I have either committed a serious error or done myself a great favor in making Child of God my first experience reading Cormac McCarthy. For every moment in which I appreciated his technical and inventive skill as a writer, I found at least three moments in which I questioned his narrative and philosophical purpose...and not questioned as in - do I agree with his purpose and philosophy? - but rather - do I think McCarthy even displays purpose in this novel?
I will attempt to sidestep-by-acknowledging the argument that art needn't possess a point. Fair enough. I do not propose that a creative work must have an underlying purpose, function or point. I am a great fan of the creative thing existing for its own sake. I suppose that I am, however, asserting that when the creative thing's existence alone is not compelling, and a subsequent search for a point of some sort proves equally fruitless, at least in the realm of my subjective experiences then, I lean toward a general analysis of the work as mediocre. I didn't expect to find Cormac McCarthy mediocre, but there it is. A talented writer telling a mediocre, if brutal, story.
For what it's worth, I actually began liking this book a tad more when the protagonist's anti-social cruelty escalated into serial killing, so the brutality I reference does not pertain to the acts that remove our main character from the ranks of the average individual. I refer, rather, to the general tone of the novel which seems to carry an ultimate judgment of the world itself - it is no good place for life, and without an abnormal amount of sheltering (which, I'll agree with McCarthy, most of us get) all of nature's creatures will grow twisted...to some extent. Maybe we will. It's not veracity at issue, it's the meaningfulness of using an entire novel and not inconsiderable facility with words to make this, and no other, important observation. No offense, Cormac, but yawn. I've read The Birth of Tragedy, too. A prime universal force is destruction - chaos - not chaotic, but chaos itself. Bad things happen to good people and good things happen to bad people. Monsters walk among us and we, who are not monsters, created them, and humans have spent millenia making up systems of thought to explain 'why' when there is no 'why', there just 'is'. There is nature and there is us, and neither one consistently displays kindness as anything but an incidental trait. Our core traits seem to be more amoral than immoral, and survival driven. I am saddened by, but reluctantly have come to believe all of this. However, in the face of these things, I have also found that beauty persists and so does kindness. I'm more interested in the balance between these realities than in either extreme.
So can we get some Apollo in there to balance Dionysus? Maybe, if I were in a more charitable mood after reading Child of God, I'd suggest that McCarthy's ability to use language inventively is the Apollo, the form, the beauty, that stands in contrast to the wicked chaos of the Dionysian truth of his story and makes it intelligible. I almost changed my own mind in just writing that sentence...but I don't feel very charitable. I feel disappointed because I wanted to read a great story by an author whom I have always meant to read and instead, at best, I read an ugly horror story and an historically-accurate depiction of an unfamiliar region. These things are good, but not great. At worst, I read a talented author trying to be shocking (I guess? Maybe thought-provoking?) by portraying bald moral emptiness and pointing out that our "moral" society created it. If I wanted to read this observation, I'd check out American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis, a fine example of brutality with a purpose that elevates the whole to a meaningful work of art. (Ellis pulled this off and he's not nearly the writer McCarthy is, by the by. But he's a much better storyteller.) Granted, Ellis is not concerned with literal isolation (figurative, sure) and isolation comprises the one remotely interesting theme in Child of God. But McCarthy does not handle the theme with near enough nuance to make it anything but sad.
So, as I said, I either made a serious error reading Child of God first, in that I have needlessly soured myself on an author I might like if I'd started with a different work...or I have done myself a great favor in figuring out early that I don't need to spend my precious read-time on any more of McCarthy's unredemptive prose.
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