The Orchard Keeper(1966) by Cormac McCarthy

 Book Review

The Orchard Keeper (1966)

by Cormac McCarthy

    

  This was Cormac McCarthy's first novel and if you don't think it sounds like Faulkner then you have not read Faulkner.  I'm not a huge fan of Faulkner but I'm generally appreciative of his influence on American literature.  He is, first and foremost, a literary modernist in that his books are difficult to understand in terms of the narrative/temporal techniques he deploys.  He is also the first and arguably only great modernist of the American South, which is not a region that generated a ton of modernist artists.  Literary modernism represents a kind of apex of the divide between an artist and their prospective audience. If you want to find readers of difficult modernist authors in 2024, you are going to have to go to an American university- and not an undergraduate class, but the graduate school, to find people who are "into" any kind of 20th century modernist author. 

 On the other hand, these writers have had a huge influence on the audience of future authors of literary fiction.  In fact, it is fair to say that "serious" literary fiction in 20th century America came to be synonymous with the deployment of these complicated narrative techniques to a greater or lesser degree. However, in the terms that this blog uses, The Orchard Keeper was clearly not a hit.  It was an interesting first novel by a promising young writer, but there is nothing necessarily in this book to indicate that the author would go on to write his Western Trilogy, The Road and No Country For Old Men twenty years later.  If you've read those books, you know that he abandoned complicated literary modernism in favor of a spare brand of prose that is more like literary minimalism.   I don't think he gets enough credit for that shift.

   That doesn't help The Orchard Keeper, which I found just as incomprehensible as any of Faulkner's books.  Certainly not a good pick for an Audiobook since the modernist technique practically requires interlineation on a page of text to keep track of the plot.  Like, when I read the Wikipedia description to prepare for this post I recognized what had happened but wouldn't have been able to tell you that as it was going on.

  On the other hand, if you have some kind of interest in the prose style of Cormac McCarthy, The Orchard Keeper is invaluable because it is the point of departure.  The reader can already pick up his trick of using simile and metaphor to elevate the description of a bleeding hillbilly to something approaching biblical reverence. 

       While there are some feints at the later McCarthy heart of darkness, The Orchard Keeper is a pretty light hearted affair.   There's no sense of the mythical in The Orchard Keeper and it weakens the impact of the prose.  Also the story is confused because of the literary technique- which is clearly something he figure out later in this career.