Unguessed Kinships

Book excerpt: "It took six novels and nearly thirty years for Cormac McCarthy to find commercial success as a writer with the National Book Award-winning All the Pretty Horses coming twenty-seven years after his debut. The second half of his long career brought major prizes, more bestsellers, and Hollywood adaptations of his work. The sharp upturn in McCarthy's readership, especially with the genre exercises No Country for Old Men and The Road, has obscured his commitment to a decidedly old-fashioned style of literature: naturalism. It is hardly a secret that McCarthy's work tends to darker themes: violence, brutality, warfare, the cruel indifference of nature. There is a bright line running from some of the core texts of literary naturalism in those themes, which would not be out of place in the writing of Jack London or Stephen Crane. But literary naturalism is much more than the oversimplified Darwinism that we often think of. Nature may well be red in tooth and claw, and humans are part of nature, but the humanity depicted in naturalist literature was capable of love, selflessness, and spirituality in addition to atavism and monstrosity. That is the naturalism that comes across in McCarthy's oeuvre. In Unguessed Kinships, Steven Frye complicates our understanding of literary naturalism through a chronological treatment of McCarthy's body of work. Beginning with an overview of the century-long critical engagement with naturalism, Frye carefully shows how the naturalist idea has matured in the context of modernity and postmodernity, particularly in its relationship with the American South and West, regions that each inspired a distinct phase of McCarthy's long career. In his novels and plays, McCarthy engages both explicitly and obliquely with the project of Manifest Destiny, both in the western drama of Blood Meridian and the twentieth-century settings of TVA-era Knoxville in the Tennessee novels and the atomic frontier of Alamogordo in Cities of the Plain. The concerns of these works are not explicitly American in Frye's reading: deep philosophical and religious questions are asked, drawing on ancient Greek philosophy, Gnosticism, Nietzsche, and more contemporary inquiries. Frye argues for McCarthy not merely as a naturalist writer but as a naturalist in the most profound sense. Unguessed Kinships includes biographical and historical context in each chapter, widening the appeal of the text to not just naturalists or McCarthy scholars, but anyone studying the literature of the South or the West. While the influential scholarship of Vereen Bell made a claim for nihilism as central to McCarthy, recent work has focused on the various philosophical, religious, and metaphysical underpinnings of his writing. In Unguessed Kinships, Steven Frye takes up the importance of both the natural world and naturalism to one of the most significant American writers of recent vintage"--