I’m well into Cormac McCarthy’s Child of God and learning by alternating first and third person narrator pov about the main character, Lester Ballard, who just lost his property to auction and has set up in a shack somewhere in the hills. I haven’t quite decided yet what Ballard represents, learned his age nor much of his background except that when he was nine his mother had already taken off and he found his father who’d hung himself in the barn. Local talent certainly.
McCarthy has a way with drawing his characters that leave them a bit vague and yet detailed in some ways. Here’s one of Ballard’s friends:
When Ballard came out onto the porch there was a thin man with a collapsed jaw squatting in the yard waiting for him.
What say Darfuzzle, said Ballard.
What say Lester
He sounded like a man with a mouthful of marbles articulating his goatbone underjaw laboriously, the original one having been shot away.
Ballard squatted on his heels in the yard opposite the visitor. They looked like constipated gargoyles. (p. 46)
I’ll bet they do. Some of the characters in Lester’s environment are pretty well worn. There’s a dumpmaster who has nine daughters they’ve named after labels they found on stuff in the dump: Uretha, Cerebella, Hernia Sue. The old man can’t keep track of them, and they’re having babies like littering rabbits.
In the excerpt above, Lester is told by his visitor that a woman is accusing him of accosting her. He’d come upon her on the trail, drunk and sleeping in a filmy white nightgown. He tore it off and went on his way. No, I don’t know why.
It’s just folks, but they have mysteries inside them that McCarthy is waiting for us to discover.
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology