I have a man crush on Cormac McCarthy's brain.

After seeing (and loving) No Country for Old Men shortly after its release, I had two questions that I desperately needed to answer:

1. Where do I get me one of those compressed air things that Javier Bardem spent two hours braining people with, and...

2. Why hasn't anyone told me to read anything by Cormac McCarthy (I don't think I'm making any great discovery here...I've just had my head up my ass reading everything Chuck Palahniuk craps onto a sheet of paper for the last ten years)?

To square things up right from the get-go, I had heard about Cormac McCarthy's book The Road. But what I'd heard about it was that it was a selection of Oprah Winfrey's Book Club. And I - in all my gruff, manly, hairy-chested splendor - was not about to cruise into Borders and pick up some fancy-pants tome that was probably about gay cowboys eating pudding*. Well, a quick Googling showed me that I was way off in my assessment of the book's topic, so I decided to buy it. Complicating matters was the fact that I had to try to find a copy of it that didn't have the golden seal on the front proclaiming it a selection of Oprah's Book Club, because I didn't want anyone to think I watch Oprah.

(*-note: In an episode of South Park, the boys explain their reluctance to see an independent film because those movies "are always about gay cowboys eating pudding." This has become my universal descriptor for anything I am initially reluctant to read/watch/hear. I don't have anything against gays, cowboys, gay cowboys, or pudding.)

I'm getting sidetracked.

Where were we? Right: Cormac McCarthy. So, I saw No Country For Old Men, and I decided that whomever could have whipped up such a skillful blend of unapologetic violence coupled with biting commentary on the human condition couldn't be the type who happened to strike gold once and then saunter off into the sunset. So, I picked up a copy of The Road, set it on the nightstand, and then I really fucked up.

By reading it.

It took me two attempts to read The Road. The first time I tried, I made it through a little less than half of the book. Wait...before I get into that, here's my take on the book:

The Road is the story of a father and son as they travel south through post-Apocalyptic America toward warmer climes. The father (whose name is never disclosed) has decided that they could not withstand another of the harsh winters that have come in the wake of the unnamed cataclysm which laid waste to, well, the entire world. The sun never breaks through the clouds. No plants can grow, so no animals can feed. Naturally, in the absence of plants and animals, people have taken to eating - you guessed it - other people. Bands of cannibals roam the roads, scavenging whomever they encounter for their next meal. The father and son travel the abandoned highways and dead woodlands, avoiding other people when they can, and doing their best to ignore them when they can't. The father yearns to save his son's life so that he may experience the best of what humanity has to offer, but is forced to sacrifice his own humanity in order to keep them alive. It is an often riveting study in contrasts. The story is bleak. It is filled with horrific visions of a future in which the need to survive trumps any notion of what is right or wrong, and it is deeply affecting.

It is so affecting, in fact, that after reading one particularly nauseating passage (in which the father discovers a cellar full of human livestock, some of which are having their appendages harvested one at a time by their cannibal captors), I closed the book, turned to my wife, and said, "I can't finish this." I didn't feel like I was reading a novel anymore. McCarthy had sucked me into his desolate, violent, unforgiving world and convinced me that I was looking into the future. His vision of what could be was so stark, so painstakingly detailed, so real, that I didn't want to know what was around the next corner. Look, I'm no simpleton. I'm not easily manipulated by words, but neither am I immune to being deeply affected by any writing that really grips me. And this gripped me. Hard. And I wanted none of it.

A couple months later, I picked the book up again, and devoured it in just a few days. I couldn't put it down. And then I wanted more.

I moved on to Child of God. It is the story of an ignorant loner, Lester Ballard, forced from his home and into the hilly, Appalachian country outside of what passes for his hometown, then falsely accused of rape. Persecuted, bitter, and made a pariah by polite society, he descends into madness that leads to murder and necrophilia. And somehow, McCarthy made me feel sorry for his loathsome antihero. He crafted a character full of hatred, bitterness, hopelessness, and yearning for affection into one gruesome, pitiful package. A man so complex in his dysfunction, yet so uncomfortably understandable. Mind you, I never found myself rooting for Lester Ballard, but I could not help but understand how society unwittingly conditioned him to become the monster they eventually hunted in the hills. McCarthy made me pity Ballard. He made my heart bleed for him just a bit at a time (I've found myself defying conventional wisdom and becoming more liberal with age. When I was 17 I joined the Marines because I wanted to kill Communists. By the time I hit 70 I'll probaby be nailing Che Guevera posters up in the Student Union at UC-Berkeley if I'm not busy firebombing the local Army recruiting office).

For Christmas, my wife got me two more McCarthy novels: Blood Meridian (Or The Evening Redness In The West) and Suttree. Blood Meridian has been regarded as Cormac McCarthy's masterpiece by people with a lot more education and experience than myself. Having only read half of Blood Meridian (which elevates McCarthy's talent for describing horrific violence to new heights), I'm not ready to call it my favorite just yet, but I will tell you that it's wildly entertaining if you don't have a queasy stomach. The story follows another unnamed protagonist, known simply as 'the kid', as he leaves his Tennessee home and eventually falls in with a band of scalp hunters that have been hired to rid the southwestern desert of any and all Indians. I'll spare you the details, but I will tell you the hunting party and their fascinating leader, the terrifying and eloquent Judge Holden, have got me hook, line, and sinker. I find myself thoroughly immersed in their world, as McCarthy's cool, detached narrative describes the unspeakable violence that they visit upon the native residents of the land they mean to cleanse via genocide.

McCarthy's style is so slick that he actually managed to turn his protagonist into an almost incidental, secondary character without me realizing it. It dawned on me today when 'the kid' reappeared in the story (mentioned completely in passing, as if absolutely inconsequential) that he hadn't been mentioned in ages, but was present in every scene. It's like if George Lucas had filmed the first 20 minutes of Star Wars, sucked you into Luke Skywalker's backstory, and then 90 minutes later you realize that Skywalker just showed back up on the screen in time to blow up the Death Star while you've been tricked into watching a story about some Stormtrooper named Frank for the last hour-and-a-half. And you know what? You're pissed that he's back! All you want to know is what happened to Frank! Skywalker's return just reminds you that there was another story you were following before you got all wrapped up in Frank the Stormtrooper, and now there's just too damned much stimulus, and you have a total braingasm, and then you just need a nap.

That might be the worst correlation in history, but it's my blog, so shut it.

The point is, I'm so wrapped up in my Cormac McCarthy obsession that it's allowed me to heal the wounds caused by Chuck Palahniuk's unfortunate jumping of the literary shark. Chuck P's earlier works, such as Fight Club, Invisible Monsters, and Survivor, were (in my opinion) some of the most relevant social commentary I've ever enjoyed. Then Chuck got a little too full of himself, or he ran out of ideas, or something, and ended up crapping out a series of books that got progressively more shocking just to be shocking. Sure, they had their moments. But if you're ever reading a book, and you think to yourself that man, the only way this could get more ridiculous is if one of these guys chops off his own pecker and chokes to death on it while trying to swallow it whole, and three pages later that actually happens...well, it's time to take a break.

So thank you, Cormac McCarthy, for giving me something to read that strips people of their dignity, their hope, and their pride, and does it all without dehumanizing them. You make me feel their pain, and you make me a little more human, and you do it all without marginalizing yourself by making one of your characters choke to death on his own severed shlong (we're all looking at you again, Palahniuk).

Now if you'll excuse me, I've got some reading to catch up on.