Cormac McCarthy's The Orchard Keeper

Simply put-without reserve, without hyperbole, with none of the fanatical accoutrement of a starry-eyed sycophant-Cormac McCarthy is our greatest living American writer. How does one, after reading McCarthy, maintain the desire to write? McCarthy weaves the mysticism of Hawthorne with the verbose wordplay of Faulkner and meets them in the middle of the Eastern seaboard to create an Appalachia at once accessible to the reader and mysterious in its unique sense of place and landscape. In McCarthy's 1963 The Orchard Keeper, we are introduced to the freshman chops which will develop into the ethereal, chilling voice that will later give us Blood Meridian.

McCarthy's use of the wraith-like stalker and demonized landscape begins its debut as the scepter, evil father of John Wesley Rattner. The evil father is killed by the quasi-hero, Marion Sylder, in a decided leap of self-preservation. The set-up allows for the thematic arch of The Orchard Keeper and allows for the irony of the title to play out later in the character of Uncle Ather, the kindly mountain man tied eternally to the landscape and crippled orchard he cares for. Sylder represents the future and the young Wesley represents the here and now. With that as the leaping-off point, McCarthy laments the dying ways of old Appalachia and ushers in a future devoid of the people and characters that gave the mist-ridden ridges and verdant valleys of the mid-Atlantic Appalachia's their flavor.

McCarthy explores the triumph of progression over the staid ways of the past in The Orchard Keeper. However, he does it in a way that is not polemical nor didactic, but merely an exploration of the old world of pastoralism into the new world of technology. The law, a theme visited in his other books, represents an amalgamation of good and bad, and McCarthy thrives on these diametric relationships between the shades of black and white in the ever present gray of his fogs and mists.

The Orchard Keeper announces McCarthy as a reckoning force in American literature. His verve and writing style is canonical. From the first italicized paragraphs of his epilogues, the voice and style vaults him into the airy heights of Hawthorne and Faulkner. He is a man's man of a writer, but accessible by feminine readers. The Orchard Keeper is a tragedy and a coming of age wrapped into one. But it is also a farewell:

They are gone now. Fled, banished in death or exile, lost, undone. Over the land sun and winds still move to burn and sway the trees, the grasses. No avatar, no scion, no vestige of that people remains. On the lips of the strange race that now dwells there their names are myth, legend, dust. (246)

The Orchard Keeper is a must read, and Cormac McCarthy is an American treasure.