How Not to Love Cormac McCarthy

I joined Ben Whitmer’s Zoom class, and the room was charged the way I expected from a scoreboard or a setlist, not a close read of the Judge. Call it devotion; call it a fan club. Men mythologizing men mythologizing men.

There’s a difference between fetishizing the canon and raiding it for tools. I’d been on the wrong side of that line before. Long before college, The Road was a badge for a certain kind of boy in a certain kind of bar, one book, one prophecy, same ending: me leaving. So yes, I was predisposed to hate McCarthy. Whitmer didn’t make me love him; he did something better. He let me read what I hated without lying about why. I still don’t want to live in McCarthy’s world, but I do want to steal his sky, the moral weather, the way history cuts you just for walking through.

At community college, “American Lit II” meant W. E. B. Du Bois, Zora Neale Hurston, and Jane Johnston Schoolcraft. Then I transferred to a “real” university. The chair of the English Department skimmed my transcript and smiled: wrong survey. American Lit II meant Hemingway, Faulkner, McCarthy. The rest belonged to electives, women, Black, Chicano, Native writers, nice to have, not the spine.

I revolted so hard I threw the whole shelf out. After 2016, I built a counter-canon on principle: no genre, no commercial fiction, nothing that sold. Woolf exorcised; Plath, ditto; the New Journalists audited and dismissed. Wallace’s footnotes out. I lived on small presses and obscure translations and convinced myself exclusion was revolutionary. I hadn’t just questioned the canon; I’d banned it. Moral purity felt like ethics; really, it made my world small.

By the time I landed in The Book Project, I was still exorcising my MFA demons. Those Iowa-style workshops ran four hours and were full of earnest Carver clones and Saunders acolytes. I write about sex and the damage ledger; about aging when desirability stops paying the bills. I swing between not wanting men to read me and fearing they won't want to. I wanted my rooms, voice, body, memory, and also the big American weather those big American man books claim.

So I took Whitmer’s Blood Meridian class. I read most of the book beforehand and hated it, pages and pages of hated it. The unpunctuated dialogue felt performative and confusing. The violence droned like a bar band playing one song forever. I want a mind thrumming under the skin, Carson McCullers’s steamy, sultry South. McCarthy wrote desert, brutal, and airless. Dialogue wandered untagged. Horizons ended in another bleached bone. I’ve always wanted the room within the room, not a blood-orange sky over men whose depth is a flesh wound.

Whitmer didn’t try to convert me. He rearranged the room and slowed us to the pace of a sentence so we could hear the forge in the clauses, iron pulled hot, hammered, cooled. He showed the machine, Bible cadences kinked through border slang, violence as geology more than plot. He treated the Judge as architecture, not psychology, an organizing principle that moves men, not a man or mythology.

I kept refusing where it mattered: the womanlessness, the pose, the narcotic sameness of the killing. Whitmer and the McCarthy disciples kept moving the furniture to make space for my refusals; they held the door open.

I didn’t tattoo McCarthy’s syntax on my wrist. When I closed the book, though, I felt its absence. The next few novels I picked up felt flatter than their potential. I no longer feel the need to argue it out of the room it belongs in, mounted with the antlers on the wall of the American canon. Not loved by me necessarily, but essential.

What the class returned to me, slyly, like a bartender watering down whiskeys, was range. I can identify the masculine bones that have always lived in my work without betraying my people. None of that requires renouncing the books I pray to. It widens the altar. McCarthy isn’t noir; he is an anti-Western in a biblical register, frontier Gothic weathered to bone. Still, he tucked into the noir part of my brain. What I got wasn’t fellowship; it was sky, the sense that history isn’t backdrop but blade. I could take that and leave the swagger. Keep the interiority, walk the hardpan.

Consider: Chandler’s torque of metaphor tightens Lucia Berlin’s jump-cuts and lets her jokes land like disclosures; Mosley’s humane steadiness anchors Gwendolyn Brooks’s street-level witness so each line holds its neighbor; Denis Johnson’s scrapyard light keeps Sandra Cisneros’s barrio vignettes luminous without sentiment; and Larry Brown’s plain mercy tempers Kaveh Akbar’s devotional urgency so the invitation feels like care, not command. In Whitmer’s frame, it isn’t masculinity’s costume; it is a grammar of consequence. Actions echo; choices stain; a small mercy tilts the room. That mix, biblical Western weather plus noir consequence, gave me a way to write about men without begging them to be better first.

The tradition’s worst habits are real; I won’t pretend otherwise. But inside the cut, there is an ethic I can work with: look at what breaks us, name the cost, do not pretty it up.

So I let a few more forbidden men back in my room. Not the bar guys with The Road tucked under their arms like credentials, but the ones on the page who keep the camera steady on impact. Not to worship; to learn.

The canon didn’t become my chapel; it became a shed of tools, some I’ll never touch, some I’ll use to cut a door where there wasn’t one. Whitmer didn’t fix my beef with McCarthy; he let me keep it and carve off the usable cuts. And it showed up where it counts: on the page. My sentences came back with harder edges. The people on my pages felt more entitled to the room, queerer, more feminine — and, frankly, more ferocious.

Meet the Author

Jenny Catlin has seen much success as a Pushcart Prize winner, a notable mention for Best American Essays, and as a writer for The Athletic, The Gettysburg Review, Willow Springs, and Horror-Sleaze-Trash, among other publications. As an educator, she has taught incarcerated people, college freshmen, and adults with intellectual disabilities. Jenny has ghostwritten thousands of pages of bureaucratic policy documents. 

The Book Project

Are you ready to have your perspective on writing altered? The Book Project might just be the ticket to not only finishing your book but making it the best version it can be.