Cormac McCarthy shaped a generation of writers like me — even when we didn’t admit it
BY JOHN WRAY
For the entirety of my writing life, Cormac McCarthy has been a mountain. Some of the novelists of my generation found the mountain beautiful; others found it oppressive. But virtually all of us, whatever our position or attitude, existed in its shade.
In spite of the enormity of his shadow, however, I’ve never before written about the author of so many novels I’ve studied and admired. In the two decades since my first book was published, I’ve fielded the boilerplate question about my influences no end of times, name-checking an almost absurdly ragtag crew: Shirley Hazzard, Denis Johnson, William S. Burroughs, Amos Tutuola, Lydia Davis, Toni Morrison, John Berger, Ursula K. Le Guin — even, just a few weeks ago, whoever ghost-wrote David Lee Roth’s memoir, “Crazy From the Heat.” But one name I’ve conspicuously avoided all these years has been that of McCarthy, who died last week at 89. Why on earth is that?