Child of God (Vintage International)

Many years before the horrifying, realistic violence of NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN (2005) and the grim post-apocalyptic THE ROAD (2006), Cormac McCarthy wrote his third novel, CHILD OF GOD (1973), providing readers a pen-light beam on a path through a very dark landscape indicating what was to come. CHILD OF GOD contains many of the characteristics readers now identify with the Pulitzer Prize winner who, arguably, ranks among America’s finest living novelists. Set in the backwoods of East Tennessee and allegedly based partially on a series of true-life murders outside Chattanooga, Tennessee in 1963, CHILD OF GOD is simply terrifying. It tells the story of twenty-seven-year-old Lester Ballard who people say “never was right after his daddy killed himself” when Lester “was about nine or ten.” As an adult, Lester is a loner. He is unliked, distrusted, and all but shunned by others. When his childhood home, such as it is, is auctioned off against his will, Lester finds himself without shelter, totally alone, and his devolution as a human being begins and it rapidly escalates. McCarthy’s attributes as a writer as seen in the novel are numerous. Readers quickly get accustomed to and accept the author’s minimal, concise, and quirky style of writing (he never uses quotation marks for dialogue) because the author’s prose is consistently at a very high level and so carefully considered. The author convincingly recreates the culture, speech, and way of life of the rural, isolated mountain folk of Sevier County. Regardless of the events which take place, McCarthy chronicles them in a stoic, objective fashion. There is clearly no intent to titillate or inflate the proceedings which occupy the plot of the story and turn it into a horror novel. There is also no effort to make them less shocking than they are or to protect the reader from truly dreadful occurrences. Throughout, McCarthy proves himself a master of imagery and metaphor (the continued return to and emergence from caves is a perfect example). Lester Ballard becomes a scavenger, struggling to survive without benefit of man-made shelter or companionship. In spite of being almost child-like at times and seeming mentally deficient to most, Lester possesses an incredible amount of willpower and skill in the wild. Less readers begin to find too much sympathy for the character, McCarthy, when least expected, has Lester commit one vile offense after another, each one worse than the last. If his actions are motivated by a sense of want or need, revenge against those who did him wrong or even life in general, one would have a better understanding of him. However, Lester goes from a would-be survivor to a marauding, one-man force of evil, seemingly totally amoral, and capable of extraordinary, self-serving deviance with no remorse, even entering the realms of necrophilia and the real-life horror, Ed Gein. In spite of McCarthy’s ironic title of the book, it is virtually impossible to see Lester as a “child of god” compared to other human beings. However, as it becomes clear to others a crime spree is taking place within their community and Lester is responsible, those who hunt him do so with more than a dedication to justice, but with ruthlessness and deadly intent. In their pursuit to end Lester’s deviant, immoral behavior, they begin to sink to his level. Hence, it is possible to read into McCarthy’s novel a statement about the extremes which can be found in both human nature as well as the very complexion of any possible divinity. Although CHILD OF GOD is thirty-eight years old at this time, it is, unfortunately, a story of our current times. All of the needless violence, the lack of remorse, the hate, the selfishness, the lack of concern for others, the vigilantism and disregard for proper justice in the novel has existed throughout our history and like a tide, rises and falls and rises again. As McCarthy writes: “You could say that he’s [Lester] sustained by his fellow men, like you. Has peopled the shore with them calling to him. A race that gives suck to the maimed and the crazed, that wants their wrong blood in its history and will have it.” The conclusion of CHILD OF GOD is as traumatizing and coolly presented as the earlier events in the novel. The visual images it leaves readers with is staggering, gruesome, tragic, and unforgettable. Complete with flashes of dark humor and vivid, carefully chosen language, CHILD OF GOD is not a comfortable read, but McCarthy’s proficiencies as a great writer are unquestionable. [NOTE: CHILD OF GOD was filmed in 2013. The film was directed by James Franco from a screenplay written by himself and Vince Jolivette. Scott Haze stars as Lester Ballard.]

Lester Ballard is 27. He lives in the hills of Tennessee, outside Sevierville. When he was nine, his mother ran away and his father hanged himself. His farm is seized by the county and auctioned off, and he is forcibly evicted. He takes up living in an abandoned cabin up in the mountains; when that burns down, he goes underground, living in a series of caves and caverns. There have been many loonies and psychopaths among the mountain folk of eastern Tennessee, but none had "a patch on Lester Ballard for crazy." "Were there darker provinces of night he would have found them." He gives an idiot boy a robin as a "playpretty"; the idiot proceeds to eat the legs off the living bird; when the boy's sister (or mother?) expresses her dismay, Lester explains that the boy simply "wanted it to where it couldn't run off". On another visit, he kills the sister (mother?), burns down her cabin with the idiot boy trapped inside, and hauls away her corpse to add to his collection of female cadavers. He dresses them in new clothes and uses them for necrophilia. He later wears their panties and dons a fright wig fashioned out of one of their scalps. According to Cormac McCarthy, Lester Ballard "is a child of God much like yourself perhaps". CHILD OF GOD was McCarthy's third novel, published in 1973 (it is set in the early 1960s). It is an especially sordid view of humanity. Lester Ballard may be the most primeval, but he has lots of company. One of the few people he socializes with is Reubel, who oversees a dump of junk and garbage. "The dumpkeeper had spawned nine daughters and named them out of an old medical dictionary gleaned from the rubbish he picked. These gangling progeny with black hair hanging from their armpits now sat idle and wide-eyed day after day in chairs and crates about the little yard cleared out of the tips while their harried dam called them one by one to help with chores and one by one they shrugged or blinked their sluggard lids. Urethra, Cerebella, Hernia Sue." McCarthy mixes in some history of Sevier County. In the 1890's a vigilante group known as the White Caps sprang up in Sevier County. "They was a bunch of lowlife thieves and cowards and murderers. The only thing they ever done was to whip women and rob old people of their savins. Pensioners and widows. And murder people in their beds at night." (Lester Ballard's grandfather Leland "was a by god White Cap".) An old man who had been born in 1885 is asked whether he thinks people were meaner back in the days of the White Caps then they are now. "No, he said. I don't. I think people are the same from the day God first made one." I can well understand that one would not want to read CHILD OF GOD. Only someone who is somewhat unhinged could "enjoy" reading it. But I must say that McCarthy paints his squalid picture masterfully. The sentences are short and direct, much like the writing in "No Country for Old Men" and "The Road", in contrast to the Faulknerian prose of McCarthy's other novels. There is very little metaphysics. The story is told by means of short vignettes, in chapters of no more than ten pages with most being less than four pages. Several anonymous locals contribute their two cents to the tale of Lester Ballard, somewhat like a Greek chorus. In short, the novel is a masterpiece of compact dramatic writing.

Cormac McCarthy’s Child of God is not so much a novel in the traditional sense as it is a grim ledger of a life lived on the fringes of society. Where most stories lean on plot, McCarthy instead builds something closer to a third-person diary, a sparse record of one man’s descent into vagrancy, depravity, and violence. The result is a book that can be read quickly, but it echoes long after the final page. At the center is Lester Ballard, a man who scrounges for scraps, pleasure, and shelter with no thought for the future. He is less a character in the classical mold than a raw appetite in human form, living day to day, motivated only by immediate need. There are no ambitions, no dreams, no redemption arcs here; Ballard exists like an animal, driven only by survival and fleeting satisfaction. McCarthy’s prose is stripped down, almost zoological in tone, as if Ballard were being observed by an indifferent recorder rather than understood by a narrator. The voices that drift in; neighbors, bystanders, unseen chroniclers, give the novel a documentary texture. It is as if the land itself is testifying to Ballard’s existence. This structure makes the book feel like a chronicle, less concerned with climax or resolution and more with bearing witness. The title, Child of God, is where the book’s most haunting paradox lies. McCarthy offers no moral absolution, yet he refuses to cast Ballard outside of creation. No matter how wretched, no matter how far into depravity a man may fall, he remains a child of God. It’s a statement that is both unsettling and profound, a reminder that even the most outcast soul is not beyond the reach of that designation. At just under two hundred pages, the novel reads quickly; I myself finished it in little more than an hour after reaching the one-fifth mark. But brevity here does not mean thinness. McCarthy wastes no words, and what he offers is dense with implication. Ballard may not have plans for his future, but McCarthy forces us to confront what his existence means for the rest of us. In the end, Child of God is not a book about plot, but about presence, about what it means that such a man lives in the hollows of Tennessee, stripped of dignity yet still counted among the children of God. It is disturbing, spare, and unrelenting, but in that austerity lies its meaning.

Its spine was damaged but I purchased used knowing that could happen. Other than that this book is ok. Pretty messed up but ok

"The travails of a homeless, retarded necrophiliac killer roaming the hills of Kentucky. It sounds like a joke but somehow, it's not. (Though, if I were John Waters, I'd option it immediately.) Not only do you take this ghoul seriously, once you're halfway through the book, you realize you're on his side. Without psychologizing, or even getting into the protagonist's completely non-reflective head, McCarthy makes us understand him; what he's doing makes total sense to him, given what he knows. He comes to seem merely an extreme version of all people - blind, cosmically and comically ignorant, doing what makes sense to us given what we know." - Mary Gaitskill From The Salon**com Reader's Guide to Contemporary Authors, pg 156. Mary Gaitskill has given the best description of this novel that I've read anywhere, going so far as to suggest that it almost seems jokey in description. I can roughly imagine what would happen to someone trying to pitch this idea to a publisher or a producer today. Almost. I will say this with absolute certainty: this book is a MASTERPIECE. McCarthy is a master. He is a master of language most of all. He is a master of manipulation. He's given us a character nearly void of emotion and interior and yet we find ourselves choking on our own emotions. Lester Ballard's existence in Child of God is spare, fragile. McCarthy's depiction of Lester's interior is even sparer - like bones bare of tissue and muscle - a skeleton of conjoined events void of excess flesh in both thought and description. Even the punctuation is spare. McCarthy takes us through the life of Lester Ballard, a disjointed creature surviving in the wild, by delicately weaving a story that is, at once, full of despair and depravity yet lyrically beautiful, ruthlessly harsh and stunningly exquisite in its physical depiction of nature. I am overwhelmed by McCarthy's mastery of minimalism in his choices of what information to give to the reader about or even from Lester. In Child of God, McCarthy never really tells you what Lester looks like, is thinking, wearing or feeling in any absolute form unless it is entirely necessary. I've read the book several times now. I still don't know for certain what Lester Ballard looks like. I don't know what color his hair is. Or his eyes. I don't know how tall he is other than not very. And really, none of this matters. Without getting into specifics, I will say that this book is a very upsetting book to read. The main character, Lester, commits acts that are of the most disturbing nature one can (or in my case, never thought I could) imagine. And my warning is that it is NOT for everyone. Those who can step into the darkness of Lester's existence will experience words so thoughtfully joined, so carefully drawn and pared to their most delicate state. A tale unlike any other. One of the most finely crafted novels I've ever read. On that note, Mary Gaitskill said it and I agree. So, here are my top ten reasons why John Waters should make Child of God, the movie: 10. Celluloid goldfish 9. Demon yodelers 8. Mountain gnomes who dress in leaves 7. Use of the term "follerin" 6. Testicles referred to as "cods" 5. Women named Urethra, Cerebella and Hernia Sue 4. Men in drag (down to the undies) and frightwigs ("fashioned" from dried human scalps) 3. Frozen gals 2. A cannibal in the cage next door And the number 1 reason: 1. Dialogue that contains: Say you want to blow me? I said owe.

(Although I include excerpts to back up my opinions on the novel, I make sure that these are spoiler free.) I have been reading McCarthy's "Blood Meridian," and as that book is very dense, I thought I'd pause and read this book given its short length. So this is the second book I've read by him, and the first I finished. The things which have absorbed me into McCarthy's writing are numerous, but most of all I love how eloquently and smoothly he can describe the landscapes in ways which not only give you a perfect mental picture of how it physically is, but also how it is perceived by the mind, and he does this without being confusing. "The hardwood trees on the mountain subsided into yellow and flame and to ultimate nakedness. An early winter fell, a cold wind sucked among the black and barren branches. Alone in the empty shell of a house the squatter watched through the moteblown glass a rimshard of bonecolored moon come cradling up over the black balsams on the ridge, ink trees a facile hand had sketched against the paler dark of winter heavens." I also appreciate how, at least most of the time, he prefers to matter-of-factly describe what the characters are physically doing rather than why they are doing it, allowing the context and detail to provide any sort of insight into the characters mind. "He was almost to the roadfork at the foot of the mountain before he fetched up the final time. He turned around and looked back up the road. He squatted in the road and set the butt of the rifle down and gripping the forestock in both hands he rested his chin on one wrist. He spat. He looked at the sky. After a while he stood up and started back up the road." The only reason this book loses a star for me, is that I came into this after having my head spun around by "Blood Meridian," (I will post a review for that when I finish it) and this book doesn't have as much of the grandiose landscape description. It has them, just not in such a high dosage, but this is a very personal nitpick, and I still highly recommend this book. I would read it again. Oh, and as for the technicals, this book is divided into three sections with frequent pauses. Very easy to read a little bit and set it down without becomming lost (but why would you want to set this down?) As for the plot, this book works best if you go into it knowing very little besides what the book description on Amazon says. Just know that it becomes very depraved.

Cormac McCarthy is one of the most accessible of modern authors. This in no way diminishes his accomplishments, as he is adept at so many facets of the writer's art. His prose blends perfectly the spare and the lyrical. His pacing is flawless. The reader is swept up into his cadences, secure in the knowledge that he/she will be expertly guided through the thickets and brambles to the clearing ahead, also assured that there would be no needless detours along the way. We are never overburdened with needless detail. Characters are believable and delineated concretely. The reader's senses are awakened to sensory impressions that are visceral. We "remember" what he describes. <Child of God> is a great example of this master storyteller's art. It is a novel without any hint at artifice. It can be read by virtually anyone. What distinguishes it from equally "accessible" works is that it can be read on so many levels. In other words, it is a work that naturally has broad appeal. It will appeal to those who enjoy reading about disturbed murderers and psychopaths. On the other hand it will hold enormous interest to readers who are thoroughly familiar with the Southern Gothic fiction of William Faulkner and Flannery O'Connor. Not to denigrate McCarthy, but on the surface, this work might even be called "Faulkner Lite." McCarthy's acknowledgment to Faulkner in fact occurs in the opening sentence of the novel (which also happens to be the work's longest sentence) < They came like a caravan of carnival folk up through the swales of broomstraw and across the hill in the morning sun, the truck rocking and pitching in the ruts and the musicians on chairs in the truckbed teetering and tuning their instruments, the fat man with the guitar grinning and gesturing to others in a car behind and bending to give a note to the fiddler who turned a fiddlepeg and listened with a wrinkled face. > This alliterative run-on is clearly McCarthy's way of paying homage to the master. Like Faulkner and O'Connor, this novelist peoples his fiction with grotesque, or at the least, exaggerated characters. The Cornelius Suttree of the novel <Suttree > could just as easily be a member of the Sutpen family in Faulkner. And the main character in this work, Lester Ballad, is every bit as amoral and unconcerned with human life as is "The Misfit" in "A Good Man is Hard to Find." In fact, if one were looking for a literary model for Lester Ballad, one should turn to O'Connor before going to Hannibal Lecter. Ballard is a kind of amalgam of The Misfit and Harper Lee's Boo Radley, the "child of God" sequestered away in <To Kill A Mockingbird >. The difference being that whereas Boo Radley was only a scarecrow, Ballard is something far more sinister and malignant. Malignancy, in fact, is what this novel is about essentially. Lester Ballard is a tumor that has been growing and festering within the body of the community. He is a case of "out of sight, out of mind." Because he has been repeatedly shunted off by the insular southern town that McCarthy depicts, he is free in his isolation to let his psychotic mind's tendrils expand and propagate unchecked. McCarthy's underlying message may be that the more we neglect those on the periphery of society, the more we invite evil into our lives. The very title of the book seems to beg the question. It recalls in some respects Christ's warning/appeal that "as you do unto the least of these (God's children), so you do unto me." So in a very large sense, Lester Ballard represents every street-person you pass in San Francisco or New York or wherever you happen to be a member of a larger community. Ballard is in this sense more avenging angel than irredeemable villain. The malignancy is growing in our collective communities, for the most part unseen, but festering, nevertheless. The greater our neglect, the greater the chance for evil rebounding upon us. If you have not read McCarthy, this is a great place to start. You can read this novel in one or two sittings, as it flows so smoothly and uninterruptedly that you will not even notice that he is planting these seeds of inquiry as you are rolling along. Yet after you put the book down, you will no doubt take away a lot more than you noticed in passing.

...and it was. Because I am a nurse, corpses don't creep me out. But the sadness and anger of this main character seems all too familiar in today's world.

Cormac McCarthy's 'Child of God' is a haunting tale of isolation and despair. McCarthy's stark prose and vivid imagery create a bleak and desolate world that is both disturbing and compelling. The protagonist, Lester Ballard, is a deeply flawed character whose descent into madness is both horrifying and tragically human. McCarthy's unflinching portrayal of the darker side of humanity makes 'Child of God' a shocking but surely rewarding read.

Well how can a mere mortal describe one of the great writer's prose. Never fails can delight with his artful work.

A compra foi para meu cunhado, um dos livros favoritos dele.

Thank you very much for this nice experience. Quick delivery, perfect state of the product and very interesting book will shop again sometime

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