The Orchard Keeper Essay

He may leave some doubt as to what is going on now.But he does write with torrential power.” –Orville Prescott, , with its earthbound folkways and inarticulate people, has been mated with one of Isak Dineson’s gothic tales. “In the outline the story has a Faulknerian profile.He was beginning to give me nightmares just as he gives the kid nightmares. His characters are not thick, psychologically resonant creations, but are subordinate to the breadth and muscle of the world that surrounds them.

He may leave some doubt as to what is going on now.But he does write with torrential power.” –Orville Prescott, , with its earthbound folkways and inarticulate people, has been mated with one of Isak Dineson’s gothic tales. “In the outline the story has a Faulknerian profile.He was beginning to give me nightmares just as he gives the kid nightmares. His characters are not thick, psychologically resonant creations, but are subordinate to the breadth and muscle of the world that surrounds them.

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But the dead do not remember and nothingness is not a curse. He walked out in the gray light and stood and he saw for a brief moment the absolute truth of the world. The crushing black vacuum of the universe If you answered “yes” to any of these, you probably are, or should be, a Cormac Mc Carthy fan.

But the wonder is that in spite of them it is also an impressive book. Mc Carthy is expert in generating an emotional climate, in suggesting instead of in stating, in creating a long succession of brief, dramatic scenes described with flashing visual impact.

He may neglect the motivation of some of his characters.

Some novelists can write with brilliance and a fresh point of view about such familiar matters…Others, although they are highly gifted too, are sorely handicapped by their humble and excessive admiration for William Faulkner.

Cormac Mc Carthy, author of he has his own story to tell; but he tells it with so many of Faulkner’s literary devices and mannerisms that he half submerges his own talents beneath a flood of imitation.

There are no marathon sentences in these pages, but most of Faulkner’s other famous characteristics are present: the wandering pronouns with no visible antecedents; the recondite vocabulary and coined words; the dense prose packed with elaborate figures of speech; the deliberate ambiguity, the hints and withheld information; the confusion in time and place, and the flashbacks that fall to shed much light into the intermittent gloom.

All these factors insure that is an exasperating book.

A state of dread, like some uncanny foretaste of a bitter memory.

The cold relentless circling of the intestate earth. For half a century now the aloof novelist, playwright, and screenwriter has plunged into the dark, arid subconscious of the American west and surfaced with a series of bleak and terrifying visions.