Cormac McCarthy has departed into the Big Retirement, leaving behind a body of words that rate him admittance into the pantheon of prose alongside such literary titans as Homer, Cervantes, Melville and Joyce. Accordingly, many are marking his passage by revisiting his work, particularly in the context of his conclusive, just-in-the-nick of time dual releases "The Passenger" and "Stella Maris," which many readers have noted came as a deviation from the conventional McCarthy fare. Most probably expected something akin to a Western.
But while McCarthy is and will always be associated with the Western genre, he was never actually a Western writer. He penned a few Westerns, to be sure, but deviation and violation of convention were inherent to his career. As great a wanderer of genre as his characters were wanderers of the Blakian landscapes he hallucinated, McCarthy was a model of ineffable storytelling. There is no descriptor that can cage his style, let alone as cliched a category as the "Western."
