Blood Meridian

Blood Meridian – by Cormac McCarthy

There have been times in my life when I discovered a great new record album by a great new music group.  Everyone around me agreed.  Then, I would read a critic’s review of this great new record only to read how the critic slagged it off as being puerile and putrid.  I would then then listen to a piece of music that the CRITIC thought was great, and felt like I was listening to a defecating goat in incredible pain.  The same thing can be said about famous paintings.  A painting that I thought was beautiful would be dismissed by a critic as worthless and uninspired, yet the paintings that the critic loved, LOOKED like a goat in pain had defecated on the canvas.

I’ve never really understood this.  What is it that makes certain people’s tastes ‘superior’ than others?  When did it become ‘cool’ to hate everything that everyone loved and to love everything that everyone hated?  I bring this up because this is one of those books that critics everywhere love, yet I thought it was the most godawful exercise in tedium I have ever experienced.   I’d rather sit through a four-hour conference call on a Friday afternoon where everyone is forced to talk about their accomplishments for the week as opposed to having to ever read something like this again.

Before I go any further, if you’re reading this review and you really liked this book,  I mean, you REALLY liked the book (you don’t just say you did because you want to keep your seat at ‘The Cool Kid’s Table’) then that really is fine.  I’m not trying to belittle your opinion.  I just simply don’t get it.   I’ve easily read over 1,000 books in my lifetime (I started posting reviews on Amazon back in 2013 – I’m up to about 350) and I have to honestly state that this is probably the worst piece of fiction I’ve ever come across.  It’s definitely in my top (i.e. bottom) 5 anyway.

There’s no story here. There’s nothing here that interested me in the slightest.  There’s no care in the writing either.  For some reason, the author doesn’t even bother to put quotation marks around the dialog.  We get periods at the end of sentences and an occasional comma, but that’s it.  Again why??   Is this what an author has to do to pen a “classic”?    

The narrative (notice I didn’t say ‘story’) is about a 15-year old kid (known as ‘The Kid’) who lives in the Old West in the 1800s.  He leaves home one day, ends up joining an army to fight in Mexico, and ends up stumbling around the western frontier with mostly unsavory characters and encounters even more unsavory adversaries.  This whole book is nothing but dust, blood, scalpings, dying, disease, corpses, carnage and depression.  There were times where I really had to struggle figuring out exactly what was going on.  It’s not that the writing was necessarily confusing, it was just so uneventful and depressing. Again, this seems to be some sort of twisted appeal when we’re describing works of art.  I get that true art needs to be unique, but does it have to be so malodorous?   I’ll also add that I’m still confused by the ending of this book.  I even did a Google search and found some “ideas” but apparently my sentiment is shared by many.  Again, it seems as though ‘true’ works of art are supposed to be confusing.  Whatever.  Ugh.

This book was written in 1985; the same year I graduated high school.  I’m glad it wasn’t written before then, because it might have ended up as ‘required reading’ in one of my high school English classes.  You remember those classes, right?  The ones where none of the kids had a clue as to what they were reading, and hated the book so bad that they all bought the Cliffs Notes?    Yep. This is one of those books.

O.K. rant done.  Really.  Again, if you really did like this book, that’s cool.  I hated it.  All I could think of while reading was that critics were playing a cruel joke on me and trying to make me believe that I was an emperor wearing a suit of molded, smelly brand-new clothes.      Next, please.