« Ways To Laugh Out Loud | Main | A Not Quite Universal Dream »
August 29, 2006
Taking To The Road
This past Sunday's Times had an article about the influx of film production in the tiny Texas town of Marfa. The two films that recently wrapped there are, of course, Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood and the Coen Brothers' adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's No Country For Old Men. Accompanying the article were the first officially released production stills from both films.
I imagine there's a decent chance both films will be premiering at Cannes next May (and if they do, their combined drawing power might be the impetus I need to finally make the trip to camp out at the Palais). But that's almost a year away, and more pressing at the moment is the news I received via telephone this morning that, only twelve months after No Country For Old Men hit shelves, my favorite modern novelist has a new book coming out: The Road hits shelves on September 26th.
My friend Tony, who introduced me to McCarthy years ago, was the one who alerted me to its publication. He suggested that I avoid reading anything about it and just let the novel surprise me. Of course, that's just the sort of advice I have trouble heeding, and I immediately started looking for information about the book. There's not much out there - even the Cormac McCarthy Society website hasn't made mention of it yet - and so, as I have a tendency to do, I started to fill in the holes myself.
From reading the first few lines of the synopsis and its suggestions of "a stunning departure from his previous work," its adjectival usage of a tell-tale word like "postapocalyptic," it would appear that The Road will venture into narrative territory even further afield than the (relatively) modern settting of No Country. On the other hand, McCarthy, for all his explicit contextual detail, has never been one to evoke literal realism with his prose; his thematic concerns are what bind the work into one expanding whole, and which make the individual works timeless. And that degree of surreality which made Blood Meridian so nightmarish and The Crossing so mythic began, I think, with Outer Dark - a short fairy tale of a novel abot a journey that was, in its own right, fairly apocalyptic, right down to its four hourseman iconography. Add to that the political ruminations of No Country and the fact that this new book takes place in a ravaged American landscape, and a picture begins to form...
...or maybe it doesn't. I stopped reading the synopsis after the first two sentences. There's no need to spoil with premature analysis something that I'll unquestionably, fervently be devouring in just under a month (and one month after that will see the publication of McCarthy's latest play, The Sunset Limited, which Steppenwolf staged in Chicago earlier this summer and will be bringing to New York in the fall). That seven year draught after Cities Of The Plain certainly seems to be over.
Posted by David Lowery at August 29, 2006 03:16 PM
Comments
David, if you haven't checked out Haruki Murakami, do it. Try either Hard-Boiled Wonderland... or if you care to go with the best, first The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. Also if your in town this weekend we should try to hang out.
Posted by: Adam at August 30, 2006 07:07 AM
I've been meaning to read The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle for years now...ever since someone (was it you?) gave a copy of it to James. It's one of those titles that, perhaps unfairly, always gets pushed back on my reading list. The same thing is happening, I've noticed, with my Netflix queue.
Posted by: Ghostboy at August 31, 2006 07:01 PM