Child of God

Kicked off his land and falsely accused of rape, Lester Ballard wanders the mountains of Sevier County, Tennessee looking for trouble. The deranged, rifle-toting misfit pays visits to everyone from a domineering junkyard owner to an unexpecting shopkeeper, committing a serious of increasingly bizarre and violent crimes along the way.

First printed in 1974, Cormac McCarthy’s third novel is also among his more accessible. His trademark poetic landscape descriptions and quoteless dialogue are both here, but neither are done to excess. As a result, Child of God has a far quicker, more fluid pace than later McCarthy works, Suttree in particular.

The most striking aspect of Child of God is its idiosyncratic point of view. In the first section of the book, the narrative switches between Ballard’s perspective and that of unnamed townsfolk, who comment disparagingly (and ironically, given their own lack of sophistication) on his upbringing. We’re left with old Lester for the duration, but we never get too far inside his head. McCarthy takes us through the course of his days dispassionately, a plus not only because Ballard is a miserable human being, but also because this lack of judgment allows his monstrous acts to speak for themselves.

Weighing in at just under 200 pages, Child of God lacks both the literal and intellectual heft of Suttree and Blood Meridian, but it still gets at meaty concerns about the fabric of society and builds to a chillingly brutal conclusion. This is not McCarthy’s grandest work, but it may be his most tightly written. Neither the novice nor the experienced McCarthy reader should skip this overlooked gem.

8/10