Reading the World by Dianne C. Luce
Beginning with a thorough analysis of the east Tennessee setting from which McCarthy’s fiction develops, Luce sketches an Appalachian environment and society in transition. Against this backdrop, Luce uses a combination of storytelling methods, including flashbacks, perspective changes, and dream sequences, to investigate McCarthy’s different characterization in each individual novel. McCarthy’s fragmentary narration and poetic writing style, as demonstrated by Luce, combine to produce a vivid portrait of the philosophical and religious components at play in human awareness as it contends with a world fraught with isolation and cruelty.
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In Reading the World, Dianne C. Luce explores the philosophical and historical backgrounds of Cormac McCarthy’s early works written between 1959 and 1979 in Tennessee to show how McCarthy combines literary realism with the symbols and myths of Platonic, gnostic, and existentialist philosophies to produce his singular worldview.
A scholarly and provocative book that is the result of years of serious dedication to McCarthy’s work. I have little doubt that McCarthy is the best living author in America, and Dianne Luce’s comprehensive and educational book is the best analysis of CM’s four Tennessee books that we have.
