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The Orchard Keeper
Set in rural Tennessee between the world wars, The Orchard Keeper is the unique, darkly biblical debut novel from the legendary author of Blood Meridian and The Road, Cormac McCarthy.
John Wesley Rattner is a young boy when his father is murdered. Marion Sylder, an outlaw and bootlegger, strangled him to death.
By chance, John and Marion will meet. They will not recognize each other; John will not know what this man has done.
An experimental debut following in the footsteps of William Faulkner, this is a magnificent conjuring of an American landscape - and a devastating portrayal of innocence lost.
Part of the Picador Collection, a series celebrating fifty years of Picador books and showcasing the best of modern literature.
John Wesley Rattner is a young boy when his father is murdered. Marion Sylder, an outlaw and bootlegger, strangled him to death.
By chance, John and Marion will meet. They will not recognize each other; John will not know what this man has done.
An experimental debut following in the footsteps of William Faulkner, this is a magnificent conjuring of an American landscape - and a devastating portrayal of innocence lost.
Part of the Picador Collection, a series celebrating fifty years of Picador books and showcasing the best of modern literature.
259 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1965
1042 people are currently reading
11524 people want to read
About the author
Cormac McCarthy
46 books28.6k followersCormac McCarthy was a highly acclaimed American novelist and screenwriter celebrated for his distinctive literary style, philosophical depth, and exploration of violence, morality, and the human condition. His writing, often characterized by sparse punctuation and lyrical, biblical language, delved into the primal forces that shape human behavior, set against the haunting landscapes of the American South and Southwest.
McCarthy’s early novels, including The Orchard Keeper and Outer Dark, established him as a powerful voice in Southern Gothic literature, while Blood Meridian (1985) is frequently cited as his magnum opus—a brutal, visionary epic about violence and manifest destiny in the American West. In the 1990s, his "Border Trilogy"—All the Pretty Horses, The Crossing, and Cities of the Plain—garnered widespread popularity and critical acclaim, blending coming-of-age themes with philosophical introspection and tragic realism.
His 2005 novel No Country for Old Men was adapted into an Academy Award-winning film by the Coen brothers, and his harrowing post-apocalyptic tale The Road (2006) won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and was also made into a major motion picture. Both works brought him mainstream recognition and a broader readership later in his career.
Despite his fame, McCarthy remained famously private and rarely gave interviews, preferring to let his work speak for itself. His legacy endures through his powerful, often unsettling portrayals of humanity’s struggle with fate, violence, and redemption, making him one of the most influential and original voices in modern American literature.
McCarthy’s early novels, including The Orchard Keeper and Outer Dark, established him as a powerful voice in Southern Gothic literature, while Blood Meridian (1985) is frequently cited as his magnum opus—a brutal, visionary epic about violence and manifest destiny in the American West. In the 1990s, his "Border Trilogy"—All the Pretty Horses, The Crossing, and Cities of the Plain—garnered widespread popularity and critical acclaim, blending coming-of-age themes with philosophical introspection and tragic realism.
His 2005 novel No Country for Old Men was adapted into an Academy Award-winning film by the Coen brothers, and his harrowing post-apocalyptic tale The Road (2006) won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and was also made into a major motion picture. Both works brought him mainstream recognition and a broader readership later in his career.
Despite his fame, McCarthy remained famously private and rarely gave interviews, preferring to let his work speak for itself. His legacy endures through his powerful, often unsettling portrayals of humanity’s struggle with fate, violence, and redemption, making him one of the most influential and original voices in modern American literature.
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April 23, 2022
VANGELO NERO
McCarthy al debutto, il suo primo romanzo, targato 1965. Pubblicato dalla Random House, la stessa casa editrice di Faulkner, scrittore al quale McCarthy viene spesso avvicinato.
All’epoca, McCarthy lavorava come meccanico a Chicago: come altri scrittori americani del Novecento, McCarthy viene dal lavoro manuale, non è un intellettuale.
La storia è ambientata al sud, in una comunità rurale del Tennessee, che sembra appartenere a un’altra epoca, più remota e più primitiva. Si svolge negli anni del proibizionismo a cavallo tra le due guerre mondiali.
Nostalgia per i valori che si perdono con la modernità e il progresso, con l’industrializzazione.
Il vecchio Ather vive in una capanna che ha costruito lui stesso e vive barattando radici; un giovane, John Wesley Rattner che vive invece barattando pelli di animali che caccia lui stesso per lo più con le trappole; Marion Syleder è invece un contrabbandiere di whiskey, e data l’epoca e l’ambientazione, non poteva certo mancare.
Da una vasca d’acqua emerge il cadavere di una persona, la polizia (la Legge) se ne occupa blandamente, senza decisione, come se non volesse scoprire la verità, o la temesse. Come se la verità potesse incrinare lo statu quo.
C’è abbondanza di segni di quella che sarà poi la sua arte nelle opere più riuscite, soprattutto l’attenzione alla natura, per nulla tenera, piuttosto ostile e violenta, ma a suo modo giusta, in quanto ‘naturale’ - s’intravede quella rudezza che è propria della società americana - la differenza tra vittime e carnefici è sfumata, storia scrittura e tono sono duri, aspri.
Ma non c’è niente da fare, è un esordio estremamente deludente, perfino noioso, con personaggi sfocati, gran guignol a gogò, situazioni al limite della credibilità.
James Franco, regista, e Scott Haze, protagonista, sul set del film “Figlio di dio” del 2013, tratto da un altro romanzo di Cormac McCarthy.
McCarthy al debutto, il suo primo romanzo, targato 1965. Pubblicato dalla Random House, la stessa casa editrice di Faulkner, scrittore al quale McCarthy viene spesso avvicinato.
All’epoca, McCarthy lavorava come meccanico a Chicago: come altri scrittori americani del Novecento, McCarthy viene dal lavoro manuale, non è un intellettuale.
La storia è ambientata al sud, in una comunità rurale del Tennessee, che sembra appartenere a un’altra epoca, più remota e più primitiva. Si svolge negli anni del proibizionismo a cavallo tra le due guerre mondiali.
Nostalgia per i valori che si perdono con la modernità e il progresso, con l’industrializzazione.
Il vecchio Ather vive in una capanna che ha costruito lui stesso e vive barattando radici; un giovane, John Wesley Rattner che vive invece barattando pelli di animali che caccia lui stesso per lo più con le trappole; Marion Syleder è invece un contrabbandiere di whiskey, e data l’epoca e l’ambientazione, non poteva certo mancare.
Da una vasca d’acqua emerge il cadavere di una persona, la polizia (la Legge) se ne occupa blandamente, senza decisione, come se non volesse scoprire la verità, o la temesse. Come se la verità potesse incrinare lo statu quo.
C’è abbondanza di segni di quella che sarà poi la sua arte nelle opere più riuscite, soprattutto l’attenzione alla natura, per nulla tenera, piuttosto ostile e violenta, ma a suo modo giusta, in quanto ‘naturale’ - s’intravede quella rudezza che è propria della società americana - la differenza tra vittime e carnefici è sfumata, storia scrittura e tono sono duri, aspri.
Ma non c’è niente da fare, è un esordio estremamente deludente, perfino noioso, con personaggi sfocati, gran guignol a gogò, situazioni al limite della credibilità.
James Franco, regista, e Scott Haze, protagonista, sul set del film “Figlio di dio” del 2013, tratto da un altro romanzo di Cormac McCarthy.
June 26, 2016
"They are gone now. Fled, banished in death or exile, lost, undone. Over the land sun and wind still move to burn and sway the trees, the grasses. No avatar, no scion, no vestige of that people remains. On the lips of the strange race that now dwells there their names are myth, legend, dust."
-- Cormac McCarthy, The Orchard Keeper
McCarthy is at a natural disadvantage when an obsessive reader finally works back to his first book. Invariably, McCarthy will be unfairly graded against his own amazing later output. I liked Orchard Keeper. I really did. It was superior in almost every way that matters to most serious writing out there, but it just didn't hold up against other McCarthy novels. If one considers Suttree and Blood Meridian to be his masterpieces (and thus 5 stars), and The Road , No Country for Old Men and All the Pretty Horses to be solid pieces of American literature (all 4 stars), it is unavoidable that the Orchard Keeper rates only three.
The great thing about reading this first McCarthy is you can see the germs of all of McCarthy's potential built into it. It contains the strange embryo of all of McCarthy's future greatness: his great mythic prose, amazing archetypal characters, beautifully grand, natural scenes. If you love McCarthy, please don't skip the Orchard Keeper, just don't expect it to knock you down, and chill you to the bone, and blow you away like Blood Meridian or Suttree.
-- Cormac McCarthy, The Orchard Keeper
McCarthy is at a natural disadvantage when an obsessive reader finally works back to his first book. Invariably, McCarthy will be unfairly graded against his own amazing later output. I liked Orchard Keeper. I really did. It was superior in almost every way that matters to most serious writing out there, but it just didn't hold up against other McCarthy novels. If one considers Suttree and Blood Meridian to be his masterpieces (and thus 5 stars), and The Road , No Country for Old Men and All the Pretty Horses to be solid pieces of American literature (all 4 stars), it is unavoidable that the Orchard Keeper rates only three.
The great thing about reading this first McCarthy is you can see the germs of all of McCarthy's potential built into it. It contains the strange embryo of all of McCarthy's future greatness: his great mythic prose, amazing archetypal characters, beautifully grand, natural scenes. If you love McCarthy, please don't skip the Orchard Keeper, just don't expect it to knock you down, and chill you to the bone, and blow you away like Blood Meridian or Suttree.
January 2, 2016
The Orchard Keeper: Cormac McCarthy's first novel of a Southern Quartet
The Orchard Keeper by Cormac McCarthy was selected by Tom "Big Daddy" Mathews as the Moderator's Choice for Members of On the Southern Literary Trail for January, 2016.
First Edition, Random House, New York, New York, 1965
Cormac McCarthy, Dust Jacket Photo, "The Orchard Keeper"
You have to read this book. I rarely say it. I feel so strongly about it, I'll say it again. Read this book. Read it straight through. Then read it more thoroughly, more thoughtfully. See how Cormac McCarthy put this story together.
The hill country of Eastern Tennessee has always been different. During the American Civil War, the mountainous areas of Tennessee were a hotbed of Unionism.
Set in Red Branch, Tennessee, Cormac McCarthy created a community that portrayed the independence of the residents of that area of the state. Red Branch is located somewhere between Knoxville and Sevierville in Tennessee. The time of the story is between World War I and World War II.
The people of Red Branch are a close knit bunch. It's a place of hospitality if you're one of their own. If you're not from around there, you're not likely to be welcome. If you're a member of the Alcohol and Tobacco Unit of the Federal government, don't expect a whole lot of information about who is running whiskey out of the Tennessee Hills.
Folks in Red Branch do what comes naturally. Sex is a gift to be engaged in and enjoyed. The young women are just as willing and eager as the young men are to enjoy one another. Young Josh Tipton, a bit player in the overall scheme of things, is humiliated that his young lady insults him by telling him he's the nicest young man that ever needled her. Perhaps he's insulted to be a nice young man. But considering McCarthy's comedic moments, it's more likely Josh's humiliation over the needle size of his pride and joy.
A quick read, The Orchard Keeper, at first blush is a simple enough tale. There are three main protagonists, Marion Sylder, a bad boy not above breaking the law by running unbranded whiskey out of the hills in fast cars; Uncle Ather Ownby, who tends a ruined apple orchard, a hermit, content to live alone away from the encroachment of civilization, and young John Rattney, a fatherless boy, who comes to be fostered and mentored by both Sylder and Ownby.
McCarthy writes of a land and a people fast changing. What was once unblemished forested mountainsides is being encroached upon by progress. Or so some would call it. McCarthy intimates it is a present fast forgetting the past.
John's last memory of his father, Kenneth, is being given an orange drink by his father, purchased for a nickel, before his father left for South Carolina in search of a job. It's the last time John ever sees his father.
John's mother reminds him that his father was a hero in the army, returning from service with a platinum plate in his skull. She also tells him that if only his father were there, neither he nor she would want for anything, for his father had always been a good provider. Evidence is to the contrary.
Kenneth Rattney was no hero. He was a con man and a thief, always on the lookout for an easy buck. Whether he came by it honestly or not, he didn't care.
Kenneth hitches a ride with Marion Sylder, who is coming back home to Red Branch after an absence of five years. Sylder's driving a new black Ford coupe. He's well dressed. Rattney's wrong when he decides Sylder's an easy mark. When Sylder has a flat, Rattney attacks him with a tire iron. Sylder kills him in self defense, disposing of his body by rolling him off the road where the body lands in the old spray pit of the gnarled and ruined orchard tended by Uncle Ather. Sylder has no idea whose body he's rolled off the road.
Uncle Ather, walking through his ruined orchard discovers Rattner's body floating in the old spray pit. Ather's learned a long time ago that bringing in the authorities is only going to lead to meddling. He hides the body, piling cut cedar trees over the old pit. Neither does Ather know the identity of the body floating in the pit.
Back at the rickety shack John and his mother occupy, John is drawn into the nature of the wilderness that surrounds him. He moves his bed to the enclosed porch of the house, watching the change of the seasons. His mother, for all purposes, a widow, leaves John to his own devises. John does not attend school. No truant officers exist to drag him away from his wandering through the woods that surround him.
During his regular walks through the remarkable landscape in which he lives, John meets both Marion Sylder and Uncle Ather. Both become mentors, essentially foster fathers to him.
John watches Sylder slide through a curve, plunging into a swift running creek. He pulls him from his car. Sylder realizes the boy saved his life and he returns the favor by seeing the boy share the comfort of his home, supplies him with enough money to increase the string of his traps with which he wishes to earn money for his mother's support, and gives the boy his first dog.
Uncle Ather is a fount of folkways and woodlore. He is a natural storyteller, a man seemingly older than the hills he wanders. Ather still remembers when civilization was so distant that "painters," or panthers, regularly roamed the woods, their screams piercing the black night unlit by a distant civilization.
However, society is changing. There is no place for characters such as Marion Sylder and Uncle Ather Ownby. Running unbranded, or shall we say, untaxed whiskey, isn't good for Government Revenue. Sheriff Gifford, the symbol of government authority is on the lookout for Sylder. Ather calls the law down on himself when he shoots up a tank put up on one of his beloved mountains by the United States Army.
John Rattner remains loyal to both his friends as the law closes in on them. McCarthy makes it clear that both bootlegger and mountain hermit can be fathers of greater influence than a man who merely fertilizes an egg.
What first appears to be a relatively simple plot is not as simple as it appears. Just who is the narrator of this tale? Is this an unknown, omniscient narrator, speaking to us in the third person? Or, is this a classic bildungsroman told by an older, wiser John Rattner?
McCarthy created a remarkable story with his debut. The language of the hill people is pitch perfect. His prose describing the Tennessee hill country is more poetry in the indelible beauty of a vanishing world captured forever on the page.
McCarthy's manuscript landed on the desk of Albert Erskine at Random House. Erskine had been Faulkner's editor. As he read McCarthy's manuscript, I wonder if Erskine at times questioned whether Bill Faulkner ever died. I can see Erskine shaking his head in wonder at the words on the rough manuscript that a new Southern voice had produced.
McCarthy was seen as the heir apparent to William Faulkner. Orville Prescott, reviewing The Orchard Keeper noted that the author had read much Faulkner. And imitated him much. Yet, Prescott found a raw narrative power in this first novel. Prescott, O., Still Another Disciple of William Faulkner, The New York Times, May 1965
In 1966, the William Faulkner Foundation selected McCarthy as the author of the most notable novel. Rightly so.
The Orchard Keeper by Cormac McCarthy was selected by Tom "Big Daddy" Mathews as the Moderator's Choice for Members of On the Southern Literary Trail for January, 2016.
First Edition, Random House, New York, New York, 1965
Cormac McCarthy, Dust Jacket Photo, "The Orchard Keeper"
Them that's got shall get
Them that's not shall lose
So the Bible said and it still is news
Mama may have Papa may have
But God bless the child that's got his own
That's got his own--Billie Holliday, God Bless the Child, 1941
You have to read this book. I rarely say it. I feel so strongly about it, I'll say it again. Read this book. Read it straight through. Then read it more thoroughly, more thoughtfully. See how Cormac McCarthy put this story together.
The hill country of Eastern Tennessee has always been different. During the American Civil War, the mountainous areas of Tennessee were a hotbed of Unionism.
Set in Red Branch, Tennessee, Cormac McCarthy created a community that portrayed the independence of the residents of that area of the state. Red Branch is located somewhere between Knoxville and Sevierville in Tennessee. The time of the story is between World War I and World War II.
The people of Red Branch are a close knit bunch. It's a place of hospitality if you're one of their own. If you're not from around there, you're not likely to be welcome. If you're a member of the Alcohol and Tobacco Unit of the Federal government, don't expect a whole lot of information about who is running whiskey out of the Tennessee Hills.
Folks in Red Branch do what comes naturally. Sex is a gift to be engaged in and enjoyed. The young women are just as willing and eager as the young men are to enjoy one another. Young Josh Tipton, a bit player in the overall scheme of things, is humiliated that his young lady insults him by telling him he's the nicest young man that ever needled her. Perhaps he's insulted to be a nice young man. But considering McCarthy's comedic moments, it's more likely Josh's humiliation over the needle size of his pride and joy.
A quick read, The Orchard Keeper, at first blush is a simple enough tale. There are three main protagonists, Marion Sylder, a bad boy not above breaking the law by running unbranded whiskey out of the hills in fast cars; Uncle Ather Ownby, who tends a ruined apple orchard, a hermit, content to live alone away from the encroachment of civilization, and young John Rattney, a fatherless boy, who comes to be fostered and mentored by both Sylder and Ownby.
McCarthy writes of a land and a people fast changing. What was once unblemished forested mountainsides is being encroached upon by progress. Or so some would call it. McCarthy intimates it is a present fast forgetting the past.
“They are gone now. Fled, banished in death or exile, lost, undone. Over the land sun and wind still move to burn and sway the trees, the grasses. No avatar, no scion, no vestige of that people remains. On the lips of the strange race that now dwells there their names are myth, legend, dust.”
John's last memory of his father, Kenneth, is being given an orange drink by his father, purchased for a nickel, before his father left for South Carolina in search of a job. It's the last time John ever sees his father.
John's mother reminds him that his father was a hero in the army, returning from service with a platinum plate in his skull. She also tells him that if only his father were there, neither he nor she would want for anything, for his father had always been a good provider. Evidence is to the contrary.
Kenneth Rattney was no hero. He was a con man and a thief, always on the lookout for an easy buck. Whether he came by it honestly or not, he didn't care.
Kenneth hitches a ride with Marion Sylder, who is coming back home to Red Branch after an absence of five years. Sylder's driving a new black Ford coupe. He's well dressed. Rattney's wrong when he decides Sylder's an easy mark. When Sylder has a flat, Rattney attacks him with a tire iron. Sylder kills him in self defense, disposing of his body by rolling him off the road where the body lands in the old spray pit of the gnarled and ruined orchard tended by Uncle Ather. Sylder has no idea whose body he's rolled off the road.
Uncle Ather, walking through his ruined orchard discovers Rattner's body floating in the old spray pit. Ather's learned a long time ago that bringing in the authorities is only going to lead to meddling. He hides the body, piling cut cedar trees over the old pit. Neither does Ather know the identity of the body floating in the pit.
Back at the rickety shack John and his mother occupy, John is drawn into the nature of the wilderness that surrounds him. He moves his bed to the enclosed porch of the house, watching the change of the seasons. His mother, for all purposes, a widow, leaves John to his own devises. John does not attend school. No truant officers exist to drag him away from his wandering through the woods that surround him.
During his regular walks through the remarkable landscape in which he lives, John meets both Marion Sylder and Uncle Ather. Both become mentors, essentially foster fathers to him.
John watches Sylder slide through a curve, plunging into a swift running creek. He pulls him from his car. Sylder realizes the boy saved his life and he returns the favor by seeing the boy share the comfort of his home, supplies him with enough money to increase the string of his traps with which he wishes to earn money for his mother's support, and gives the boy his first dog.
Uncle Ather is a fount of folkways and woodlore. He is a natural storyteller, a man seemingly older than the hills he wanders. Ather still remembers when civilization was so distant that "painters," or panthers, regularly roamed the woods, their screams piercing the black night unlit by a distant civilization.
However, society is changing. There is no place for characters such as Marion Sylder and Uncle Ather Ownby. Running unbranded, or shall we say, untaxed whiskey, isn't good for Government Revenue. Sheriff Gifford, the symbol of government authority is on the lookout for Sylder. Ather calls the law down on himself when he shoots up a tank put up on one of his beloved mountains by the United States Army.
John Rattner remains loyal to both his friends as the law closes in on them. McCarthy makes it clear that both bootlegger and mountain hermit can be fathers of greater influence than a man who merely fertilizes an egg.
What first appears to be a relatively simple plot is not as simple as it appears. Just who is the narrator of this tale? Is this an unknown, omniscient narrator, speaking to us in the third person? Or, is this a classic bildungsroman told by an older, wiser John Rattner?
McCarthy created a remarkable story with his debut. The language of the hill people is pitch perfect. His prose describing the Tennessee hill country is more poetry in the indelible beauty of a vanishing world captured forever on the page.
McCarthy's manuscript landed on the desk of Albert Erskine at Random House. Erskine had been Faulkner's editor. As he read McCarthy's manuscript, I wonder if Erskine at times questioned whether Bill Faulkner ever died. I can see Erskine shaking his head in wonder at the words on the rough manuscript that a new Southern voice had produced.
McCarthy was seen as the heir apparent to William Faulkner. Orville Prescott, reviewing The Orchard Keeper noted that the author had read much Faulkner. And imitated him much. Yet, Prescott found a raw narrative power in this first novel. Prescott, O., Still Another Disciple of William Faulkner, The New York Times, May 1965
In 1966, the William Faulkner Foundation selected McCarthy as the author of the most notable novel. Rightly so.
January 16, 2016
I am not a McCarthy fan, having read 1 of his books (All the Pretty Horses), and putting aside another (Suttree) after just a few chapters. His vision is bleak and depressing, and his themes seem to run to "live, suffer and die".
But,oh my God, this was a good book!
The lyrical language and description of nature pulled me in. The dialogue of the isolated, uneducated, Tennessee mountain people kept me there. The rough characters who found a way to survive by any means kept me rooting for them, even though I new it would end badly for most, if not all of them. I was so rooting for the old man, Uncle Ather, to escape into the Harrykin and live out his few years as he saw fit. McCarthy couldn't even allow that, choosing to give him (and his dog) the hopeless conclusion that seems to be his trademark. Life is hard, and never gets better, he constantly tells us. That's why I am not a McCarthy fan.
But, oh my God, this was a great book!
As another reviewer pointed out, the beauty of McCarthy's prose was worth the bleak and harrowing lives of his characters, but he had to temper his novels with others that were gentler, with some redemption involved. I don't know if I'll read another of his novels, but I am very happy that I read this one, his first, written 50 years ago.
Oh my God what a book!
But,oh my God, this was a good book!
The lyrical language and description of nature pulled me in. The dialogue of the isolated, uneducated, Tennessee mountain people kept me there. The rough characters who found a way to survive by any means kept me rooting for them, even though I new it would end badly for most, if not all of them. I was so rooting for the old man, Uncle Ather, to escape into the Harrykin and live out his few years as he saw fit. McCarthy couldn't even allow that, choosing to give him (and his dog) the hopeless conclusion that seems to be his trademark. Life is hard, and never gets better, he constantly tells us. That's why I am not a McCarthy fan.
But, oh my God, this was a great book!
As another reviewer pointed out, the beauty of McCarthy's prose was worth the bleak and harrowing lives of his characters, but he had to temper his novels with others that were gentler, with some redemption involved. I don't know if I'll read another of his novels, but I am very happy that I read this one, his first, written 50 years ago.
Oh my God what a book!
January 16, 2020
Who’s Who and What's What??
“The cardinal shot like a drop of blood.”
“The oil lamp glowed serenely at its image, a soft corolla, inflaming the black window glass where a curled and withered spider dangled with a dusty thread.”
“The sun broke through the final shelf of clouds and bathed for a moment the dripping trees with blood, tinted the stones a diaphanous wash of color, as if the very air had gone to wine.”
McCarthy’s prose, in this first book of his, is very beautiful, but it isn’t the prose that has made him who he is, a great writer, the best in fact. It was his prose in “The Road,” “Blood Meridian,” and in “No Country for Old Men” that made him famous, that also allowed me to read such horrifying books. It just carried me along, made me want more.
Some reviewers took note that other reviewers were just comparing this book to his later writings. While that complaint is understandable, I find myself doing the same and for the same reason. This book was a difficult read, it made no sense where sense was needed. I was half way through with the book when I decided to start all over, but even then, it was hard to follow, and I found myself analyzing why: First, McCarthy used pronouns in place of a person’s name much of the time, and he would be talking about one person’s story, just to begin another’s, still using the pronoun, “He.” I would continue reading and hope that I would soon know just who he was talking about, and sometimes I figured it out, sometimes not. I quickly learned that “The old man” was the orchard keeper, and “the boy,” a friend whose dad had disappeared and was buried in the orchard, not by the orchard keeper but by Marion, who is called “The man” Marion also had befriended the boy. But “the man” could mean just about anyone, not just Marion, so if you are careful to notice, you might figure it out. And then a few stories in this book just didn’t make any sense to me. But, hey, it was his first novel, and while I am surprised that it was published, the publishers probably had better reading comprehension than many of us readers.
“The cardinal shot like a drop of blood.”
“The oil lamp glowed serenely at its image, a soft corolla, inflaming the black window glass where a curled and withered spider dangled with a dusty thread.”
“The sun broke through the final shelf of clouds and bathed for a moment the dripping trees with blood, tinted the stones a diaphanous wash of color, as if the very air had gone to wine.”
McCarthy’s prose, in this first book of his, is very beautiful, but it isn’t the prose that has made him who he is, a great writer, the best in fact. It was his prose in “The Road,” “Blood Meridian,” and in “No Country for Old Men” that made him famous, that also allowed me to read such horrifying books. It just carried me along, made me want more.
Some reviewers took note that other reviewers were just comparing this book to his later writings. While that complaint is understandable, I find myself doing the same and for the same reason. This book was a difficult read, it made no sense where sense was needed. I was half way through with the book when I decided to start all over, but even then, it was hard to follow, and I found myself analyzing why: First, McCarthy used pronouns in place of a person’s name much of the time, and he would be talking about one person’s story, just to begin another’s, still using the pronoun, “He.” I would continue reading and hope that I would soon know just who he was talking about, and sometimes I figured it out, sometimes not. I quickly learned that “The old man” was the orchard keeper, and “the boy,” a friend whose dad had disappeared and was buried in the orchard, not by the orchard keeper but by Marion, who is called “The man” Marion also had befriended the boy. But “the man” could mean just about anyone, not just Marion, so if you are careful to notice, you might figure it out. And then a few stories in this book just didn’t make any sense to me. But, hey, it was his first novel, and while I am surprised that it was published, the publishers probably had better reading comprehension than many of us readers.
February 19, 2008
There's no question McCarthy is a brilliant prose writer. There are times when I stop in reading to marvel at his stunning verbal combinations. However the subject matter of this book just didn't appeal to me and I found the density of description overwhelming to the plot and actual characters. I knew exactly what everything looked like, smelled like, moved like, sounded like, etc, but for a good chunk of it i wouldn't have been able to tell you what was actually going on and how it related to anything else. I appreciate the man's talent and am certainly interested to read his other works, but this book left me rather cold.
April 2, 2024
Bleak and depressing as shit
/blēk an(d),(ə)n(d) dəˈpresiNG az SHit/
adjective
1. Miserable to the extreme
2. Resembling Cormac McCarthy's books
It's a given with Cormac McCarthy that his novels will be bleak and depressing as shit. It's like every bit of joy and light and goodness is sucked into a black hole, leaving the reader full of despair.
Usually I don't enjoy reading the first half or so of his books but by the end, I really appreciate the story and am glad I stuck with it.
Unfortunately with this novel, McCarthy's debut, I enjoyed the second half as little as the first.
Excuse me while I grab an extra Zoloft.
/blēk an(d),(ə)n(d) dəˈpresiNG az SHit/
adjective
1. Miserable to the extreme
2. Resembling Cormac McCarthy's books
It's a given with Cormac McCarthy that his novels will be bleak and depressing as shit. It's like every bit of joy and light and goodness is sucked into a black hole, leaving the reader full of despair.
Usually I don't enjoy reading the first half or so of his books but by the end, I really appreciate the story and am glad I stuck with it.
Unfortunately with this novel, McCarthy's debut, I enjoyed the second half as little as the first.
Excuse me while I grab an extra Zoloft.
January 15, 2016
Forgive me if I borrow liberally from a review found in a blog written several years ago by Mookse and Gripes. The first paragraph matches my sentiments almost exactly. As with M&G, this is my seventh Cormac McCarthy novel and, like them,
It’s been said by more than a few that McCarthy’s style is largely an imitation of William Faulkner’s. Of the six other McCarthy books that I have read only one, Blood Meridian, gave me that impression but it is very evident in this, his first novel. In its review in 1965 the New York Times ticked off a long litany of Faulknerisms including “wandering pronouns with no visible antecedents; the recondite vocabulary and coined words; the dense prose packed with elaborate figures of speech; the deliberate ambiguity, the hints and withheld information; the confusion in time and place, and the flashbacks that fail to shed much light into the intermittent gloom”. All of these serve to make The Orchard Keeper an challenging book to read. Even so, it is still a fascinating and, even though I seldom reread a book that I have finished, I see myself revisiting this book at some time in the future. It is one of those books that is impossible to fully absorb with just one reading.
Set in rural Tennessee in the years between the two World Wars, this is the story of an old man, a young man and a boy who are, unbeknownst to them, linked together by an act of violence that took place years before. The old man, Ather Ownby, lives in a ramshackle cabin with no one for company but an ancient hound dog. For much of the book he is a mute witness to what goes on around him. All he wants is to be left in peace but in a world moving relentlessly into the future, this is an unlikely prospect. Marion Sylder is a bootlegger, largely because that is the only way that someone in Red Branch can make a decent living. Years before, he was assaulted by one Kenneth Rattner and ended up killing him in self-defense. Later, when he crashed his car full of whiskey upside down in a creek, he was rescued by John Wesley Rattner, a boy trying to earn money by trapping mink. None of these characters has an easy life but they all do the best they can.
This is the world that Cormac McCarthy grew up in and it is obvious that he knows it well. This book is not so much a story as a representation of the past, present and future struggling to maintain its identity in the face of a rapidly modernizing world, a common theme in many of McCarthy’s books.
McCarthy does one thing in this book that I don’t recall from his others. There are several stories or anecdotes that, while unrelated to the main story, do provide entertainment or food for thought. The prelude, for example, describes some men who are attempting to cut down a tree but are stymied because its trunk has grown around a wrought iron fence. It doesn’t appear to be related to the rest of the book but McCarthy seems to enjoy throwing in bits of symbolism and lets the reader figure out what it means, if anything.
Bottom line: The Orchard Keeper, like Blood Meridian, is a book that readers will spend a lot of time reflecting on. Mookse & Gripes nailed it when they said they were more likely to enjoy thinking about it enjoyed reading it. This should not be taken as discouragement, though. The three main characters are fascinating and likeable. McCarthy’s ability to bring them to life, if just for a while, is a blessing for, as he tells us, “they are gone now. Fled, banished in death or exile, lost, undone. On the lips of the strange race that now dwells there their names are myth, legend, dust.
this was his most difficult yet, perhaps because much of the time I didn’t really feel like I knew what was going on and didn’t entirely trust that the obfuscation was with valid purpose. More than any other McCarthy novel, I had to work very hard to follow the narrative thread (or, rather, to find the narrative thread after losing it several times). There were some pay-offs, though. Well before I finished it, I already could tell it was going to be a book that I would enjoy thinking about more than I enjoyed reading it.
It’s been said by more than a few that McCarthy’s style is largely an imitation of William Faulkner’s. Of the six other McCarthy books that I have read only one, Blood Meridian, gave me that impression but it is very evident in this, his first novel. In its review in 1965 the New York Times ticked off a long litany of Faulknerisms including “wandering pronouns with no visible antecedents; the recondite vocabulary and coined words; the dense prose packed with elaborate figures of speech; the deliberate ambiguity, the hints and withheld information; the confusion in time and place, and the flashbacks that fail to shed much light into the intermittent gloom”. All of these serve to make The Orchard Keeper an challenging book to read. Even so, it is still a fascinating and, even though I seldom reread a book that I have finished, I see myself revisiting this book at some time in the future. It is one of those books that is impossible to fully absorb with just one reading.
Set in rural Tennessee in the years between the two World Wars, this is the story of an old man, a young man and a boy who are, unbeknownst to them, linked together by an act of violence that took place years before. The old man, Ather Ownby, lives in a ramshackle cabin with no one for company but an ancient hound dog. For much of the book he is a mute witness to what goes on around him. All he wants is to be left in peace but in a world moving relentlessly into the future, this is an unlikely prospect. Marion Sylder is a bootlegger, largely because that is the only way that someone in Red Branch can make a decent living. Years before, he was assaulted by one Kenneth Rattner and ended up killing him in self-defense. Later, when he crashed his car full of whiskey upside down in a creek, he was rescued by John Wesley Rattner, a boy trying to earn money by trapping mink. None of these characters has an easy life but they all do the best they can.
This is the world that Cormac McCarthy grew up in and it is obvious that he knows it well. This book is not so much a story as a representation of the past, present and future struggling to maintain its identity in the face of a rapidly modernizing world, a common theme in many of McCarthy’s books.
McCarthy does one thing in this book that I don’t recall from his others. There are several stories or anecdotes that, while unrelated to the main story, do provide entertainment or food for thought. The prelude, for example, describes some men who are attempting to cut down a tree but are stymied because its trunk has grown around a wrought iron fence. It doesn’t appear to be related to the rest of the book but McCarthy seems to enjoy throwing in bits of symbolism and lets the reader figure out what it means, if anything.
Bottom line: The Orchard Keeper, like Blood Meridian, is a book that readers will spend a lot of time reflecting on. Mookse & Gripes nailed it when they said they were more likely to enjoy thinking about it enjoyed reading it. This should not be taken as discouragement, though. The three main characters are fascinating and likeable. McCarthy’s ability to bring them to life, if just for a while, is a blessing for, as he tells us, “they are gone now. Fled, banished in death or exile, lost, undone. On the lips of the strange race that now dwells there their names are myth, legend, dust.
August 28, 2007
Blame it on Faulkner. You can't write a novel nowadays about the South—good country people, grotesque deviants, backwoods hollers, and wide, copper-colored rivers—without being labeled Faulkner-esque, your work derivative of Faulkner, your themes and language descended from a rich Faulknerian lineage. It's some wonder more southern writers aren't trying to flee from under daddy F's looming shadow, the evoked comparison being just as much of a complaint half the time as it is a compliment. Yet I see the appeal of mining the grounds Faulkner just happened to stake before anyone else. The proud independence of men still attached to the land, attached to a social code that marries courtesy and unremitting retribution, the poetic language of rock and stream and briar—the legend of the South is fertile for sowing literary ambitions. Although The Orchard Keeper, Cormac McCarthy's first of ten novels to date, does labor under Faulkner's heavy mantle, it differentiates itself through a precision and foreboding in the tone it establishes, and a descriptive language that is almost wholly objective, yet immediately redolent and mythical.
Set in the early 30's, the story concerns a hill-born teenage boy who becomes acquainted with the man who killed his father, though neither is aware of the other's identity. Both are set in narrative orbits around Ather Ownby, the boy's aged uncle, a woodsman who lives in near seclusion by a decrepit apple orchard, who disdainfully regards the inevitable encroachment of industry, and who keeps watch over a decaying corpse that appears unexpectedly in the orchard's water-filled fertilizer pit. The drama enacted by these three characters is propelled by loyalty, independence, and endings—the ending of lives, the end of prohibition, and the quickening disappearance of mountain life and ways.
Like any regional writer, McCarthy's uses place not only as setting, but also as impetus and character. The mountain of The Orchard Keeper is a physical and ideological twin for Uncle Ather, mirroring appearance and staunch resistance to change:
"Hot winds come up the slope from the valley like a rancid breath, redolent of milkweed, hoglots, rotting vegetation. The red clay banks along the road are crested with withered honeysuckle, pea vines dried and sheathed in dust. By late July the corn patches stand parched and sere, stalks askew in defeat. All greens pale and dry. Clay cracks and splits in endless microcataclysm and the limestone lies about the eroded land like schools of sunning dolphin, gray channeled backs humped at the infernal sky."
In his essay, "Hamlet and His Problems," T.S. Eliot popularized the term objective correlative, referring a "a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula for [a] particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked." In other words, it is impossible, in any artistic or otherwise meaningful way, to talk about emotions themselves. To be rendered truly and without sentimentalism, emotions must be couched in concrete things. McCarthy is adept at this, his third person narration remaining ignorant of his character's inner thoughts, the settings and situations of their lives doing all the tonal heavy-lifting.
And heavy-lifting it is. McCarthy's forte is foreboding, of violence typically, but also of the strained and incommunicable relations between family members, between strangers, and with the very earth itself--kin and blood ineffable, brutality a common threat, the line between life and death a bold, black demarcation. Faulknerian or not, The Orchard Keeper reads like seeing the features of a landscape, in momentary flashes of lightening, burn brightly out of darkness.
Set in the early 30's, the story concerns a hill-born teenage boy who becomes acquainted with the man who killed his father, though neither is aware of the other's identity. Both are set in narrative orbits around Ather Ownby, the boy's aged uncle, a woodsman who lives in near seclusion by a decrepit apple orchard, who disdainfully regards the inevitable encroachment of industry, and who keeps watch over a decaying corpse that appears unexpectedly in the orchard's water-filled fertilizer pit. The drama enacted by these three characters is propelled by loyalty, independence, and endings—the ending of lives, the end of prohibition, and the quickening disappearance of mountain life and ways.
Like any regional writer, McCarthy's uses place not only as setting, but also as impetus and character. The mountain of The Orchard Keeper is a physical and ideological twin for Uncle Ather, mirroring appearance and staunch resistance to change:
"Hot winds come up the slope from the valley like a rancid breath, redolent of milkweed, hoglots, rotting vegetation. The red clay banks along the road are crested with withered honeysuckle, pea vines dried and sheathed in dust. By late July the corn patches stand parched and sere, stalks askew in defeat. All greens pale and dry. Clay cracks and splits in endless microcataclysm and the limestone lies about the eroded land like schools of sunning dolphin, gray channeled backs humped at the infernal sky."
In his essay, "Hamlet and His Problems," T.S. Eliot popularized the term objective correlative, referring a "a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula for [a] particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked." In other words, it is impossible, in any artistic or otherwise meaningful way, to talk about emotions themselves. To be rendered truly and without sentimentalism, emotions must be couched in concrete things. McCarthy is adept at this, his third person narration remaining ignorant of his character's inner thoughts, the settings and situations of their lives doing all the tonal heavy-lifting.
And heavy-lifting it is. McCarthy's forte is foreboding, of violence typically, but also of the strained and incommunicable relations between family members, between strangers, and with the very earth itself--kin and blood ineffable, brutality a common threat, the line between life and death a bold, black demarcation. Faulknerian or not, The Orchard Keeper reads like seeing the features of a landscape, in momentary flashes of lightening, burn brightly out of darkness.
May 13, 2016
Color rating: Mauve
There are a lot of reviews that mention the difference between this and McCarthy’s later work. It’s undeniably true that this is a tonal anomaly; the cadence is yet to be developed, the trademark dialogue is almost entirely absent along with the heavy religiosity. Hell, even the flora gets short shrift. All things considered, however, The Orchard Keeper is a fine first novel that demonstrates pure ambition, a deftness of language in the upper one-percentile, and…I just don’t give a shit at all. No joke. I have to say that if the author’s name wasn’t on the cover, this book would be ripe for obscurists and Gothic fetishists alone. This isn’t bashing—it’s honesty. I’m not a McCarthy fellatist so I hope I have a bit of objectivity here. I readily cede to the man’s mastery and think at least four of his novels are some of the best of the second-half of the American 20th century. I just don’t drink his Kool-Aid with the aplomb that I suck at the prodigious wells of Pynchon, McElroy, DeLillo, Vollmann, etc. Again, this is just personal opinion. No need to send the Judge.
My main issue is that there is nothing that really compels the story forward. Three stories lines weaving and bobbing within and around one another proves (at least) two too many for McCarthy here. The book really is remarkable in just how unremarkable it is. It’s the rarest thing in his canon: completely forgettable. I just finished the damned thing and I couldn’t tell you a whole lot about it. I am, of course, on a strong regimen of memory-erasing pharmacopeia to cope with the necessities of modernity (a phone in your pocket!), but I tend to remember quite a bit about books (especially ones I’ve just finished). Although McCarthy would emerge with a crystalline voice in his very next offering, The Orchard Keeper seems like little more to me than a Vaseline smear across the lens of some antiquated Southern camera whose aperture is perpetually set to ‘underwhelming.’
There are a lot of reviews that mention the difference between this and McCarthy’s later work. It’s undeniably true that this is a tonal anomaly; the cadence is yet to be developed, the trademark dialogue is almost entirely absent along with the heavy religiosity. Hell, even the flora gets short shrift. All things considered, however, The Orchard Keeper is a fine first novel that demonstrates pure ambition, a deftness of language in the upper one-percentile, and…I just don’t give a shit at all. No joke. I have to say that if the author’s name wasn’t on the cover, this book would be ripe for obscurists and Gothic fetishists alone. This isn’t bashing—it’s honesty. I’m not a McCarthy fellatist so I hope I have a bit of objectivity here. I readily cede to the man’s mastery and think at least four of his novels are some of the best of the second-half of the American 20th century. I just don’t drink his Kool-Aid with the aplomb that I suck at the prodigious wells of Pynchon, McElroy, DeLillo, Vollmann, etc. Again, this is just personal opinion. No need to send the Judge.
My main issue is that there is nothing that really compels the story forward. Three stories lines weaving and bobbing within and around one another proves (at least) two too many for McCarthy here. The book really is remarkable in just how unremarkable it is. It’s the rarest thing in his canon: completely forgettable. I just finished the damned thing and I couldn’t tell you a whole lot about it. I am, of course, on a strong regimen of memory-erasing pharmacopeia to cope with the necessities of modernity (a phone in your pocket!), but I tend to remember quite a bit about books (especially ones I’ve just finished). Although McCarthy would emerge with a crystalline voice in his very next offering, The Orchard Keeper seems like little more to me than a Vaseline smear across the lens of some antiquated Southern camera whose aperture is perpetually set to ‘underwhelming.’
February 25, 2016
On the list of best books I’ve ever read, Blood Meridian would be near the top (if you put the proverbial gun to my head, I’d probably put it at the top). However, I’d only read two of McCarthy’s novels before this year: Blood Meridian and The Road. One of my personal goals for 2016 is to take a deep dive into McCarthy’s back catalog. I started at the beginning with The Orchard Keeper, McCarthy’s first published novel.
The story centers around three characters living in the 1930’s: a young boy, a bootlegger who (unbeknownst to the boy) murdered the boy’s father, and an old hermit. I would not call this a plot-driven novel by any stretch. The book just sort of meanders from character to character; if there is a central thread here, I’d probably define it as a study of a world that time has passed by (both from a cultural standpoint and a physical one), but it’s certainly not heavy-handed in that respect. For the most part, McCarthy seems to simply drift around as the spirit moves him, which is just fine by me.
Although this is McCarthy’s first book, it doesn’t really read like a debut novel. McCarthy doesn’t seem like he’s finding his way as a writer here; it’s as if his famous style wasn’t so much honed over time, but was always an elemental piece of the author. Readers that have read his more famous works and enjoy McCarthy’s writing will be happily at home here: the dialogue is great, the love for and descriptions of nature are lavish and evocative, and the insights into human nature are razor sharp and unflinching. This book is a bit disjointed, and I don’t know if it would have worked as a 400 page novel, but at under 250 pages the frequent digressions felt interesting instead of maddening.
This was not as epic as Blood Meridian, and McCarthy’s best was yet to come. But I was pleasantly surprised at how much I enjoyed this debut. 4.0 stars, recommended for fans of McCarthy’s more famous works.
March 27, 2018
I swear, you could hand me McCarthy's grocery list and I would love it. I haven't found a book of his that I didn't love, and I don't expect to in the future. I fully intend to work my way through the rest of his books by the end of the year.
The Orchard Keeper is his first book, and wow, what an amazing first book. Honestly, I didn't expect anything less. You can really tell by his later books that he fine tuned his craft, but all the elements that I love are still present in this book. Amazing, sparse, and beautiful prose? Check. Brilliant landscape and nature descriptions? Yep. Spot on dialogue that makes you feel as if you are actually in Tennessee in the late 1930's? Again, yes.
The Orchard Keeper revolves around 3 main characters living in rural Tennessee between the world wars. Marion Sylder is a bootlegger, Uncle Ather is an old hermit, and John Wesley Rattner is a young man who lost his father suddenly. Circumstances bring all three men together, and separately Sylder and Ather become father figures to Rattner.
I'm keeping the synopsis spoiler free, but there is an irony to these men coming together, as they are all impacted by a crime committed by Sylder. Ather becomes the keeper of this crime, while Slyder continues to run whiskey in his car and defy the law. Through all of this Rattner is unaware of the impact these two men have on his life.
People often ask me where to start with McCarthy, and I would say definitely pick up one of his later novels before attempting this one. Parts of the story can be a bit confusing at times, but it eventually all comes together, and the end result is pure McCarthy.
The Orchard Keeper is his first book, and wow, what an amazing first book. Honestly, I didn't expect anything less. You can really tell by his later books that he fine tuned his craft, but all the elements that I love are still present in this book. Amazing, sparse, and beautiful prose? Check. Brilliant landscape and nature descriptions? Yep. Spot on dialogue that makes you feel as if you are actually in Tennessee in the late 1930's? Again, yes.
The Orchard Keeper revolves around 3 main characters living in rural Tennessee between the world wars. Marion Sylder is a bootlegger, Uncle Ather is an old hermit, and John Wesley Rattner is a young man who lost his father suddenly. Circumstances bring all three men together, and separately Sylder and Ather become father figures to Rattner.
I'm keeping the synopsis spoiler free, but there is an irony to these men coming together, as they are all impacted by a crime committed by Sylder. Ather becomes the keeper of this crime, while Slyder continues to run whiskey in his car and defy the law. Through all of this Rattner is unaware of the impact these two men have on his life.
People often ask me where to start with McCarthy, and I would say definitely pick up one of his later novels before attempting this one. Parts of the story can be a bit confusing at times, but it eventually all comes together, and the end result is pure McCarthy.
March 15, 2025
3,5⭐️
Historia mnie nie powaliła, ale te opisy… niesamowite.
Historia mnie nie powaliła, ale te opisy… niesamowite.
October 29, 2011
A truly intriguing and beautifully depicted but ultimately unsatisfying debut from McCarthy which arrived draped in keen, vibrant colours, with lush, fragrant descriptions of the gorgeous Tennessee landscape, earthy watercolour portraits of its taciturn characters, and the leisured pace of an Appalachian highway that tunnels through the overhanging, rainbow-spiked autumnal woods, emerging every now and then, sun-dappled and redolent of honey and cider, into the fresh breezes of open space—and yet those shimmery blacktops cutting across the narrative set pieces portend of imminent resolutions that never actually materialize.
The plot? Whatever. This book was meant to be admired, not explained. Damaged male characters stoically interact with each other in monotonic and monosyllabic word stutters, closed upon their pain and unaware of the bemused joke fate is playing with them; and while the cliff-edge tavern that occupies the opening section of the novel—perched precariously above a Tennessean gorge down into which the empty bottles from a night's carousing are sent in spinning free fall—is one of the most amazing drinkeries I've come across in my fictional forays, it charges the novelistic air with a humming energy that gradually and imperceptibly expends itself over the more subdued and sober pages that follow such that they oddly come to seem like a drawn-out epilogue. Thus, heavily under the spell of Faulkner and already imbued with impressive descriptive prowess, McCarthy had no compelling story to drive his impeccably pungent writing, a situation he would remedy in his threnodic sophomore effort Outer Dark and achieve near-perfection with in Blood Meridian. Read The Orchard Keeper to be impressed by McCarthy's raw talent, not to be entertained.
The plot? Whatever. This book was meant to be admired, not explained. Damaged male characters stoically interact with each other in monotonic and monosyllabic word stutters, closed upon their pain and unaware of the bemused joke fate is playing with them; and while the cliff-edge tavern that occupies the opening section of the novel—perched precariously above a Tennessean gorge down into which the empty bottles from a night's carousing are sent in spinning free fall—is one of the most amazing drinkeries I've come across in my fictional forays, it charges the novelistic air with a humming energy that gradually and imperceptibly expends itself over the more subdued and sober pages that follow such that they oddly come to seem like a drawn-out epilogue. Thus, heavily under the spell of Faulkner and already imbued with impressive descriptive prowess, McCarthy had no compelling story to drive his impeccably pungent writing, a situation he would remedy in his threnodic sophomore effort Outer Dark and achieve near-perfection with in Blood Meridian. Read The Orchard Keeper to be impressed by McCarthy's raw talent, not to be entertained.
June 19, 2023
Cormac McCarthy is easily one of my top five favorite authors of all time, but I haven’t read everything he’s written. I decided to go back to the very beginning because his earlier works are the ones I’ve missed. This was a solid book, and you definitely get a sense of what he’s capable of writing. It doesn’t pack white the same punch as his later works, but it’s a great place to see him lay down a template for what’s to come.
The beginning and end of the book are fantastic, but things drag a little more in the middle. There’s a small story to tell, but it’s stretched across too many pages with too many detours, even though it’s a pretty short read anyway. McCarthy paints beautiful scenes, providing some of the smallest details to lock you into the world he’s created. It did seem to take away from the plot at times, and this probably could have benefited from just being a short story or novella.
It’s not The Road or Blood Meridian, but, let’s be honest… Mid Cormac McCarthy is still better than pretty much anything else.
The beginning and end of the book are fantastic, but things drag a little more in the middle. There’s a small story to tell, but it’s stretched across too many pages with too many detours, even though it’s a pretty short read anyway. McCarthy paints beautiful scenes, providing some of the smallest details to lock you into the world he’s created. It did seem to take away from the plot at times, and this probably could have benefited from just being a short story or novella.
It’s not The Road or Blood Meridian, but, let’s be honest… Mid Cormac McCarthy is still better than pretty much anything else.
January 13, 2020
Oh, how this book makes me envy McCarthy's literary genius more than ever before. This cannot be a first novel. "The Orchard Keeper" is too well developed to have been a first finished effort.
McCarthy must have half a dozen other initial attempts cached away in a desk drawer somewhere - rough drafts that nobody has ever seen. Assuming this book actually is his first book - which it unbelievably is - McCarthy certainly established his inimitable voice and style from the get-go. I'm quite astonished. He has always been slow, deliberate, beautiful, cautious, descriptive, and he has always been expertly so.
Surprisingly, McCarthy's prose, though stunning overall, does experience a few (only a select few) minor slips in the book, and the work isn't quite as polished as his others overall. For example, in no other McCarthy book will you find a phrase as ambiguous as "evil-looking". Still, for McCarthy to have established himself as resoundingly as he did with his very first publication is highly impressive, and I thoroughly enjoy "The Orchard Keeper". The last lines are haunting...
McCarthy must have half a dozen other initial attempts cached away in a desk drawer somewhere - rough drafts that nobody has ever seen. Assuming this book actually is his first book - which it unbelievably is - McCarthy certainly established his inimitable voice and style from the get-go. I'm quite astonished. He has always been slow, deliberate, beautiful, cautious, descriptive, and he has always been expertly so.
Surprisingly, McCarthy's prose, though stunning overall, does experience a few (only a select few) minor slips in the book, and the work isn't quite as polished as his others overall. For example, in no other McCarthy book will you find a phrase as ambiguous as "evil-looking". Still, for McCarthy to have established himself as resoundingly as he did with his very first publication is highly impressive, and I thoroughly enjoy "The Orchard Keeper". The last lines are haunting...
June 24, 2017
It was never my intention to do it this way but up to this point I've read all of McCarthy's books except this one. So it happens that the last of his novels I've read is the first he wrote. Because of that, it is difficult to rate this one. I can still sense the greatness of his unique style, but because I have read his following masterpieces, they are naturally what I use as a measuring stick for his work and "The Orchard Keeper" just doesn't hold up to any of his later work.
There is a part of me that wishes I would not have saved this one for last because I was disappointed, but then again, had I read this one first I might not have been so eager to read more of his books.
Just to clarify, I was disappointed only because this book was not as great as most of his others, but that does not mean I think this is a bad book. It certainly isn't for everyone. Then again, that's usually said about all his work, even his great ones.
I know Cormack is in his 80's now and I don't know if we will be seeing any more novels coming from him. I sure hope so. And as he did with Faulkner, I sure hope to see someone of his class fall into his footsteps.
September 9, 2015
When reading a McCarthy book, you already know what you're going to get: an obscure and erudite vocabulary full of comprehensive description; from the height of a tree, to the striations on the leaves, nothing left to ponder.
McCarthy is more about quality over quantity, yet the reader yearns for more. With it being his first novel, it displays much talent and what would eventually become an amazing literary career.
Probably a great starting point for anyone venturing out into one of his back-wood Appalachian microcosms.
McCarthy is more about quality over quantity, yet the reader yearns for more. With it being his first novel, it displays much talent and what would eventually become an amazing literary career.
Probably a great starting point for anyone venturing out into one of his back-wood Appalachian microcosms.
April 16, 2025
Awful. This was just plain bad. Having read McCarthy before, I expected way more, than what I got.
Characters were dumb, and they spoke even dumber. I loathed the way these people spoke. It took me out of the story completely. I would have DNF‘ ED this, but I am in prison and have nothing else better to do than read this stinkfest! So I finished it anyways.
Overall, forget about this, and save your time. Hot garbage! 1⭐️
Characters were dumb, and they spoke even dumber. I loathed the way these people spoke. It took me out of the story completely. I would have DNF‘ ED this, but I am in prison and have nothing else better to do than read this stinkfest! So I finished it anyways.
Overall, forget about this, and save your time. Hot garbage! 1⭐️
March 27, 2020
Se ne sono andati tutti, ormai. Scappati, banditi nella morte o nell'esilio, perduti, rovinati. Sole e vento percorrono ancora quella terra, per bruciare e scuotere gli alberi, l'erba. Di quella gente non rimane alcuna incarnazione, alcun discendente, alcuna traccia. Sulle labbra della stirpe estranea che ora risiede in quei luoghi, i loro nomi sono mito, leggenda, polvere.
Ci sono già tutte le caratteristiche del McCarthy che vedremo negli anni a venire.
C'é la natura selvaggia, imparziale, tanto benigna quanto maligna. Ci sono le generazioni a confronto, c'è la morte che regna sempre sovrana nei suoi romanzi e c'è quella capacità descrittiva che in poche grandi penne hanno.
Non il miglior McCarthy, ma è già tanta roba!
Se tu li affliggerai in qualunque maniera,
E il loro grido salirà fino a me,
Io di certo li ascolterò
Ci sono già tutte le caratteristiche del McCarthy che vedremo negli anni a venire.
C'é la natura selvaggia, imparziale, tanto benigna quanto maligna. Ci sono le generazioni a confronto, c'è la morte che regna sempre sovrana nei suoi romanzi e c'è quella capacità descrittiva che in poche grandi penne hanno.
Non il miglior McCarthy, ma è già tanta roba!
Se tu li affliggerai in qualunque maniera,
E il loro grido salirà fino a me,
Io di certo li ascolterò
April 27, 2025
یک داستان حوصلهسربر، فاقد هیجان و پر از پیچ امینالدوله.
August 11, 2010
I was a little worried going into this book because it is very common for a writer’s first novel to not be a good representation of that person’s entire body of work. This is often true with even the writers who go on to be canonized legends, as more often than not it takes them about two or three books to really get their literary sea legs.
While The Orchard Keeper isn’t quite at the level of Blood Meridian or Suttree, I’m still convinced that Cormac McCarthy sprang from the womb clutching a portable typewriter. Almost everything that people love about McCarthy’s work can be found gestating within these pages. There are the beautifully rich descriptions of environmental scenery set alongside both humorous and sorrowful depictions of the grotesqueries of human behavior. These are two areas where McCarthy always shines. Also evident is his massive vocabulary and love of arcane words. I just have to believe that as a child Cormac asked for a pony one Christmas and got the unabridged Oxford English Dictionary instead.
Even though there are some definite signs of where McCarthy’s writing style was going later on in his career, there where also a few things present that surprised me. There are many commas in this book for starters. Also his characters speak in a heavy Southern vernacular – something that he seemed to minimize the use of as he went on. There are also instances where the narrative drifts into a character’s internal monologue and this is denoted by blocks of italicized text. This is an old Faulkner trick from way back. Part of me wonders if McCarthy was trying to intentionally fashion himself after Faulkner or if these mechanizations were at the behest of his editor. Albert Erskine edited Faulkner’s last few books late in his career and then went on to edit several of McCarthy’s early works.
The story follows three men in the Appalachian area somewhere near Knoxville, TN. John Wesley Rattner is a teenaged boy without a father who is confused about both where he belongs in the world as well as with the sexual stirrings that he is beginning to feel. Marion Sylder is a hot shot liquor bootlegger. Arthur Owenbey (aka Uncle Ather) is an old hermit who lives out in the woods near the mountains. Young Rattner’s friendship with both men provides for a brotherhood of the forsaken, or possibly a glimpse into how communities took care of their own in more simple times. In the two older men the reader is shown a rugged individualism and resentment of government authority that took root in the South from the fallout of the Civil War if not long before, possibly even a remnant from the era of indentured servitude. My favorite character was Uncle Ather, as he seemed to embody a similar defeated wisdom as Sheriff Bell in No Country for Old Men.
I stumbled across this 1965 New York Times review of this book online:
http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/05/17...
Holy hell. While not completely scathing, I can still here the prick tones in Orville’s voice loud and clear. One of the things that so intrigues fans of McCarthy is his reticence to put himself in the media spotlight or reveal more than the most basic details about his personal life. This sort of behavior seems so odd because at some level one has to believe that part of the reason a person strives to become a published author is because some small part of that person desires something approaching fame or at the very least, recognition that leads to financial security. It is interesting to ponder whether or not Cormac McCarthy was simply not wired in that sort of way or if a few early reviews like the one above turned him against the idea. I’m glad he didn’t stop writing, but at the same time I’m a little nervous about having burned through everything of his with the exception of the Border Trilogy. I hope he lives to be a very money-hungry one hundred and twenty year old.
While The Orchard Keeper isn’t quite at the level of Blood Meridian or Suttree, I’m still convinced that Cormac McCarthy sprang from the womb clutching a portable typewriter. Almost everything that people love about McCarthy’s work can be found gestating within these pages. There are the beautifully rich descriptions of environmental scenery set alongside both humorous and sorrowful depictions of the grotesqueries of human behavior. These are two areas where McCarthy always shines. Also evident is his massive vocabulary and love of arcane words. I just have to believe that as a child Cormac asked for a pony one Christmas and got the unabridged Oxford English Dictionary instead.
Even though there are some definite signs of where McCarthy’s writing style was going later on in his career, there where also a few things present that surprised me. There are many commas in this book for starters. Also his characters speak in a heavy Southern vernacular – something that he seemed to minimize the use of as he went on. There are also instances where the narrative drifts into a character’s internal monologue and this is denoted by blocks of italicized text. This is an old Faulkner trick from way back. Part of me wonders if McCarthy was trying to intentionally fashion himself after Faulkner or if these mechanizations were at the behest of his editor. Albert Erskine edited Faulkner’s last few books late in his career and then went on to edit several of McCarthy’s early works.
The story follows three men in the Appalachian area somewhere near Knoxville, TN. John Wesley Rattner is a teenaged boy without a father who is confused about both where he belongs in the world as well as with the sexual stirrings that he is beginning to feel. Marion Sylder is a hot shot liquor bootlegger. Arthur Owenbey (aka Uncle Ather) is an old hermit who lives out in the woods near the mountains. Young Rattner’s friendship with both men provides for a brotherhood of the forsaken, or possibly a glimpse into how communities took care of their own in more simple times. In the two older men the reader is shown a rugged individualism and resentment of government authority that took root in the South from the fallout of the Civil War if not long before, possibly even a remnant from the era of indentured servitude. My favorite character was Uncle Ather, as he seemed to embody a similar defeated wisdom as Sheriff Bell in No Country for Old Men.
I stumbled across this 1965 New York Times review of this book online:
http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/05/17...
Holy hell. While not completely scathing, I can still here the prick tones in Orville’s voice loud and clear. One of the things that so intrigues fans of McCarthy is his reticence to put himself in the media spotlight or reveal more than the most basic details about his personal life. This sort of behavior seems so odd because at some level one has to believe that part of the reason a person strives to become a published author is because some small part of that person desires something approaching fame or at the very least, recognition that leads to financial security. It is interesting to ponder whether or not Cormac McCarthy was simply not wired in that sort of way or if a few early reviews like the one above turned him against the idea. I’m glad he didn’t stop writing, but at the same time I’m a little nervous about having burned through everything of his with the exception of the Border Trilogy. I hope he lives to be a very money-hungry one hundred and twenty year old.
April 15, 2023
John Wesley, a young orphan boy, while out checking his traps stumbles upon a car recently crashed in the river. The owner of that car is Marion Sylder a local outlaw and bootlegger. The boy helps pull Sylder out of the river.
From here the two form a bond akin to that of father and son, with Marion teaching young John Wesley how to hunt and promising him a pup from his new litter. However, Wesley is unaware his newfound friend is the very same man who killed his father all those years ago.
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This was a fun read, though I will say it has probably been my least favorite work of mccathrys so far. It is somewhat forgivable however as this was Mccarthy's first work. It's hard to follow at times even for a Mccarthy novel and it feels like not enough interesting events take place during its length. I did, however, enjoy the thematic tone and setting of the novel and if that type of thing is very important to you, I would say this may be worth a read for that aspect alone.
From here the two form a bond akin to that of father and son, with Marion teaching young John Wesley how to hunt and promising him a pup from his new litter. However, Wesley is unaware his newfound friend is the very same man who killed his father all those years ago.
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This was a fun read, though I will say it has probably been my least favorite work of mccathrys so far. It is somewhat forgivable however as this was Mccarthy's first work. It's hard to follow at times even for a Mccarthy novel and it feels like not enough interesting events take place during its length. I did, however, enjoy the thematic tone and setting of the novel and if that type of thing is very important to you, I would say this may be worth a read for that aspect alone.
February 23, 2023
Like others, my rating is comparative to McCarthy's later work. Perhaps thats not fair?
The Orchard Keeper was his debut novel and while the prose is exquisite, the narrative I thought was more muddled, the story not fully developed. His later stuff was just so much better. I still have a few other of his early works to read yet. It's interesting to see how his development as a writer was influenced by where he lived at the time.
The Orchard Keeper was his debut novel and while the prose is exquisite, the narrative I thought was more muddled, the story not fully developed. His later stuff was just so much better. I still have a few other of his early works to read yet. It's interesting to see how his development as a writer was influenced by where he lived at the time.
December 8, 2021
Sarà anche un libro incasinato in cui la trama va un po’ per conto suo e non si capisce bene chi abbia fatto cosa, ma come scrive divinamente bene McCarthy? Ma che poesie sono le sue descrizioni della natura selvaggia e severa degli Stati Uniti che furono? Io resto incantata tutte le volte. Certi passaggi di questo libro mi hanno messo letteralmente i brividi addosso.
April 8, 2021
Tenho pena... guardei, como um tesouro precioso, o único Cormac que me faltava ler e não gostei...
December 8, 2008
McCarthy's fisrt novel, the third of his I have read. All the signs are there! Writing without borders, dimensional shifts, thick, dreamlike. The Old Testament prophetic tone, the lyrical imagery as if somehow nature is expressing itself, and somehow too the sense that in each filmic detail, each auditory beat, you've been there to know it. Of people who were not very much in a sort of boggy, muddy, place that wasn't too much - like rubbish, always there, always, but never lasting - noticed, remarked. Of story, little, that revolves around a corpse weighted with Greek significance; memorable cameo scenes and episodes, conversations, exact dialects; animal movements and walks and animal skinned people shuffling or maybe walking like a cat, that may be this kind or worth of cat or not (an important 'character' the cat here). Take a bit of history's dirt, blow on it, then it's alive and then gone, tragic really.
April 7, 2019
4.5 stars
It's Cormac McCarthy - it will have great dialogue and aching prose that will stop your heart. It will be about sorrow and loss, loneliness and despair. That's what you get every time. But nobody does it better.
My favorite line:
"The dace skittered into the channel and a watersnake uncurled from a rock at the far bank and glided down the slight current, no more demonstrative of effort or motion than a flute note."
It's Cormac McCarthy - it will have great dialogue and aching prose that will stop your heart. It will be about sorrow and loss, loneliness and despair. That's what you get every time. But nobody does it better.
My favorite line:
"The dace skittered into the channel and a watersnake uncurled from a rock at the far bank and glided down the slight current, no more demonstrative of effort or motion than a flute note."
November 22, 2023
Sorry to say that I had trouble with this one. I found the prose exasperating and difficult to follow.
September 10, 2012
Sorprendente romanzo di esordio, nel quale trovano già espressione le principali tematiche che costituiranno il nucleo portante delle opere più mature di questo magnifico scrittore.
È un libro aspro, percorso da una violenza strisciante, insidiosa e inarrestabile, una storia di equivoci e di segreti, di maturazione e di lealtà, di solitudine e di disincanto.
I protagonisti non sono eroi, ma individui che lottano per l’esistenza, un’esistenza che non regala nulla, ma piuttosto toglie, crudelmente e indiscriminatamente. Le loro storie si snodano per brevi scene di forte impatto visivo intorno al mistero di un cadavere in decomposizione, mentre una natura selvaggia e sublime – definita quasi puntigliosamente dai nomi delle pietre, delle piante, degli animali – si eleva essa stessa a protagonista, sovrastando con il suo rigoroso splendore e la sua mitica aura di presenza perenne la transitoria futilità delle vicende umane.
Suoni, odori, colori e palpiti di vita fanno così del paesaggio l’elemento predominante nel racconto, trasmettendo al lettore l’eco delle emozioni provate di volta in volta dai personaggi: inquietudine, paura, sensualità, odio, sgomento…E su tutto risalta come un miracolo la prosa austera e possente di McCarthy, vero erede della più gloriosa tradizione letteraria di ogni tempo.
Una lettura che si apprezza soltanto se già si conosce e si ama questo autore, qui più che mai esente dall’esercizio di quegli strumenti di ‘captatio benevolentiae’ che servono ad uno scrittore per conquistarsi il favore del grande pubblico.
È un libro aspro, percorso da una violenza strisciante, insidiosa e inarrestabile, una storia di equivoci e di segreti, di maturazione e di lealtà, di solitudine e di disincanto.
I protagonisti non sono eroi, ma individui che lottano per l’esistenza, un’esistenza che non regala nulla, ma piuttosto toglie, crudelmente e indiscriminatamente. Le loro storie si snodano per brevi scene di forte impatto visivo intorno al mistero di un cadavere in decomposizione, mentre una natura selvaggia e sublime – definita quasi puntigliosamente dai nomi delle pietre, delle piante, degli animali – si eleva essa stessa a protagonista, sovrastando con il suo rigoroso splendore e la sua mitica aura di presenza perenne la transitoria futilità delle vicende umane.
Suoni, odori, colori e palpiti di vita fanno così del paesaggio l’elemento predominante nel racconto, trasmettendo al lettore l’eco delle emozioni provate di volta in volta dai personaggi: inquietudine, paura, sensualità, odio, sgomento…E su tutto risalta come un miracolo la prosa austera e possente di McCarthy, vero erede della più gloriosa tradizione letteraria di ogni tempo.
Una lettura che si apprezza soltanto se già si conosce e si ama questo autore, qui più che mai esente dall’esercizio di quegli strumenti di ‘captatio benevolentiae’ che servono ad uno scrittore per conquistarsi il favore del grande pubblico.
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