Cormac McCarthy, 89, has a new novel — two, actually. And they’re almost perfect:
The world of The Road Warrior is the kind of world you want to see.
A world where two guys from California and Nevada — one a Vietnam veteran, the other a former Marine — become a team. They must journey through the heartland of America, one guy a day, the other a thousand miles at a time. The road is a path toward survival.
The Road Warrior, the first novel by the late Cormac McCarthy, is set in the 1970s and is a kind of road trip gone awry.
“We start in Hollywood,” says McCarthy in a recent interview in his home, surrounded by a bookcase containing hundreds of books on American history and culture, “and we’re out here.”
After they’ve crossed the Mojave Desert, the characters enter a place McCarthy calls the “Middle America of Kansas City.” There, the two guys are on the road with a small group of others, most of whom seem to have been picked carefully — like the ones who go into the military and then the Marines, the ones who are law enforcement…the ones with the most money and the least education.
“We’re on the road all across the United States. We’re traveling from one place to another, in between,” says McCarthy.
And the way this world is set up is almost perfect. The Road Warrior is a perfect book.
And in McCarthy’s world, this perfect world is so believable that it’s almost uncanny. “It’s not at the level of the movies,” says McCarthy. “They’re better in the way that you know better, and it’s like a film noir thriller.”
McCarthy says on a tour of America, he gets a kick just from driving on America’s road. It could be anywhere in America, but it’s somehow perfect.
But what makes
