Cormac McCarthy: The Road to Oprah

I t's always a delicious moment when the pigs at the trough ease aside to make way for a thoroughbred. At a time when both the television and publishing industries are hogged by unusual mediocrity, news that Cormac McCarthy, winner of a Pulitzer prize for his latest novel The Road, is to be the hot potato on Oprah's couch is one of those victories against the darkness - and gives special cheer to those of us who judge McCarthy one of the world's preeminent writers.

It has taken more than 40 years, since the publication of his 1965 novel The Orchard Keeper, for the granite-like recluse from New Mexico (he now lives in Texas) to exchange his cultic reputation for an international one.

In small part, McCarthy's gradual rise to prominence may be attributed to his laudable resistance - like Harper Lee, JD Salinger and Thomas

Pynchon - to our culture of interviewing; a culture that risks confounding the artist for the work.

There is also the resistance of many a squeamish reader to McCarthy's Tarantino-esque appetite for gore. In Blood Meridian, a man is scalped practically on every other page, but the violence is no more bloody or irrelevant to his moral purpose, really, than it is in King Lear: it is quality pulp. (In one of the only two interviews McCarthy has given in the past decade, he remarks: "There is no such thing as life without bloodshed.")

Then there are the detractors of McCarthy's incantatory prose, who say that his writing is 'high-flown nonsense'; that it relies on biblical repetition, on excessive borrowings from Faulkner and Melville, on melodrama and histrionics and too many 'ands'; that McCarthy is, in short, 'one of the great hams of