Unfortunately I had to put this one down, and it was only due to the fact that every other chapter is written in the mind of a character who is schizophrenic. Maybe McCarthy is so great that it will one day be seen as a masterpiece — Faulkner narrated a story from the point of view of a dead person. But I can’t follow or even muster up the tiniest bit of care for someone who is mentally deranged. It’s like trying to feel sorry for a drunk who is crying because of something terrible that happened in their life, that’s causing them to drink. I’m actually thinking now of this woman who was a friend of some friends (she was Swiss) who went to sleep with a candle burning next to her pillow, and an empty glass, cigarettes, an ash tray and a bottle of something like schnapps or rum. She explained that she would wake up in the middle of the night and in order not to have to get out of bed, would have all her needs right there: her cigarettes and her drinks. She was a severe alcoholic and one night we made the mistake of indulging her and let us tell her all about the story of her baby that died in the hospital. It went on for hours, and it never got anywhere. She just repeated the same thing over and over and over. And later we learned that she did this to any new person she met. There was no forward motion and she was really just a broken record using this excuse to not face her problems.
That’s sort of how I felt about every other chapter in this book. For the first several chapters I could tell it was a woman’s mind, but then I finally just did a quick search and learned that it was the main character’s sister, who was dead in the “real time” part of the book. So because she was crazy, and dead, I didn’t really feel the need to read this book. If it was just his (the brother’s) story, I would have read it entirely, because we learn, early on, that he is still in love with his sister and that she’s dead. I’d love to know what that character thinks about his own obsession. But I don’t need to read the rantings of a crazy person UNLESS they make some progress. But I didn’t see it coming, and it was too hard to read: not Finnegan’s Wake hard and not even Ulysses hard, but more like Mrs. Dalloway when the “impressionism” that Virginia Woolf was trying to capture became so confusing, you couldn’t tell if you had just swept from one head to another.
So that’s one I had to put down. Currently reading, “Up With the Sun,” and enjoying it. It’s an imagined biography of the real actor and antiquarian Dirk Dallman (I’ll correct that name later), who was found murdered along with his lover Stephen in about 1980 or 81. In real life, (I think that’s now written, IRL, they did catch the guys and they were hustlers who decided to prey on some wealthy fags who bought their cocaine and grass.) Gay men have always had this interesting willingness to venture across class lines: so it was perfectly fine for an extremely wealthy gay guy (or at least one who was pretending to be wealthy) to dip into the impoverished world of the hustlers. I just hope this guy is up to the task.