Name: The Orchard Keeper
Rating: 3.3 (10 reviews)
ISBN: 9780330475006

Cormac McCarthy

Set in a small, remote community in rural Tennessee in the years between the two world wars, The Orchard Keeper is an early classic from one of America's finest and most celebrated authors. It tells of John Wesley Rattner, a young boy, and Marion Sylder, an outlaw and bootlegger who, unbeknownst to either of them, has killed the boy's father. Cormac McCarthy's debut novel is a magnificent evocation of an American landscape, and of a lost American time.

The Orchard Keeper

Tim Pendry

An intense and atmospheric but ultimately flawed first novel by Cormac McCarthy. It was published in 1965 when McCarthy was in his very early thirties and shows signs both of his later genius and the abiding fault of ambitious first novels in trying to be self-consciously over-literary. In this case, it is hard to pin down what precisely is going wrong as one works one's way through. The genius is undoubtedly there, the command of language is superb and his descriptions of nature are mostly flawless. Those of humanity are flawless. He just so damn good at what he does well that it ironically points up where he fails in two directions - overwriting (to the point of ennui at points) and an allusive obscurity that rather arrogantly expects us to work as hard at reading the novel as he clearly did at writing it. The story in itself is more a description of a situation than a clear narrative. Very poor and fairly uneducated Appalachians (the story is set in Tennessee) come up against nature, chance and necessity and, to some extent, an authority which has rules that are to be respected and evaded. The 'blurb' tries to market the book as a relationship between a bootlegger Marion Snyder and a young boy, John Wesley, whose father, unbeknownst to the lad, was killed, not without justification, by Snyder but I am not sure how much this actually matters. What we have instead are several inter-connecting threads based around a particular locality which is both partly civilised and partly wild. McCarthy is excellent on such easily forgotten matters as the nature of mud, how water flows in creeks and how people actually hit each other. The particular set pieces where things happen to people or people make journeys or men relate to other men (or their dogs and other animals) are, in themselves masterful. Women are very much secondary, even irrelevant, to the tale but, frankly, that does not matter here. So where does it fail? It fails because McCarthy had an extremely bad case of 'similitis' - over and over again in describing nature (which takes up a good prop0rtion of the book) he uses simile and metaphor to excess and, at a certain point, it comes to look over-elaborate and condescending. The use of 'as if' or 'like' develops into a tic which seems to mimic the epic tradition as if McCarthy was trying to be a little too clever by half in implying that his rough-hewn laconic Appalachians are somehow closer to the Ancient Greeks or Romans than at first sight appears plausible. In fact, such an idea might have merit. There is an air of implied tragedy (though very muted by a flawed but still partially caring State) as well as perhaps a bucolic relationship to nature, for all its harshness, of Appalachian people compared to those who lived in cities like Knoxville. It is a noble experiment but it does not quite work because the brilliant natural descriptions get bogged down periodically in this extended 'literariness' that seems surplus to requirements. It is the same error made by the much younger (when he wrote his first novel) Graham Greene. I used the word 'condescending' and I think that is right especially when you discover that he was a Rhode Island boy who moved to Knoxville when he was six and that his father was a lawyer with the Tennessee Valley Authority. Perhaps the disciplined and ambitious literary near-graduate (he did not actually graduate) was both fascinated and a little frightened by the horny-handed law avoiders of the hills. Perhaps he is trying to put them in a literary box where they can be understood better by 'his type'. Let me be clear that he is not at all condescending towards his characters who have a fictional reality self-evidently drawn from close knowledge of the local culture and environment. It is perhaps only condescending in its attempt to make this world literary and box it in. It is as if he takes a world that he can observe and record masterfully (both the countryside and its human and animal inhabitants) and then treats them as little more than raw material for a somewhat narcissistic literary ambition. It is the work that matters which is fine but he could have done a better job at masking this and not accidentally showing himself as precursor by half a century of the educated distancing from people who would probably be voting for Trump in 2016. We cannot make contemporary political points based on a man writing in the early 1960s about the late 1930s (and able to use the word 'nigger' as it would have been used by the men of his time) but the literariness creates two worlds for us - the educated writer's and the uneducated subject. This is a matter only of style (an obsession with right style is the flaw) rather than of content. McCarthy does not deny agency to his subjects. If there is some stereotyping it is the stereotyping that reflects reality. If a cop is a brute, then it is because cops could be brutes. The book is a little harder to read than it should be. It is arrogant in style (when dealing with nature) while being the precise opposite in content (especially when dealing with humanity). Things do not always need to be 'like' other things to be fully understood. Whatever the irritations, you know when you come to the end of the book that you are dealing with more than a fine writer. You are dealing with a potential literary genius. The irritation comes from this genius not seeing the humane wood because of his intense concern with the literary trees.

Patrick Book

3.5 at least. He has always had an incredible eye for detail!

The first novel from one of America's most celebrated novelists, the bestselling, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Road. Set is a remote community in rural Tennessee in the years between the two world wars, it is the story of a young boy and a bootlegger who, unbeknownst to either of them, has killed the boy's father. The boy, John Wesley Rattner, and the outlaw, Marion Sylder–together with Rattner's Uncle Ather, who belongs to a former age in his communion with nature and his stoic independence–enact a drama that seems born of the land itself. All three are heroes of an intense and compelling celebration of values lost to time and industrialization.

Tobias V. Langhoff

The last six months I’ve been reading through McCarthy’s bibliography (in approximate reverse order of publication) after having read and loved THE ROAD several years ago. I will probably re-read The Road now that I have a larger context to shelve it in. What has become clear is that Cormac McCarthy likely is my favorite living author.

The theme is reminiscent of many of his other books: Biblical fate and determinism among poor people in the South. A bootlegger kills a man in self defense, and later unknowingly meets and befriends his murder victim’s son, who has sworn to find his father’s killer and avenge his death. Ironically, the two begin a father/son relationship. The eponymous orchard keeper, however, is an old man who gets entangled in the plot when the killer dumps the body on his property.

Although this book is very recognizably McCarthy, it’s also noticeable that it’s his debut novel. It’s clunkier, and has a lot of redundant prose compared to his later books. I can envision Cormac reading through his first published novel and immediately deciding on a few things: His next books will cut down on the cast, and have much fewer named characters. The prose will also be decimated. There will be less plot. The endings will be less explicit and more mysterious and open to interpretation.

Set in a small, remote community in rural Tennessee, this book tells of John Wesley Rattner, a young boy, and Marion Sylder, an outlaw and bootlegger who, unbeknownst of either of them, has killed the boy's father. Together with Rattner's Uncle Ather, the three enact a drama.

Michael Springer

The Orchard Keeper was Cormac McCarthy's first book, originally published back in 1965. It was interesting reading this one closely after reading his most recent book, The Road. 

(I read a very early copy of the book, with the original blurbs on the jacket. Random House was very sure of the book's popularity and importance, enough so to suggest McCarthy was a writer who would inevitably be recognized as a master at some point. They clearly had no idea it would take about 30 years for him to start selling gobs of books. Thank god, or he probably would've never been published.)

This is the story of three different characters living in Appalachia in the early 1900's. One is an old man who has been concealing a body that turned up on his property years ago. Another is the dead man's son, who believes his dad was a swell guy and who wants revenge on his father's killer. The final character is a bootlegger, and is the man who actually killed the guy in the pit. 

The old man has no idea whose body he guards. The young boy has no idea his father abandoned him and wasn't planning on ever returning. The bootlegger has all but forgotten the dead man, who he murdered in self-defense and tossed into a bog. 

My quick explanation is a little confusing. The point is, none of the characters know much about the others, and none of them have any idea what strange connections they have with the other two. 

The ironies run deep here, as the boy thinks of the man who killed his father as a hero, and the old man continues sheltering the body of a total sleeze-ball as the body decomposes. The story ends tragically, as Cormac McCarthy stories often do. Somehow, despite the low body count, I found this story much sadder than most of his works. 

As a writer, I am impressed at how good this book is considering it's a first novel. It's a subtle, strange, evocative book, and all of the stylistic elements that distinguish McCarthy are already intact here. Little punctuation, incredible dialogue, a wonderful evocation of place. That said, it is quite slow, and probably isn't the best starting place for someone new to McCarthy. But it is definitely worth reading for fans of his writing. So, I'm going with four stars. Not as amazing as The Road, but very good.

A young boy, an old man, and the outlaw who has unknowingly killed the boy's father, all try to resist the changes brought about during the period between the wars

Jackson Weaver

Barış Yarsel

elizabeth

An American classic, The Orchard Keeper is the first novel by one of America's finest, most celebrated novelists. Set is a small, remote community in rural Tennessee in the years between the two world wars, it tells of John Wesley Rattner, a young boy, Marion Sylder, an outlaw and bootlegger who, unbeknownst to either of them, has killed the boy's father. Together with Rattner's Uncle Ather, who belongs to a former age in his communion with nature and his stoic independence, they enact a drama that seems born of the land itself. All three are heroes of an intense and compelling celebration of values lost to time and industrialization.

The Orchard Keeper

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