Review of No Place for Home: Spatial Constraint and Character Flight in the Novels of Cormac McCarthy (Studies in Major Literary Authors) (Hardcover)

Jay Ellis's delightfully original and urbane treatment of the finest American novelist since Faulkner and Hemingway exemplifies the best tradition of crossover criticism.

In a style that is edgy, electric, and intensely personal, Ellis probes into the complex worlds of McCarthy's fiction as if they were matters of life and death, which of course they are. Ellis's range of psychological, linguistic, literary and and cultural references doesn't ever appear forced or pretentious. In fact one of the book's achievements is to maintain a sense of spontaneity throughout.

A rare combination of insightful close readings, stimulating tangents and a number of very big and engaging ideas, the book reads as if Ellis (a novelist himself) decided to pour the same level of energy and feeling into a work of scholarship as he would into a work of his own fiction. The result is both provocative and passionate, a tribute of the sort that every great writer deserves but seldom sees in his or her lifetime.

I have not yet read a better guide to McCarthy's work for either the layman or the scholar. Wherever there are dedicated readers of McCarthy, NO PLACE FOR HOME will be there.


Product Description
This book was written to venture beyond interpretations of Cormac McCarthy's characters as simple, antinomian, and non-psychological; and of his landscapes as unrelated to the violent arcs of often orphaned and always emotionally isolated and socially detached characters. As McCarthy usually eschews direct indications of psychology, his landscapes allow us to infer much about their motivations. The relationship of ambivalent nostalgia for domesticity to McCarthy's descriptions of space remains relatively unexamined at book length, and through less theoretical application than close reading. By including McCarthy's latest book, this study offer the only complete study of all nine novels. Within McCarthy studies, this book extends and complicates a growing interest in space and domesticity in his work. The author combines a high regard for McCarthy's stylistic prowess with a provocative reading of how his own psychological habits around gender issues and family relations power books that only appear to be stories of masculine heroics, expressions of misogynistic fear, or antinomian rejections of civilized life.

Click Here to see more reviews about: No Place for Home: Spatial Constraint and Character Flight in the Novels of Cormac McCarthy (Studies in Major Literary Authors) (Hardcover)