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valparaiso 's review for:
The Orchard Keeper
by Cormac McCarthy
Set in the rural, poverty stricken foothills of the Smoky Mountains in 1930s Tennessee, the time and place of this book is foreign to me. More foreign to me is Cormac McCarthy’s overwrought and verbose writing style. (Fans would call it evocative and descriptive.) McCarthy’s reputation and the brooding red cover of this short novel drew me in, as I had read and enjoyed his book The Road a few years ago.
My problem is, I’m still not sure what The Orchard Keeper was about. Its defining feature is the author’s dense, extended descriptions of landscape, weather, and the minutiae of seemingly banal events.
For characters there are a couple of young male friends causing trouble. A bar that burns down. Hitchhikers who disappear. A dead body in a pond in a gravel quarry. An old man living alone in the woods. A bootlegger who gets arrested by the cops. How are they all connected? I’m not sure. Who was McCarthy talking about in any given scene? I’m also not sure.
I can appreciate McCarthy‘s skill as a gritty poet of earth-bound and outcast living, however I don’t aspire to it as a style of writing. It compelled me enough to read on, but it did not move me. I had to decide to read the slow moving and confusing scenes for an appreciation of the words alone, and not for plot or character development.
I’m always looking for a key take away in what I read. McCarthy’s style was my great inhibitor here. I could not find what was universal in this story about the human experience. Here’s my best effort: I sense in this novel an opportunity to reflect on and appreciate life amidst the ceaseless march of time and the small moments that make up the mosaic of our lives. A summer rain. The rustle of leaves under foot in the woods. Sunset. A flock of sparrows.
The characters and plot were as fleeting and ephemeral as McCarthy’s writing. Ghosts. Shadows. Just another part of the earth, which seems in The Orchard Keeper to be his true protagonist.
My problem is, I’m still not sure what The Orchard Keeper was about. Its defining feature is the author’s dense, extended descriptions of landscape, weather, and the minutiae of seemingly banal events.
For characters there are a couple of young male friends causing trouble. A bar that burns down. Hitchhikers who disappear. A dead body in a pond in a gravel quarry. An old man living alone in the woods. A bootlegger who gets arrested by the cops. How are they all connected? I’m not sure. Who was McCarthy talking about in any given scene? I’m also not sure.
I can appreciate McCarthy‘s skill as a gritty poet of earth-bound and outcast living, however I don’t aspire to it as a style of writing. It compelled me enough to read on, but it did not move me. I had to decide to read the slow moving and confusing scenes for an appreciation of the words alone, and not for plot or character development.
I’m always looking for a key take away in what I read. McCarthy’s style was my great inhibitor here. I could not find what was universal in this story about the human experience. Here’s my best effort: I sense in this novel an opportunity to reflect on and appreciate life amidst the ceaseless march of time and the small moments that make up the mosaic of our lives. A summer rain. The rustle of leaves under foot in the woods. Sunset. A flock of sparrows.
The characters and plot were as fleeting and ephemeral as McCarthy’s writing. Ghosts. Shadows. Just another part of the earth, which seems in The Orchard Keeper to be his true protagonist.