books with gross gay sex.
Lots of writers are nutty, bipolar, depressive, or homosexual. Poets in particular are any of these things and it’s incredible how many suicide out.
Roth, Rechy, Mailer, and Koszinski were/are narcissists. Wallace and Miller tried to murder their girlfriends and wives. Miller, Mailer and Bukowski were misogynistic pricks who treated women like dirt. Burroughs was a drug addict. Kerouac drank himself into the grave. Genet was a homosexual, a pimp, and a petty thief. Most all of them were quite good writers, but I’m not into Bukowski too much.
Hemingway was a lousy person? LOL lots of writers were terrible people. Shakespeare was a monster. But that’s not why we read Hamlet!
Djuna Barnes Nightwood is a great novel, beautifully written. Honestly, I try to read contemporary fiction but besides some good crime stuff it is dreck so far as I’ve seen. Maybe that’s not accurate. Jonathan Frantz writes really well, but about characters I couldn’t give a shit about.
Barnes was one of the greatest writers of the 20th Century. Probably more bisexual than lesbian, she nevertheless spent most of her life in a passionate love affair with another woman. She was part of the Hemingway – Joyce – Woolf, Stein, etc. crowd in Left Bank cafes in the 20’s. She lived her whole life in the shadow of the Eifel Tower.
She wrote a couple of great books and then she went away. She faded away into a reclusive alcoholic in her in Paris apartment. She could often be heard by neighbors drunkenly ranting and screaming to no one in particular. Died relatively young, like so many of them. Typical sad, crazy writer story.
Frantz writes very well. I like him a lot. He writes about ordinary, everyday people, like, well, your neighbors! Which is probably why you don’t care about his characters.
Not like my neighbors! I will try some newer stuff again, but right now I’m content with Junger and Boll and Camus, nothing much more modern than that. Oh, and Jean Rhys if we’re talking women writers. Good Morning, Midnight is short but packs a dreary punch.
I tried to read Beloved by Toni Morrison and couldn’t even make it to Page 5. But they say it is spellbinding so I guess I should’ve tried harder.
Camus and Rys are excellent.
Rather condescending tone you have there. “Might help a bit”? Help with what? Not being part of someone’s amen chorus?
For The Waste Land, yes, dedicated to Pound as “il miglior fabbro.” Later on, it’s more a matter of influence and admiration, I’d say, than intervention.
You are talking two giants here, Ezra Pound and TS Eliot, arguing in the captain’s tower while calypso singers laugh at them and fishermen hold flowers.
Pound had a massive ego and was a huge narcissist and a bit of a prick. But a giant of a figure.
Eliot was calmer but he was also a small planet of his own with his own orbit.
Both of these guys were so far advanced into their own poetic worlds that I have a hard time believing that one was mentoring the author.
Also, Pound was off doing Imagism in Paris, Trieste, and Venice and hanging out with Joyce. Eliot was outside of the literary scene in the London fog.
They were both modernists, sure, but Eliot was not an Imagist. They were both rather obscure, but Eliot at least gave you footnotes and was less pretentious. He was also so much more accessible. Pound is way off somewhere else with the Cantos. Eliot never tried anything remotely like that.
Pound was off translating works from Chinese with Fennelosa and working with Old Occitan troubadour lyrics. Eliot was somewhere else entirely with a lot of background in old stage plays.
That they were both antisemites at some point or other I suppose is one of their major colliding points. Other than that, they were two orbits circling different objects, never to meet.
A great place to start! I started, oddly enough, with A Handful of Dust (ca. 1970). It left me so shaken that it was five years before I could read anything else of his. Then I read the Collected Letters, followed by Brideshead. By that time I was truly an addict.
My apologies for preaching to a member of the choir.
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I was able to read it until literally the bitter end, but it was a distinctively Pyrrhic victory. The obsessive-compulsive use of “and-and-and-and-and-and”…you get the picture. “Muscular prose,” my arse. The lack of literary style seems more like the efforts of a literary prankster. Also, his hand-wringing about the lack of civility in America while he lards on the nihilistic violence in his books is really rich. He was admittedly a productive writer when he lived in the Knoxville area, but it seems that his productivity stopped when he moved to Santa Fe. I’ve enjoyed visiting there, but that town, surrounded by the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, is not a place for the productive or creative. One wag deemed it “Pueblo-Disney.” Anyway, Cormac McCarthy, RIP. Sic Transit Gloria Mundi.
What about Taos? That’s an artists’ haven.
Read Vile Bodies. Nice. Dipped into Brideshead Revisited. Looking good so far. I’ve also read a small excerpt from his first novel written around age ~21. We don’t expect much of work by such a young person, but it was already quite good! Mary Shelley was that age when she wrote Frankenstein. So young adults can definitely produce quality fiction.
It’s one of those skills that gets better with age though.
On the other hand, a lot of novelists seem to peak around ages 30-40 (Joyce, Melville, and Pynchon), and after that, we sort of lose track of them. But if creativity (and brain cells/brain speed) all peak when young, perhaps it makes sense.
Rock bands peak young too. Ever noticed that? And it’s not because they are young. If a band of older people produced some killer work it would be lauded. Even with the great bands, their work absolutely declined after age 40.
I knew a woman who had an affair with Harold Bloom late in his life, and I know he had at least one son (and maybe other kids). He was definitely hetero. Maybe the bilious commenter above was confusing him with another prof, Allan Bloom, who was gay.
Pound being a fascist was one of the few redeeming pasts about him. He was also in favor of Black Reparations.
I read Faulkner’s Sanctuary when I was young, and now in my old age (84) I read it twice more.
Pure genius. (Him, not me.) America’s greatest writer by miles.
Movie is also terrible –
https://reclaimingbeautymain.blogspot.com/2013/02/beauty-that-seduces-us-into-evil.html
“The Road” is one of the worst cinematic lumps of shit ever produced.
Early on, with zero character development, Charlize going off to die in the woods like a terminal housecat.
Viggo constantly carrying the almost adult sized kid around like a big sack of yams.
Idiot level dithering over the intent of the feral humans.
Pah-fukkin-leeze
It was puke making; one of the few films that I ever bailed on before its end.
Poop Post, Poopy.
You were stoned when viewing “No Country For Old Men”, man…right ?!
Or…
Once upon a time, you were hit in the head with a livestock pneumatic kill bolt.
My sweet summer child.
Dead on.
Also, Melville, like Doestoevsky, had the genius ability to see “where all this is headed,” trace the source back to their present day, and powerfully depict it in their literature. Doestoevsky foresaw the Bolsheviks in Demons and identified their Russian accomplices, after whom the novel is named (think American Antifa) 60 years before the event. Melville foresaw Black Lives Matter (and more to come) and the existential threat to America of our commercialism and universalism that optimistically refused to take a deep (time-consuming and not immediately profitable) look into human nature in Benito Cereno.
Generally agree with that list, but … it’s a tactic to mix the obvious (James, Conrad, Dostoyevsky) with the far less agreed upon: Pynchon (worthless), Kerouac (vastly overrated), McCarthy (Cormac – Yes, Mary? um, No), Proulx (unsure, but doubtful), Roth (hahahahahahaha!! be real), Jackson (Shirley? not in that league), Miller (Arthur? ditto), Wallace (who’s that? dude who wrote Ben Hur? The 4 Just Men pulper? surely not the bloviated David Foster???? Cmon!).
No mention of Balzac, Scott, Tolstoy, Proust or Mann (or even … the Bard??), but those third raters? Promiscuous, yes. Knowledgeable? Unclear.
One should take into account that sensibilities change over time & frequently canonical writers somehow cease to be readable.
Until the late 18th C most ambitious authors were desperate to write epics, but that genre was already dead. With the rise of the novel, we have a situation that perhaps 90% of the greatest novels had been written from the 1840s to the 1940s, in just 100 years or so.
With poetry- it is basically untranslatable.
Drama died somewhere at the beginning of the 20th C, with Ibsen and Chekhov.
Non-European classics (Chinese, Indian, Islamic,…) are, with some exceptions, almost always hard to comprehend because they differ in ethics & aesthetics.
True, after WW2 many significant novels were written, but, I’d say the change of sensibilities, our perceptions & reactions in a world dominated by images, TV, …. are not conducive to writing & reading novels.
He had two sons, one of them schizophrenic.
These stereotypical Africans don’t possess inner life. They’re as dumb as Homer’s “heroes”.
Not going into novels, inner life triumphs in Plato’s major works & in Athenian tragedians.
So- there may be some truth in this. Epics are for dumbfucks.
Thank you for the knowledgeable critique!
“Pynchon (worthless), Kerouac (vastly overrated), McCarthy (Cormac – Yes, Mary? um, No), Proulx (unsure, but doubtful), Roth (hahahahahahaha!! be real), Jackson (Shirley? not in that league), Miller (Arthur? ditto), Wallace (who’s that? dude who wrote Ben Hur? The 4 Just Men pulper? surely not the bloviated David Foster???? C’mon!).
No mention of Balzac, Scott, Tolstoy, Proust or Mann (or even … the Bard??),”
They’re all very good, though I’ve only read bits of Tolstoy (15 pagers) and of Scott (30 pages). Sadly, I’ve read none of Balzac, Proust, or Mann.
Thomas Pynchon is regarded as one of the greatest writers of our modern era. Read V., The Crying of Lot 49, Gravity’s Rainbow (one of the top three novels of the last 200 years), Vineland, and Slow Learner.
I like Jack Kerouac. I don’t care what the critics say. I read On the Road.
I referred to Cormac McCarthy. I’m not sure I’ve read any Mary McCarthy. Never read her!
I have a book of Proulx, The Shipping News. I only read one page but it sure was good.
Roth is also considered one of the greatest modern novelists. I read Goodbye Columbus and Portnoy’s Complaint.
Yes, Shirley Jackson. She’s pretty highly regarded for her horror stories. Read The Lottery.
Miller is Henry Miller. I know a lot of people don’t like him, but I do. Read Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn.
Yes, David Foster Wallace. And he’s also considered one of the greatest modern writers among literary critics. I read a lot of recent academic literary criticism from literary journals (hard to read!) and he and Pynchon are very highly regarded by modern literary scholars.
Cormac McCarthy is great. Blood Meridian is McCarthy channeling Melville (especially Moby Dick) via Shakespeare because Melville in Moby Dick was channeling Shakespeare.
Shakespeare (Othello) -> Melville (Moby Dick) -> McCarthy (Blood Meridian). It’s a Hegelian dialectic.
Melville and Dostoevsky are unreal!
Bitter… much?
So… what are you saying? Melville not your thing? It does seem kind of narrow as a yardstick for American literature… Do we really need a canon?
No, I love Melville. The three greatest books in English literature in the last 200 years are:
Herman Melville: Moby Dick
James Joyce: Ulysses
Thomas Pynchon: Gravity’s Rainbow
I don’t follow.
I believe in the idea of a canon, of course.
But there’s been a lot of reaction against it on the Lunatic Cultural Left because somehow or other, way too many White men ended up in the Canon of Western Literature. Who the Hell did they think would dominate the canon of Western Lit? Of course it will be White men!
I think even if you look at Literature on a global perspective, White (or mostly-White) men dominate. If you look at Latin American literature, a lot of it is very good, but the writers are mostly White-looking males.
African literature is a new thing and it can be quite good, but there’s not much of it. Chinua Achebe is excellent, and he’s not the only one.
Jews are lumped in with White men whether they like it or not.
Black Americans have surely produced some fine writers (Ralph Ellison and Zora Neale Huston), but there have not been many of them.
There are a few good Caribbean writers like Jean Rhys, but they are few in number.
Arab literature seems to be a new thing, but there are only a few good Arab writers. Naguib Mafouz is one of them. So was Gassan Kanafani.
There have not been many excellent writers coming out of India. I believe there may be a few. No good writing has come out of Pakistan, Bangladesh, or Nepal.
Afghanistan, Iran, and the Stans have not produced much great literature other than Rumi of course. I think Islam hinders the production of great art, though I do like this new Afghan writer Khaled Housseni. “Reading Lolita in Tehran” was a good book. Once again, I think Islam seriously stunts artistic production, especially literature. Look at how many writers from Muslim countries get attacked. People even try to murder them. Look at Rushdie and Mahfouz.
There has been little great literature coming out of SE Asia, Indonesia, and the Philippines other than Jose Rizal. Basically a literary wasteland.
Chinese literature in terms of the modern novel is a new thing but some of the older, very long epics are also very good and seemed to predate the modern picaresque. Some very good writers are coming out of China, but there are only a few of them. Mo Yan and Yian Lianke are two of them.
Japanese literature is fairly new, but they have been writing for a century. Some excellent writers, the finest of the 20th Century, have come out of Japan, but there are not a large number of them. Haruki Murakami is surely one of them.
There is very little good Korean literature out there. Mongolian literature is nil. There are no good Siberian writers.
There have not been many good Amerindian writers. Louise Erdrich is one of them.
Hispanic Americans have not produced much good lit. John Rechy is the only one who comes to find. Maybe Julia Alvarez? It tends to get way too caught up in SJW BS.
Very little if any good literature has come of the Polynesian, Melanesian, or Micronesian islands.
LOL! I must have read all his other novels!!! Loved them just as much.
Other than maybe Clapton, who peaked much later!
John Carpenter did take one of Kings worthless books and turn it into a cheesy yet entertaining movie . When I was 13 years old 1958 Red Plymouths scared the shit out of me .
Nothing that Stephen King writes could ever be as frightening as his face.
Two months late, but thank you for the link, Anon.
A wonderfully erudite and hilarious hatchet job – the best thing I’ve read all year.
Michel Houellebecq? Andrew Anglin a Houellebecq fan? Encroyable. Houellebecq’s one of the slimiest Shofar-blowing brainless Western “intellectuals” steadfast in support of the “Jewish and Democratic State.” The Zionist Entity rolled out the red carpet for him when he toured “Israel” like some dip-shit first-term US congressman in 2014 or so. He’s a far more sophisticated pandering sycophant to the Bloom crowd than McCarthy could even have imagined being.
Don’t believe me? “All you have to do is read the texts to realize that anti-Semitism is simply a conspiracy theory—there are hidden people who are responsible for all the unhappiness in the world, who are plotting against us, there’s an invader in our midst. If the world is going badly, it’s because of the Jews, because of Jewish banks … It’s a conspiracy theory. ” Houellebecq quoted in Paris Review piece, Jan. 2, 2015.
Hard to believe Anglin showering praise on a diluted Gallic version of a Sam Harris or, say, that other great Jewish intellectual and writer (and novelist), David Frum
In some ways, McCarthy was the logical end point of American literature, following William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway. These are complete hacks, one after the other. Of course, after McCarthy, there was no lower you could fall, so popular literature has largely simply ended.
Some other leftist novelists that were also the end of American literature, that you left out:
Norman Mailer
Phillip Roth
Steven King
Lillian Hellman
Gore Vidal
Hunter Thompson
E.L. Doctorow
John Steinbeck
Garrison Keillor
William S. Burroughs
Harlan Ellison
Upton Sinclair
Dalton Trumbo
Maya Angelou
Just to name a few
So let me get this straight, Hemingway, Faulkner, and McCarthy were all hacks with no talent? I guess I can see how someone who often reminds me of how Tucker Max would write if he was a right wing extremist.
I have read several of McCarthy’s books and a lot of Hemingway and they were both masters of the craft.
This time our friend over at The Daily Stormer has no idea what he is talking about.
No.
Mailer, Roth, Hunter Thompson, Doctorow, Burroughs, Steinbeck, and Sinclair were not Leftist writers who signaled the end of literature.
All were superb writers regardless of their politics.
Also Thompson was not a novelist.
So Anglin considers only Melville to be a great novelist?
What about Hawthorne or James Fenimore Cooper?
Does he despise Twain as well?