Cormac McCarthy's Child of God, based on a historical murder case.

I read this novel not more than forty miles from where it takes place; Sevier County, Tennessee. For most of the masses who have read The Road (or watched the movie, although it's not an exact equivalent), Child of God is similar in vulgarity, surprise, and efficiency. I love when novels push my boundaries. It gives me a sense of purpose as a reader by forcing my own ethical beliefs to choose a side either with or against the main character. This creates tension, struggle even. Needless to say, I read this book in no more than two hours because it was riveting and in some aspects, challenging to wade through. Child of God is separated into three sections; Lester disturbs his family auction and is exiled to Frog Mountain, Lester loses his humanity entirely and wreaks havoc on all who he passes, and finally Lester is reintroduced back into society by way of a mental hospital.

McCarthy does a good job introducing the landscape to his readers, but spends less time developing certain characters. His prose are sparse, though tactfully eerie (he uses fewer words but meaningful ones). It's up to the reader to piece together Lester Ballad,  and how he acquires such disturbing qualities (necrophilia just to name one) and violence so quickly. The only complaint I have is against the use of phonetics. Trying to incorporate dialect was unnecessary in that it didn't affect how I perceived the characters. The phonetics made the prose harder to read at times and forcibly slowed down the pace of my reading. Here's (a fictionalized) account of me reading to myself:

Not a real line from the book: "We gots rayts in our kitchen. yer mind goun shootin' im?"

Me: We, ok that once was easy. gots. got. rayts? Rays, no that's not right. Rats, yeah rats! in our kitchen. Your mind's going..you mind. DO you mind going and shooting them. Good god, why. 


See what I mean? Having rats in a kitchen is enough for me to assume that the character's poor, living in a rural setting, is apparently helpless at killing their own rats or there are more than he can kill, and so on.

What's most significant about this book is it begs the bigger question, what is a child of God? If Lester was one, what does that make God?

With love,
    THE RED GLASSES