Review of Child of God by Cormac McCarthy

Javier Bardeem won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor in his role as Anton Chigurh in the film adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's No Country for Old Men. I found this ironic in some ways. Anton Chigurh was not human. He was evil incarnate, a symbol of unavoidable malevolence, a razor blade reaper with no recognizable conscience. He was larger than the life. It's in McCarthy's 1973 Child of God that we find the human roots of Chigurh.

His name is Lester Ballard. A social outcast since childhood, Lester grows up in rural Tennessee, in and among small towns and forests where his growing degeneracy has few barriers or checks. His violence toward certain people escalating as the story moves on, Ballard finds himself penned in with seemingly no way to escape.

Child of God should be taken as more of a character study than story per se. There is certainly a flow of events, something which McCarthy supplements with bits and pieces of parallel story in an asynchronous style of editing that keeps the reader engaged page to page. But by and large the progression of Ballard's life—his words and actions—are front and center. There is zero stream of consciousness one should (thankfully) note.

I once watched a short documentary about a social worker who visited and worked with people, almost entirely men, on death row. He said that in 95% of the people he encounters, he can tell them their story before they open their mouths. Broken homes, no father present, lower class, never shown love or affection as a child, and the list went on. Child of God is the fictional representation of such men, people for whom connection, love, compassion, and the ties which bind society have no meaning, or at least have a most twisted meaning.

As seems the norm with McCarthy, style is sharp, tight. Minimalism complementing story, the jagged edge that is Ballard cuts the reader in McCarthy's sparse but effective diction. And Child of God, like No Country for Old Men, is not for the faint of heart. McCarthy pulls no punches depicting the depths of human depravity. And that is without going into the cynicism of the title.

It is perhaps inevitable to ask: how does Child of God compare to No Country for Old Men? While there are similarities, there are far more differences. I would ultimately revert to this review's intro: Ballard is not Anton Chigurh. McCarthy looking deeper into Ballard's motivations and behavior, he remains somehow human where Chigurh is never flesh and blood. And that is saying a lot considering the things Ballard does (necrophilia not among the least).

In the end, Child of God is a small, black window into humanity. It's not as nihilistic as No Country for Old Men; McCarthy leaves the door open for people of Ballard's type to potentially find saving grace. Child of God remains an indirectly sympathetic portrayal of an extremely troubled man. Ballard's psyche never laid bare with a scalpel, instead his actions and words do the talking. Readers of Theodore Sturgeon's equally brilliant Some of Your Blood will find comparable material, each writer's sense of style distinguishing the books from one another.