Cormac McMonthly: Cities of the Plain (1998)

There's hard lessons in this world.

Cormac McCarthy was one of the greatest American writers of fiction. During his life, he published 12 novels. Over the course of this year, I have been reading one of those novels each month, in publishing order, and reflecting on the experience here. Welcome to Cormac McMonthly.

Thank you to Peter Elvis for this photo.

Here we have an ending, of sorts.

Bearing, as it does, the unenviable weight that comes with being the third part of a trilogy, Cities of the Plain is difficult, and not especially rewarding, to contemplate as a single novel.

Any and every discussion of this book begins this way, and rightfully so. It’s the third part of McCarthy’s Border Trilogy, and the glue holding the series together. Without Cities, the first two books, All the Pretty Horses and The Crossing would merely be in conversation with one another, but living separate lives.

John Grady Cole and Billy Parham, whose paths never crossed in those first two books, are shown to be good friends, with a deep understanding of one another. In the works of Cormac McCarthy, where man’s understanding of anything at all, apart from the inevitability of his own demise, must be taken as illusory, that understanding – the deep friendship two men can share – is as close to reliable as we get.

How did they come to be friends? Not terribly important. We’re left to imagine and infer that, mostly. And we can. We know that these two men have led similarly hard lives, and are both committed to running out the string as caballeros, despite and because of what the world around them has to say about it. It’s impossible not to nod appreciatively and smile ruefully when the book reveals that these two have found one another.

Their interplay is, for my money, where this book shines brightest. John Grady’s determination to rescue puppies from up under some rocks while Billy snoozes off to the side, refusing to help, is the one enduring image I’ll retain from this read that’s entirely pleasant. Well, maybe not entirely. Of course one of the puppies has to come up dead. Ol Cormie won’t ever let us have pure sunshine.

Elsewhere I enjoyed the discussion of which animals might be the stupidest, and how in the hell a man could possibly tell. I was amused by the talk of two twins conspiring to trick a horse into thinking they were one person over the course of the horse’s upbringing. There’s some fun animal stuff happening in Cities.

There’s also an owl flying smack into the center of a moving car’s windshield, shattering the glass to the point of obscuring visibility. I’ll come back to this.

The Border Trilogy seems hell-bent upon proving how good man is at fooling himself into thinking he knows anything about anything. There is nothing that a man can fully understand, because the attempt to understand is to fail to perceive externality as it is. There’s a layering-on of information when we claim to know or understand something, removing us further from that thing, and obscuring its self-evident essence.

In All the Pretty Horses, the focal device for this obfuscation was horses, pretty and otherwise. A man can’t really know a horse’s heart, though he can try to, or think he does. Through this lesson, we are then taught that the same can be said about a man’s relationship to his own heart, his ownself.

In The Crossing, Mexico is the unknowable other, and that theme continues in Cities. Here is a culture that predates America, which fascinates and lures farmboys with limited imaginations and large hearts. “But,” says Eduardo, the Mexican owner of a whorehouse who has dealt with many heartsick farmboys, “the Mexican world is a world of adornment only and underneath it is very plain indeed.”

Cities goes further, introducing a more nuanced portrayal of women, sexual politics, and even mental health, as dimensions of unknowability.

But nowhere is knowledge more misleading and dangerous than in the book’s central attempt at heroism. In his idolatry of Magdalena, the epileptic prostitute who promises to marry him, John Grady projects onto her a particular virtue, which can only thrive once Magdalena is plucked from her natural, exotic Mexican surroundings and brought to live in America, where she will be exposed to justice and the way of life she deserves, thanks to having been discovered and subsequently rescued by a good ol American boy who knows what’s right and what isn’t.

John Grady is willing to look past the fact that Magdalena is, by profession, a whore. This is no failing of hers, nor a choice that she has made for herself, he believes. He is not dissuaded by the fact that he or she or both will almost certainly be killed, should Magdalena be removed from Eduardo’s possession. Warnings from friends that he is crazy go unheard.

Because John Grady knows he loves her, and that knowledge legitimizes the love, rendering all else secondary.

John Grady can’t accept the situation as it so plainly appears to all those around him, because of what he knows.

But of course, McCarthy shows us, neither John Grady nor anyone knows anything, for we cannot. To live is to know or to attempt to know, thereby missing all as it naturally is.

At least that’s my takeaway, and I’ve had to struggle to arrive at it. I’ve got a hunch that Cities of the Plain might prove to be one of the more rewarding rereads in McCarthy’s canon, and yet, having just finished it for the first time, it’s the one I’m least inclined to want to reread.

Its pace is uneven, with a meandering and mostly inconsequential first half that explodes into a gruesome knife-fight near the end, and culminates in an epilogue that might be the most obnoxiously out-of-place philosophizing in all of McCarthydom (although I’ve heard things about Stella Maris, which I have not yet read).

John Grady dies for what he believes in, which is a foolish act if we follow McCarthy logic. Billy withers into obscurity, only to be told by a woman we know nothing about that she knows who he is.

Then of course we must contend with the fact that in the Book of Genesis, the Cities of the Plain include our buddies, Sodom and Gomorrah. And we all know what happened to them. McCarthy didn’t give this book that title by accident. So who’s god here? Angered by what sin? Who’s being wiped out?  

Well I don’t know who knows what anymore in McCarthy or whether anything can be known.

So I return to that bloodied owl embedded in that shattered windshield.

Think about what an owl in a story represents to you, as a reader.

Then think about a windshield. A big, clear, frame that you look through to see what’s right in front of you.

One smashes into the other, rendering it opaque, dangerous.

Do you keep on driving? With that limited view of the road?     

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Cormac McMonthly

• January: The Orchard Keeper (1965)

• February: Outer Dark (1968)

• March: Child of God (1973)

• April: Suttree (1979)

• May: Blood Meridian, or, The Evening Redness in the West (1985)

• June: All the Pretty Horses (1992)

• July: The Crossing (1994)