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 DescriptionThis 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.
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No Place for Home: Spatial Constraint and Character Flight in the Novels of Cormac McCarthy (Studies in Major Literary Authors) (Hardcover)
I found this book to be another of Hal Borland's masterful descriptions of the nature around us. When Hal describes a brook to fish in, or a hill loaded with color in the fall, an animal's tracks in the snow,aweathered fence line falling down, the sound of geese far overhead on a cold clear night.....You can feel, hear, and see in your mind's eye... exactly what he was describing. You might have even experienced these things, yourself, at some point in your busy life, but never thought any more about it until you opened the pages of this and all others by Hal Borland. This book is not only a MUST read....It's a GREAT read. Enjoy
