McCarthy, Cormac. The Orchard Keeper. Vintage, New York, 1965. F; 11/20.

A friend listing the books on his “to be read” shelf mentioned this. Classic fiction is sometimes surprisingly rewarding (Middlemarch, Mrs. Dalloway). I’ve read McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses and The Road, and they were dark and rich with serious emotion. This one, McCarthy’s first, felt heavy like Faulkner, especially like The Sound and the Fury: the South around 1930, acceptance of a rough life, violence, obscurity. Events evolve in and against an overwhelming wilderness and a lot of the emotional weight is carried by that backdrop more than by what the story, its events, its characters’ character, or any kind of allegedly coherent moral ideas.

For sure the characters and events are obscure (although less so than the early going in The Sound and the Fury) and McCarthy seems to be testing how tough the cord carrying our suspension of plot disbelief is. It’s often night. A rectangular early 1930s Ford moves illegal whiskey, its driver Marion Sylder picking up an anonymous drifter who tries to murder him but whom he kills and dumps into a concrete spray pit. The drifter turns out to be Kenneth Rattner, father of young adolescent John Rattner, who later rescues and is befriended by Sylder. Dead Rattner senior is maintained hidden in the spray pit by elderly Arthur Ownby who is young Rattner’s second mentor and the informal orchard keeper (ironically. He’s a grave-keeper.). He (the “Old Man”) defends himself with a shotgun against government agents and escapes into the bush, but eventually gets caught by a wily federal agent and is put in prison. Young John is the only one to escape, and he returns years later to find things much changed.

Particular details are authentic and darkly comical. A wonderfully dilapidated bar has a back porch hanging over a gully into which the proprietor sweeps garbage and bottles after closing. One night the drinkers on the porch hear nails pulling loose and the ones that can’t make it into the bar quickly fall into the gully as the porch collapses. McCarthy’s southern dialogue is phonetic, without punctuation: “you cain’t hardly get there from here, he said. You ort to of come thew Sunshine, crost the river there…”

As the Tennessee characters work through plot events, we figure out that the natural world in their time and place is vertiginous and dangerously unpredictable: “the wind rising and gone colder until the trees bent as if borne forward on some violent acceleration of the earth’s turning” and that those characters’ perception is subject to nature’s momentum: “Groups of trees turned slowly like masted carousels, blending shadows and parting in darkness and wonder (italics mine).”

If we are orderly-minded and looking for themes in this dark dizzy world they come up only gradually from its obscurity. Young John’s coming-of-age as a trapper, old Arthur’s doomed iron conservative endurance, Sylder’s petty lawbreaking, and the harsh authority of the police. People and events driven by a brutal surrounding adapt in their way to its will and carry on.

Just now I’m reading some of DH Lawrence’s essays and I remember his wild commentary on classic American fiction. He might have seen Faulkner and McCarthy as a bit Melville-like, pushing forward without knowing what it was a mysterious and wonderful horror that can only find its way to redemption through the telling itself. I finished this novel with a respect-for-the-past reverence that didn’t fit for me with the whirling confusion of reading it. It’s Lawrence-like too for a good storyteller to piece together solemnity and tear it down it at the same time.

8.2/9.3