Child of God (1973)

McCarthy takes the grotesque tradition, heads out the back, shoots it with a shotgun and pisses all over its corpse. McCarthy does not flinch, does not turn away from what is awful in our world. He writes what he sees in it and what he sees is Lester Ballard, a child of God much like yourself. Depraved and hilarious and perfectly phrased. Masterful.
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A lean, jet-black character study. ( )

The book is nasty, brutish and short. Everything Thomas Hobbes could want to show what life in a state of nature would be like. The main character - Lester Ballard - gets my vote for being the most despicable characterization of a human being imaginable; yet, in some way, McCarthy seems to want, at some level, to create some sense of sympathy for Ballard.

McCarthy's works tend to be blunt, uncompromising (and frequently unsympathetic) looks at humanity - the sort of stuff one doesn't want to acknowledge - that hit too close to home to be comfortable. He has an eye for precision in his narration that is stark, uneasy, yet - in its own way - quite beautiful.

This may not be a book for everyone, as some parts approach the absolutely disgusting. But if you want to experience real American literature as few other authors dare present it, Child of God may be a masterpiece. ( )

That kid at school who always had a runny nose and a rash around his mouth from licking his lips, and he smelled funny, and used to eat out of the bin and expose himself to other kids...he grew up and Cormac McCarthy wrote a book about him ( )

McCarthy’s style was recognisable immediately to me – that descriptive prose used to convey landscape, the way it’s not clear immediately in places what is happening, partly because of the sparseness of the prose in places or because he uses a pronoun leaving the reader to work out who this person it, the lack of quotation marks for direct speech, the way we get brief but insightful characterization and then the disturbing main character, a forerunner of Chigurh in ‘No Country for Old Men’ except Ballard has that ambiguity about him summed up in the title - ‘Child of God’, an idea explored in a conversation where an unnamed old man says he thinks ‘people are the same from the day God first made one’ when asked if he thought people were meaner now.

McCarthy is able to create characters and places which seem so real and yet so different. He readily creates an atmosphere and his prose is inviting to read. He doesn’t make us feel too happy about what we’re like, though. ( )