In literature as in American life, success must be total and contrasted 'failure' fatally dispiriting.īut in both content and technical riches, the Tough Guys are the true legislators of tortured American souls. The current Tough Guys are a murder of great, hopelessly masculine, undomesticated writers, whose critical reputations have been and still are today cruelly divergent, adrift and largely unrewarded compared to the contemporary Savant school. Upper middle class, urban and cosmopolitan, they or their own species review themselves. The Savants' blood line (curiously unrepresentative of Americans generally) has gained undoubted ascendancy in the literary firmament of the US. You could argue that the latter is liberal, east coast/New York, while the Tough Guys are gothic, reactionary, nihilistic, openly religious, southern or fundamentally rural. The Savant tradition comes from Hawthorne, especially through Henry James, Edith Wharton and Scott Fitzgerald. The Tough Guy tradition comes up from Fenimore Cooper, with a touch of Poe, through Melville, Faulkner and Hemingway. We can divide the contemporary American novel into two traditions, or two social classes.

This is a very great novel, but one that needs a context in both the past and in so-called post-9/11 America.

Shorn of history and context, Cormac McCarthy's other nine novels could be cast as rungs, with The Road as a pinnacle.

The Road by Cormac McCarthy