. Spinning .

Just finished McCarthy’s Child of God and honestly don’t know what to say.  I truly wish some day to continue my formal study of literature so that I can offer a more insightful review than Whew!  I seem to base my very unprofessional reviews on gut feeling and reaction to both story and writing rather than follow any acknowledged critical theory.  Maybe someday I’ll get the time and money to take  this all to a higher level.  Meanwhile…

I loved this book.  As gross and as horrifying as Lester Ballard is, and as vague about what makes him tick as McCarthy could be, I was fascinated by him.  He is so very much the darker side of us and yet in his way, he is almost innocent though he does know what he’s doing all the time.  I think the disturbing factor that McCarthy brings to Ballard–and this may well be why he does not give him a detailed history–is that he is so close, just on the other side of the line we draw for ourselves of decent behavior.

I’m thinking that what sets (for me) a book apart from being just another novel, even a good novel with story and fine writing, is when it carries the reader through it into the world of the narrative and the characters.  When it makes you stop only to need to think about or share some fine idea or bit of exceptional prose.  No doubt I definitely look for the writing style, the voice and the imagery as much as story.  McCarthy feeds my needs.  There is one other clue that tells me a book is good; I don’t want to start reading another one by a different author immediately.  It’s like brushing your teeth after a good meal and ruining the memory of it with mint instead of savoring the glory of the meal.

The end of Lester Ballard is just as jaw-dropping as his life.  On the lam he glimpses a vision of himself before what he’s become, but cannot think about it.  We just know that it bothers him a little before he goes back to the business of surviving. Child of God may describe an opinion that we are all born alike in innocence; or that we are all born alike in baseness.  What happens in our lives and our reactions steadily steer our course towards an ending.  That’s why I felt it was so imperative to discover what led Lester to choose the paths he’d taken.  Because we all begin at the same starting point.  McCarthy has pointed that out to us, and has left us to wonder if ever we, like Lester, come close to crossing that line.

Yep, McCarthy’s my man.

Lester’s first murder of a woman is born of the egg of rejection with the sperm he’s left inside a woman he found dead in a car (boy, that’s a whole psychological story right there that I won’t go into because it got worse).  After his home, such as it is, burns down, he lives in a cave.  What we see is him shooting a woman who’s spurned him, and while we know what he’s done with the first woman he found dead, it is only when he returns to the cave after his trip downtown to sell watches (we know where he probably has gotten them), and kicks at the ashes of his campfire in the cave that we learn a bit more:

Ballard kicked at the fire and turned a few dull cherry coals up out of the ash and bones.  (p. 133)

Then as we follow him down deeper into the earth through the natural caverns and passageways, we’re once again hit with horror:

Here in the bowels of the mountain Ballard turned his light on the ledges or pallets of stone where dead people lay like saints.  (p. 135)

So the turning of Lester into a serial murderer has been foreshadowed by his first murder, while we become suspicious of his actions we discover them to be true and yet they still hit us like a ton of bricks with the audacity of what he’s doing to the bodies.  McCarthy’s foreshadowing is a strange twist of letting us know the crime, and then subtly weaving it into the most mundane of actions where it lies like a rock in the middle of your stomach.

We still aren’t sure what drives Lester Ballard, but we see suggestions of his own lack of insight:

Disorder in the woods, trees down, new paths needed.  Given charge, Ballard would have made things more orderly in the woods and in men’s souls.  (p. 136)

With the advent of this weather bats began to stir from somewhere deep in the cave.  Ballard lying on his pallet by the fire one evening saw them come from the dark of the tunnel and ascent through the hole overhead fluttering wildly in the ask and smoke like souls rising from hades.  When they were gone he watched the hordes of cold stars sprawled across the smokehole and wondered what stuff they were made of, or himself.  (p. 141)

Ballard moves through life on instinct, but we see only the worst of man in his resolutions of his problems.  He seems to be unaware of the nature of what he is doing, and yet he is a man who lives by natural laws of the animalistic tendencies of man.  Born clean, ruined by life?  Or born with simply a need for survival and untouched by civilization?  Which came first…?

There is no doubt about it, Lester Ballard is one of the worst characters that McCarthy’s come up with so far in my readings.  Worst as far as evil, that is, and maybe, just maybe the Judge is more evil, but we see some intellect there that in my mind anyway, gives him reason for what he does.

This novel was first published in 1973, so even the spoiler here won’t hurt too many people: Lester is a serial killer (odd how I mentioned in a prior posting about serial killers regarding the two narrative voices of this story–although that has long since disappeared from the narrative structure).  Lester hasn’t been particularly likeable even before this developed, but the question is how to keep a reader’s interest in him with some of the things he’s doing, and no real sympathy due him from the hard licks of life. 

McCarthy does this brilliantly.  After his shack burns down (no, no sympathy called for here, if you knew the details) Lester is living in a cave.  He walks down the mountain into town to a general store and tries to sell three watches for five dollars apiece, after the shopkeeper has already turned him down and pointed to watches he can’t sell for eight.  With some haggling from the locals, one makes an offer:

I’ll give eight dollars fo rthe three of em.

Ballard looked about at the men.  They were watching him to see what price used watches would bring this Sunday morning.  He weighed the watches in his hand a moment and handed them across.  You bought em, he said.

The watchbuyer rose and handed across the money and took the watches .  You want thisn for three? he said to the man next to him.

Yeah, let me have it.

Anybody else want one for three? He held up the spare watch.

The other man who had been looking at the watches straightened out his leg across the floor and reached into his pocket.  I’ll take it of of ye, he said.

What’ll ye take for thatn you got, Orvis?

Might take five.

Shit.  You ain’t got but two in it.

This here’s a good watch.  (p. 132)

So Lester wanted fifteen, settled for eight, and the guy just sold two of them for six and wants five for the last and best one.  Maybe some readers will think, Good, it’s just what he deserved, because this little scenario is one of the hints that Lester’s killed more than one person.  But for me, I felt sorry for him.  They didn’t even wait till he left to make a fool of him.  So just what you’re hit with how bad Lester truly may be, you see people who–even though the crime’s nowhere as serious as murder–will in turn hurt him.  Remember, they don’t know he’s killed anyone.

And that, I guess, is one of the ways you arouse some sympathy for a rather nasty protagonist.

The storekeeper looked at Ballard.  Ballard, he said, how old are you?

Twenty-seven, if it’s any of your business.

Twenty-seven.  And in twenty-seven years you’ve managed to accumulate four dollars and nineteen cents?  (p. 126)

This was a shocker.  In the little description McCarthy gives the reader of Ballard via telling, but in the one hundred twenty-six pages of showing action and dialogue, I had imagined him to be at the very least in his forties.  McCarthy has allowed us to  envision our own character by judging his actions and relationships with others.  Pinning down Ballard’s age this late in the novel does a phenomenal thing:  It has just added to our knowledge of character; Ballard’s been through a lot to have become so jaded at this young age.

While McCarthy’s characters are a major force in the direction of his stories, reacting to a strongly built environment that produces more common but no less traumatic conflicts, they seem to me to be vague as individuals.  What I mean by this is that they are not clearly drawn out by McCarthy but he allows us to get to know them little by little through the events of the narrative.  They also then appear to represent more than themselves, a human trait, a flaw within human nature that we may all harbor.  His characters are allowed to develop either to control and overcome these tendencies or fall prey to them.

Lester Ballard is the drifter Suttree without the intellect or morals.  He is the Judge of Blood Meridian without the honesty.  He is conscience-less.  What we need to find out is what has driven him to this quiet solitary life while seeking out pleasure in remorseless necrophilia. 

His mother deserted him, he discovered the body of his father hung from a rafter in the barn when he was nine.  What life did he live with his father?  What does he remember of his mother?  What was the rest of his childhood like?  We need to know what makes him readily act on his most base instincts.  It’s important for us to know where the line is crossed.

Oh my.  McCarthy’s outdone himself.  Harrogate’s love of watermelons seems positively normal.

Lord, this is McCarthy:

I remember back a number of years, talkin about fairs, they had a old boy come through would shoot live pigeons with ye.  Him with a rifle and you with a shotgun.  Or anything else.  He must of had a truckload of pigeons.  Had a boy out in the middle of a field with a crateful and he’d holler and the boy’d let one slip and he’d raise his rifle and blam, he’d dust it.  Misters, he could strictly make the feathers fly.  We’d never seen the like of shootin.  They was a bunch of us pretty hotshot birdhunters lost our money out there fore we got it figured out.  What he was doin, this boy was loadin the old pigeons up the ass with them little firecrackers.  They’d take off like they was home free and get up about so high and blam, it’d blow their asses out.  He’d just shoot directly he seen the feathers fly.  You couldn’t tell.  (p. 58)

This is in the first person pov of a narrator–we don’t know who–who has known Lester Ballard since he was a kid.  Every now and then these intimacies of knowledge are shared with the reader within the third person pov of another narrator (different voice) and lends a sense of personal involvement to the story, even though we do not know who the narrator is, his relationship to Lester, or the time element involved.  It serves the purpose as do personal interviews with family, friends and neighbors amid a documentary drama about a serial killer of making the character more real.  After all, this guy knows a lot about Lester, and we’re just following Lester around trying to learn him on our own so the help is appreciated.  Exquisite technique, and not overdone by McCarthy; in his usual manner, the changeover is not obviously pointed out by font (as in Faulkner) nor precisely by chapter division.  The chapters, or segments of the story are brief, often only a page or two, and do not alternate evenly between the two narrators.  It’s wonderfully done.

McCarthy seems to spring an audacious act on the reader, and also is very blunt with the sexuality of his characters and their behavior.  But it still tends to surprise, and delight the reader. 

I’m well into Cormac McCarthy’s Child of God and learning by alternating first and third person narrator pov about the main character, Lester Ballard, who just lost his property to auction and has set up in a shack somewhere in the hills.  I haven’t quite decided yet what Ballard represents, learned his age nor much of his background except that when he was nine his mother had already taken off and he found his father who’d hung himself in the barn.  Local talent certainly.

McCarthy has a way with drawing his characters that leave them a bit vague and yet detailed in some ways.  Here’s one of Ballard’s friends:

When Ballard came out onto the porch there was a thin man with a collapsed jaw squatting in the yard waiting for him.

What say Darfuzzle, said Ballard.

What say Lester

He sounded like a man with a mouthful of marbles articulating his goatbone underjaw laboriously, the original one having been shot away.

Ballard squatted on his heels in the yard opposite the visitor.  They looked like constipated gargoyles.  (p. 46)

I’ll bet they do.  Some of the characters in Lester’s environment are pretty well worn.  There’s a dumpmaster who has nine daughters they’ve named after labels they found on stuff in the dump:  Uretha, Cerebella, Hernia Sue.  The old man can’t keep track of them, and they’re having babies like littering rabbits.

In the excerpt above, Lester is told by his visitor that a woman is accusing him of accosting her.  He’d come upon her on the trail, drunk and sleeping in a filmy white nightgown.  He tore it off and went on his way.  No, I don’t know why.

It’s just folks, but they have mysteries inside them that McCarthy is waiting for us to discover.