Child of God (original 1973; edição 1993)

"Child of God" by Cormac McCarthy. Lester Ballard is a simple minded, country man, with limited intelligence, an over-abundance of rat cunning and a psychopathic violent streak. With his florid descriptions McCarthy allows the reader to see into the mind - what limited functioning there is - of this unlikeable individual. What is most frightening is the absence of any real emotion (other than anger) or empathy for or understanding of others. Powerful and disturbing. ( )

In McCarthy's first two works, he gave us a world of more or less decent people, and then inserted some act of violence and/or evil into it: a murder, then incest and cannibalism. This book is one step closer to the astonishing transformation of Blood Meridian a in which we're given a world of more or less barbarous people, and then we just watch it all break down, over and over again, and we're left with only a faint glimmer of hope. In other words, rather than a good world in which we find some evil, we're given an evil world and find, unexpectedly, some good: a book, or a savior. Child of God is really a nice balance between those two. It's pretty grim, but it's grim at an individual level: here's what an evil world can do to a man with a sense of justice and beauty, but no way to deal with his own senses. ( )

Dark. Its McCarthy. ( )

One of McCarthy's best ( )

Good but very dark. Not recommended for those with delicate sensibilities. Tells the story of a serial killer from the killer's point of view. In that regard, similar to Ellis's American Psycho or Oates's Zombie (although predating both, of course). Several key elements from Child of God recur in McCarthy's later work. For example, Lester Ballard is a sort of root ancestor to both Harrogate from Suttree (a sexual deviant/fool exiled in the wilderness) and Chigurh from No Country For Old Men (a remorseless killer reflecting the darkness of all men).

The language is quite poetic and I enjoyed many of the descriptions a great deal. The dialogue was also quite funny in places, which was both surprising and, by contrast, helped make the dark seem darker. However, one thing that was missing was any kind of tragic arc. Lester is never ascribed any motives for his actions. He is sad and angry, but never conflicted. His trajectory is one way, straight down--not tragic but pathetic. There is neither redemption nor justice, just circumstance.

American Psycho is more thematically robust in this sense, in that there the killer being denied justice is left trapped in a existential Sartrean hell (i.e. the last lines of the novel referring directly to Sartre's No Exit). In Child of God, by contrast, there is no hell (literal or metaphorical), just oblivion. There is no kind of conflict presented between what is and what ought to be.

Now that I think about it, Blood Meridian is also more robust in this sense. I guess in the context of all of McCarthy's work to date, Child of God functions as a sort of prefiguration, a test run, for themes that McCarthy would develop better later on. In that sense, it's probably a better read for those who are already McCarthy fans. ( )