OTV Cribs

Doesn't this article sound like it was written by someone who deep-down wanted Cormac McCarthy to escort Oprah around his house wearing his bathrobe while smoking a pipe, stopping at the door to his bedroom to say, "This is where the magic happens...and I ain't talking about typing.  Care for a little border trilogy?"  But the elitist, nothing-on-Oprah-can-be-good just wouldn't let Troy Petterson indulge in his fantasy.  After all it was his duty as Male and kindler of the elitist fire to remind everyone that "This is Oprah.  Talk show host.  Women, housewives watch it.  They scream and talk about their boobs sometimes."  With that formula in place, we get: McCarthy appeared on Oprah (a show about and for screaming booby talking women), therefore McCarthy is no JD Salinger.  Stupid.

Jesus, folks, what more do you want?  You just witnessed an interview with Cormac McCarthy, something many of us never thought we'd see.  Relax.  Let it happen.  You'll probably never see it again.  So he's not polished, not ready for prime- or even Oprah-time and Oprah did little to enhance the excitement level.  Look, I feel as bad as you do that we missed out on having our Steve Allens or Dick Cavetts, those days when the Kerouacs of the world would flop down drunk and read from their new book while the host played piano and smoked cigarettes. We'll probably never see that again. Charlie Rose is more boring than frozen snot and he comes on in the too wee hours of the morning for my DVR to even care.  We have Oprah.  She ain't perfect for the hardcore litterati but she's better than Larry King, or godforbid Rosie O, and she scored one of the five hardest interviews in the literary world.  Bet you money she's working on the other four.

In case you don't want to read the entire article, here's the most egregious part:

Oprah played an embarrassing short film inspired by the novel (about a father-son trek through the post-apocalypse) that even featured shots of singed pages of its text—a sight that called to mind the elementary-school assignment in which you reproduce the, like, Magna Carta on typing paper and steep the sheet in tea and have your mom take a kitchen match to its edges. Then the proper interview began. It proved to be absurd, of course, but not quite so much as one might hope. Oprah wore a sky-blue V-neck and lipstick of a fuchsia shade perhaps deliberately de trop. One rather hoped that her guest—the maestro of high-literary horse operas and a man whose last really good book was Blood Meridian—would show up for their Santa Fe rendezvous looking like so much tumbleweed. Instead, he resembled J. Peterman's idea of a wise ol' ranch hand: bright blue work shirt, handsome chinos, and boots that I don't think I can afford. Cormac—may I call you Cormac, now?—slumped tolerantly in his deep leather chair, hand on head.

Oprah asked questions, many of them not stupid, and she slipped into her pretentious Jessye Norman intonation when reminding her audience that the book had won the Pulitzer Prize. Stay-at-home moms from Roxbury to La Jolla doubtlessly went gaga for this; others of us were simply happy to be reminded of a fine line by William Gass: "The Pulitzer Prize in fiction takes dead aim at mediocrity and almost never misses."

Cormac crinkled and twinkled—avuncular, patient, not entirely unsassy. He spilled forth the twang and soft grit of his voice in a seducer's hush you wanted to lean into. If he ever abandons his skepticism about pursuing publicity—"I don't think it's good for your head," he told Oprah—he'd be a natural on CBS Sunday Morning. The byplay was flirty enough to put you in mind of those moments that pass, every evening around 7, over book-party chardonnay or publishing-course sherry: The gray eminence delivers patient answers to a dewy literary bud as if her questions—Do you write every day? Or just when inspiration strikes?—had never before nuzzled his hairy ears. She smiles understandingly and waits for a chance to call him out for blushing. "What do you want us to get from this book?" Oprah asked Cormac. "You should be thankful for what you have," he said, causing me to wonder if a collaboration with Mitch Albom is coming down the pike.

Comments

[Varg]

All the great interviewers are on radio.

And this fella's comparison to Albom, he meant it in jest I know, but he's also being smarmy. If literature gets so complex that the author himself can't reduce it to a simple line, perhaps it's too complicated for its own good. I've heard many verbose authors go on and on about the intricacies of their piece-of-shit books. It's agony. Worth shouldn't be measured in complexity.

I know I certainly appreciated what I had after reading The Road. I actually appreciated the fact that I was no longer reading "The Road" anymore.

So "Blood Meridian" is the Cormac's "Blood on the Tracks"? I'll try to remember that one if I ever join a book club. Wait, maybe I wont because it will make me look predictable because I will have stopped liking McCarthy just as soon as he began to achieve a wider critical appeal and my obvious attempt to look refined will be exposed.