Child of God by Cormac McCarthy

Evidently James Franco is making a film adaptation of this 1973 novel about a cross-dressing, squirrel-eating, necrophilia-practicing, cave-dwelling sociopath lurking up in the hills. I cannot see the future, but prepare to see a sharp spike in the Google Ngram for "Child of God, unflinching portrayal of evil." It is the first and almost the only thing to say about the book. The back of my edition mixes things up, with "unstinting realism." McCarthy did not flinch and he did not stint, we can say this much.

This is a family website, so I can't quote too much of Lester Ballard's comings and goings, but for instance:

She was too heavy for him. He paused halfway up the ladder with one hand on the top rung and the other around the dead girl's waist where she dangled in the ripped and rudely sutured nightgown and then he descended again. He tried holding her around the neck. He got no farther. He sat on the floor with her, his breath exploding whitely in the cold of the room. Then he went out to the barn again.

He came in with some old lengths of plowline and sat before the fire and pieced them. Then he went in and fitted the rope about the waist of the pale cadaver and ascended the ladder with the other end. She rose slumpshouldered from the floor with her hair all down and began to bump slowly up the ladder. Half-way up she paused, dangling. Then she began to rise again.  

In Homer's Odyssey, when Odysseus has finished slaughtering the suitors, he identifies the disloyal servant women--"the suitors' sluts"-- and hangs them, in an image of horrible violence:

He cast a ship's cable over a cross-beam, and pulled it fast around their necks, then hauled them up so high they could not put their feet to any stay. This was done the way you would catch a thrush or a dove, making her way to her roosts, as she would with struggling pinions beat her tender body against the ground. That bed is sour to her. So strived these women, their heads hanging in a row, a wretched death. A little time they sprawled, their feet twitching, but not long. 

As Simone Weil has noted, for Homer's hero to restrain himself here, having felt "the intoxication of force," to show mercy "would require superhuman virtue, which is as rare as dignity in weakness." We do not find it in The Odyssey or The Iliad. However, "such a heaping-up of violent deeds would have a frigid effect, were it not for the note of incurable bitterness that continually makes itself heard."

You will have noticed the similarities in these images, but note also Homer's registering of the cruelty of the struggling dove, cut off from her children, flailing desperately and full of hurt confusion. "That bed is sour to her." Does Homer extend this past his simile, from the birds to the dying women? He does not say that Odysseus is wrong to execute these women, but who can see these little fluttering kicks and be unmoved?

Does Child of God offer any such "moment of grace," anything "to make us feel with sharp regret what it is that violence has killed and will kill again"? Or is it a mere heaping-up of violent deeds and the disgusting, sociopathic macabre?

What would we need in a scene like this?

Lester hauled forth the half froze robin from his shirt and held it out. It turned its head. Its eye flicked.

Looky here, Billy, said the woman.

It didn't look. A hugeheaded bald and slobbering primate that inhabited the lower reaches of the house, familiar of the warped floorboards and the holes tacked up with foodtins hammered flat, a consort of roaches and great hairy spiders in their season, perenially benastied and afflicted with a nameless crud.

Here's ye a playpretty.

The robin started across the floor, its wings awobble like lateen sails. It spied the . . . what? child? child, and veered off  toward a corner. The child's dull eyes followed. It stirred into sluggish motion.

Anyways, the child tries to eat the bird's legs off. Later, Lester sets the house on fire with the child still inside. And my question is: is it enough (for what?) to just show these things? Ought McCarthy, additionally, step in to say... something?

You will again have noticed the similarities to Homer in the image I have chosen. But McCarthy reports no "sour bed" for the tormented robin. All we hear is: "The bird floundered on the floor."

When Homer has Odysseus's dog, Argos, wasted by the twenty years of his master's absence, tick-ridden, beaten and ignored, stagger to its feet, "He wagged his tail and flattened his ears, though no longer strong enough to crawl to his master. Odysseus turned his face aside and hiding it from Eumaeus wiped away a tear." And the dog dies, already lying on the dung heap. And I am not made of stone, and so I wipe away a tear also. To be alive is to be ignored, in pain, subject to great loss, and Argos in all of this is a recapitulation of Odysseus's woes.

I believe that McCarthy has written a worthwhile and humane book. As in The Iliad, "no reticence veils the step from life to death": the scenes of perverted, insane harm are all reported with the same impressionistic transparency as the narration brings to the treeline or a brook. As with Shakespeare's porter in Macbeth, there is a grim anti-social comedy and fantastically foul language, in a number of brief and absurd interactions. It is not merely a serial killer chase or a titillating account of deviant acts.

Child of God is a tone, a vision, an hour and a quality of light. It is somewhere between monologue and world. McCarthy does not even attempt here the one thing that Faulkner found irresistible about similar men as Lester Ballard: the way the past stalks us. But, in a similar image to The Odyssey's Argos, McCarthy does flash out the ubiquity of open wounds, running sores, and lingering waste which gets tangled up with "life" construed as youth, power, sex, having one's way, stacking up our gains. It is a confusion we are warned not to make.

He always had the best dogs. I remember a dog he had one time named Suzie he said was a hellatious bird dog. He let her out of the trunk and I looked at her and I said: I don't believe Suzie's feelin too good. He looked at her and felt her nose and all. Said she looked all right to him. I told him, said: I just don't believe she's real well today. We set out and hunted all afternoon and killed one bird. Started walkin back to the car and he says to me, Bill says: You know, it's funny you noticin old Suzie was not feelin good today. The way you spotted it. I said: Well, Suzie was sick today. He said yes, she was. I said: Suzie was sick yesterday. Suzie has always been sick. Suzie will always be sick. Suzie is a sick dog. [End of chapter]