Cormac McCarthy’s Best Books: A Guide

Cormac McCarthy, who died on Tuesday at the age of 89, was renowned for stark and violent novels of the American South and West that were distinguished by a merciless vision and nearly biblical prose. From the start his writing drew comparisons to novelists as different as William Faulkner and Mark Twain, but his themes were always and recognizably his own: justice, despair, the futile but urgent need for hope in a fallen world.

Jerome Charyn’s description of “Suttree,” in The Times’s 1979 review, could well be about any of McCarthy’s novels. “The book comes at us like a horrifying flood. The language licks, batters, wounds — a poetic, troubled rush of debris,” Charyn wrote. “It is personal and tough, without that boring neatness and desire for resolution that you can get in any well-made novel. Cormac McCarthy has little mercy to spare, for his characters or himself. … ‘Suttree’ is like a good, long scream in the ear.”

These seven novels comprise the best of McCarthy’s work.

Many scholars consider this to be McCarthy’s greatest Southern novel. It traces the title character’s life along the Tennessee River in the spirit of a “doomed Huckleberry Finn,” as The Times wrote of the book. Having left behind a life of privilege, Suttree spends his days fishing, trawling Knoxville’s seedy underbelly and mingling with drunks, grifters and misfits. His attempts to connect more meaningfully with others invariably end in disaster. At nearly 500 pages, this whipsawing picaresque is McCarthy’s longest novel (and perhaps most autobiographical) and reflects the height of his sardonic humor.

This scorched-earth epic is widely hailed as McCarthy’s masterpiece, a challenging (some might say impenetrable) and breathtakingly violent tale of a teenage wanderer known as “the kid,” who heads across the American South and into Mexico in the mid-19th century. Along the way, he joins the psychotic Glanton gang, scalp hunters who were originally committed to fending off Apache attacks but turned instead to indiscriminately murdering nearly every Indian or Mexican they met. The novel’s heavyweight themes — Manifest Destiny, nihilism’s triumph over morality — are complemented by indelible imagery and sentences as expansive as desert skies.

This first installment of McCarthy’s Border trilogy — which includes “The Crossing” (1994) and “Cities of the Plain” (1998) — was his breakthrough novel, commercially. The story of a 16-year-old boy who rides to Mexico with a friend after being evicted from the Texas ranch where he grew up, it has an elegiac quality and a plain-spokenness that his earlier, thornier fiction mostly lacked. It is a moving but unsentimental novel about human consciousness, about landscape, about horses and about the displacements involved in America’s movement westward.

McCarthy’s novel was turned into an indelible film by the Coen Brothers, but get past that: The book, a piece of bravura storytelling, is well worth revisiting. It’s about drug deal gone wrong and an average Joe who stumbles upon more than $2 million in a leather satchel. It’s also about a meditative small-town sheriff and a brutal killer, Anton Chigurh, who dispatches his victims with a pneumatic cattle gun. “No Country for Old Men” — grisly, lyrical and fleet of foot — is a blood-dark meditation on the violence that man visits upon man. It’s McCarthy at his most compulsively readable.

This brooding postapocalyptic novel details the journey of a father and his young son in the wake of an unspecified cataclysm. They encounter horror after horror, but the novel is also heartbreaking in its humanity. “My job is to take care of you,” the man tells the boy. “I was appointed to do that by God. I will kill anyone who touches you.” By the end of the novel, it seems the father might die, too. This pared-down novel, which was awarded a Pulitzer, is as humane as it harrowing.

Sixteen years after “The Road,” McCarthy released two new novels that were vastly different from anything he’d ever published. The intertwined works explore arcane scientific and metaphysical fields of study that McCarthy had long been obsessed with: quantum physics, the philosophy of mathematics and theories about the nature of consciousness. In “The Passenger,” McCarthy tells the tragic story of Bobby Western, a salvage diver, who is haunted by the loss of his sister Alicia, a beautiful and troubled mathematical genius who died by suicide.

A companion novel, “Stella Maris,” focuses on Alicia, with a narrative that unfolds as dialogue between Alicia and her doctors at a psychiatric hospital in Wisconsin in 1972. In their conversations, Alicia reveals how her pursuit of revolutionary mathematical theories made her question the nature of reality and drove her to insanity. “Reading ‘Stella Maris’ after ‘The Passenger’ is like trying to hang onto a dream you’ve been having,” Dwight Garner, a critic for The Times, wrote. “It’s an uncanny, unsettling dream, tuned into the static of the universe.”