Blood Meridian, Muriel Spark, and Classic Noir: Pajiba April 2024 Book Recommendations Superpost!

Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy

Really depressing to read a book as poignant and beautiful as Blood Meridian and sit there the whole time thinking “this is so normie-proof 😈” https://t.co/7Dy1GRyVDN

— Grace Cathedral Park (@gracecthdralprk) April 12, 2024

Every year, I write a list of resolutions for things I’d like to see, do, or accomplish, and I usually include a separate list of pop culture I intend to check out over the ensuing 12 months. It’s one of the few things I’m consistently good at completing (although I never did get around to reading Moby-Dick, and I’m still disappointed in myself for that.) My 2024 literary adventures have been going well. I tried out my first Alice Munro collection and loved it. I also greatly appreciated A Passage to India by E.M. Forster and am excited to finally see the David Lean adaptation.

And then there’s Blood Meridian, the novel whose dark reputation greatly precedes it. Cormac McCarthy won practically every major literary award during his lifetime, including the Pulitzer Prize, and was widely considered one of his generation’s true geniuses of American fiction. Having read The Road and No Country for Old (and seen their respective films), I knew, sorta, what to expect with his supposed magnum opus. But Blood Meridian has also taken on a strange life of its own over the past decade or so of internet book chat. It’s cited endlessly as the most disturbing book ever published, the ultimate grimdark novel that only the bravest readers should consume. One recently viral tweet seemed to treat it like an obscure splatterpunk title that is derided by so-called normies. A strange attitude to have towards a man who was an Oprah Book Club choice and wrote a movie for Ridley Scott.

So, getting into Blood Meridian was an interesting one. After seeing it discussed like it’s a challenge (the Two Girls One Cup of Great American Fiction), I was surprised to discover that it’s actually pretty accessible. Don’t get me wrong, it is indeed as disturbing as you’ve heard it is. The sheer amount of scalping that occurs throughout its 350+ pages is tough to stomach. But it’s not as impenetrable stylistically as it’s been described. McCarthy’s famous rejection of punctuation and quotation marks around dialogue is certainly divisive, but it does lull you into the lyricism of the prose, only to punch you in the gut with the horrors of its plot. There’s an all-consuming quality to McCarthy’s work that makes him ideal for stories of pure bitter disdain for humanity. Then again, I actually found Blood Meridian to be a surprisingly moral tale, despite its evident nihilism. It’s an exploration of the bloody, cruel, and proudly genocidal conclusions of Manifest Destiny, a Western uninterested in the whitewashed lore that widely defined the genre for many decades. And at its heart is the Judge, easily one of the most charismatic demons in fiction (and I do mean demon because this 7-foot tall albino murderer does seem to literally be Satan.)

Did I enjoy Blood Meridian? That’s a silly question. But it was a fulfilling read, and I’m always nourished by the discovery that, yes, that thing you’ve long been told is an unimpeachable masterpiece is just as good as everyone says it is. Just don’t pick it up if you’ve recently eaten.

The Girls of Slender Means by Muriel Spark

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If you’re Scottish and have ever studied literature on the university level, the chances are you’ve read a decent amount of Muriel Spark novels. At the very least, you’ve definitely checked out The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, made famous by the film adaptation starring Maggie Smith. Spark is one of the true stalwarts of Scottish literature, celebrated by the likes of Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene, and influential to generations of novelists. After landing cheap tickets to a theatrical adaptation of one of her novels earlier this month, I thought it was high time that I actually read one of the books that’s been sitting on my shelf for a while.

Published in 1963, The Girls of Slender Means was inspired by Spark’s own experiences of living in London during World War 2. The May of Teck Club is a boarding house for young single women living and working in London apart from their families. The war is over but London is in ruins, and a group of women living together hope to find career success, love lives, and a sense of purpose in the big city.

Spark has this weird reputation (I assume among people who haven’t actually read her work) of being cozy. Her books are short, sharp, and often centred on middle-class worlds populated by figures of good repute. It’s always been fascinating to me how many people see The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie as genteel, as if its title character wasn’t an unabashed fascist who grooms a bunch of teenage girls to do her bidding. The Girls of Slender Means isn’t as caustic as some of Spark’s books (my favourite being The Driver’s Seat) but there is an acidity running throughout its brief length that undercuts the sweeter moments among friends.

These women are largely traumatized by the war, although it’s never outright expressed. They talk about dealing with the city-wide bombings which blew out the boarding house’s windows on multiple occasions. They squabble over rations but still commit to borderline starvation diets as a form of control. One resident pretends to date a famous movie-star as a means of psychological distraction. Spark’s great strength always lay in how she conveyed the mundane absurdities of life, and how they cannot help but lead to intense realizations. And this novel ends with a real bang. Heh.

If you’ve never read a Muriel Spark novel and are interested in checking her out, this would be a good starting point, although the benefit of her bibliography is that the vast majority of her works are under 250 pages.

The Postman Always Rings Twice by James M. Cain

Speaking of short novels that are classics, I hit the charity shop jackpot this month and found a collection of James M. Cain noirs for only £3. Support your local charities, kids! I love writers whose prose is crisp, economical, and cuts straight to the bone, and Cain might be the king of that in the crime genre.

His debut novel, published in 1934, The Postman Always Rings Twice still feels intensely modern. Taking evident inspiration from Émile Zola’s Thérèse Raquin, the story follows a drifter who winds up at a rural diner run by a Greek immigrant and his much younger American wife. She wants out of her marriage and almost immediately proposes murder. It’s a noir, so you know where this is going. What is less expected is how deeply sadomasochistic this book is. The central relationship between Frank the drifter and Cora the bored wife is surprisingly frank in its twisted power dynamics. Cain clearly has no time for bullsh*t and just gets on with things, as do his characters, who seem to be in a great hurry to commit horrific crimes.

When you’ve read a ton of bad noir, it’s exciting to go back to the origins of the genre and see where those foundations were first laid. This so easily could have slid into parody. The characters are blunt, the story simple, and the concept of subtext laughable. Yet Cain makes it work. There’s passion here, and cynicism too, but the balance is just right to stop it from sliding into melodrama or pure nihilism. Like Spark, Cain’s work is a short sharp shock to the system. What more could you ask for?