Child of God

Shortly after finishing reading Stephen Crane’s journey in New York, I decided to reread Cormac McCarthy’s Child of God. As I have surely noted in this space before, McCarthy is my leading candidate for Great Books author of the current age.  (My grandchildren will find out if I am right.)  I hadn’t read this volume for several years, and for reasons unexplained, I thought I would enjoy rereading it now.  I did.

Serendipity is a curious beast.  Child of God is about a social outcast, a homeless guy who is loved by nobody, has no friends, no means of support, and no social capital.  The novel opens when Lester (our protagonist) has his homestead sold after being taken by the county, presumably because friendless, jobless misfits have little ability to pay property taxes.  Lester then wanders into the hills to live, with no means of support and few possessions of any type.  Throughout the novel, he interacts with others, but never once does anyone treat him as anything much above subhuman. Yet, as McCarthy introduces Lester, we read:

To watch these things issuing from the otherwise mute pastoral morning is a man at the barn door.  He is small, unclean, unshaven.  He moves in the dry chaff among the dust and slats of sunlight with a constrained truculence.  Saxon and Celtic bloods.  A child of God much like yourself perhaps.

Much like yourself, indeed.  When you think about people like Lester, what do you feel?  Do you have an obligation to love Lester?  Do you have an obligation to notice Lester?  Do you have an obligation to help Lester?  Because, you see, nobody else loves or cares for Lester; nobody else is going to help Lester.  He is a child of God, much like yourself.  So, what are your obligations toward Lester?

And, by the way, Lester is a necrophiliac.  Does that change anything?

Oh, and he isn’t just a passive necrophiliac.  Sure, his first girl was dead when he found her, but after that, he created the corpses himself.  Does that change anything?

At what point does our friendless, loveless, social outcast deserve to be a friendless, loveless, social outcast?  McCarthy is one of the greatest novelists ever in plumbing the depths of human depravity.  But, before you go dismissing Lester as something beneath notice, just remember he is a child of God…much like yourself perhaps.  That sentence, which occurs on the second page of the novel, haunts the entire story.  One part of the Reader wants to dismiss Lester as something Other, but another part of the Reader knows the Truth.  Deep down, are you really any better than Lester? Are any of us really any better than Lester?  And before you hastily answer that yes indeed you are different, ponder what entitles you to be considered a Child of God while Lester is not.

Stephen Crane could have provided the epigraph to this novel.

I stood upon a high place,

And saw, below, many devils

Running, leaping,

And carousing in sin.

One looked up, grinning,

And said, “Comrade! Brother!”

As is my wont, I Goggled the novel after finishing it. There is a movie of this novel soon to be released.  Curious.  Hollywood has certainly discovered McCarthy.  (Can the movie version of Blood Meridian be far behind?  Is it even possible to make a film of that novel and capture even a sliver of the horror contained therein while still getting a rating of R?)  Honestly, I have a hard time imagining that the Child of God movie will even begin to mimic the depths of this novel; homeless necrophiliac certainly has enough shock value to make a Hollywood movie, but can said movie ever hope to simultaneously be a work of Great Art?   I suppose the best case is that this will be akin to the difference between Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Rob Zombie’s “Dragula”—I enjoy both, but only one is even within shouting distance of the realm of Timeless.