Crossings (On Cormac McCarthy)

Harold Bloom once said that there were only four active great American novelists: Don DeLillo, Cormac McCarthy, Thomas Pynchon, and Philip Roth. That was in 2003, and it was an absurd thing to say even back then (I won’t dignify it with an elaborate rebuke). Twenty years later, Roth has died; Pynchon is retired, or close to it; DeLillo continues to publish, but with diminishing readership and acclaim; and, as of a couple weeks ago, Cormac McCarthy has died.