The last time we had a new novel from Cormac McCarthy, Enron and JonBenet Ramsey were in the headlines, more than a hundred thousand U.S. troops were in Iraq, the University of Alabama football team was eking out a losing season, and a hundred million users were making Myspace.com the world’s most visited website. Folks, it’s been a minute.
But now we have new Cormac McCarthy novels. (Or will shortly, since McCarthy’s publisher is staggering their, , and reigns as a titan of American lit—an undisputed heir to Melville and Faulkner, the subject of infinite grad-school theses, and a hard-nosed dispenser of what Saul Bellow called “life-giving and death-dealing sentences.” Since 1965, when his first book () appeared, he’s been turning paper and ink into thunder and lightning.
