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Vareen Bell, The Achievement of Cormac McCarthy (Baton Rouge & London: Louisiana State University Press, 1988, £21.40). Pp. 141. ISBN 0 8071 1408 1.

Cormac McCarthy is one of the mysteries of modern fiction. His five novels are little read, even in his native Tennessee: he has maintained his distance even from his few admirers, avoiding interviews or any discussion of his methods; and he has preserved his anonymity by living in a succession of motel rooms, returning only occasionally to his childhood home in the Appalachians to visit his family. Managing somehow to survive on the proceeds of his work, in places as widely scattered as New Orleans, Chicago, Las Vegas, Paris, London, and the Mexican border, he has acquired the reputation of being a writer's writer. Among the famous and established, Saul Bellow, Ralph Ellison, and Robert Penn Warren have all expressed admiration, while a whole new generation of Southern writers, including Larry Brown, Richard Ford, and James Whitehead, are clearly and openly in his debt. Like Flannery O'Connor, McCarthy was raised a Catholic in a predominantly Protestant region; like William Faulkner, his style ranges from one of scrupulous meanness, the fundamentals of human speech, to a dense, polyphonic rhetoric drawing on the oral traditions still alive in parts of the South. His peculiar gift, which he shares with both thee writers, is to extract drama out of the conflict between the recalcitrant materiality of facts and the irrepressibility of human desire (seen as at once grotesque and heroic in the circumstances), and to embed that conflict firmly in the spare, stoical lives of the rural poor.