Sorrow’s Rigging: The Novels of Cormac McCarthy, Don DeLillo, and Robert Stone by Gary Adelman (review)

In recent years several studies of contemporary American literature have addressed the emergence of a spiritual or post-secular sentiment in the work of writers once regarded as ironic in their depiction of religion. Gary Adelman’s study contributes to this growing body of scholarship through its presentation of Cormac McCarthy, Don DeLillo, and Robert Stone as “Catholic cowboys” whose novels and plays repeatedly depict a futile yearning for faith and redemption in a world without hope. In Adelman’s view, the Catholic upbringing of these authors helps explain the fact that their writing develops a “common aesthetic having to do with a vision of the world as irredeemable.”

In the introduction to Sorrow’s Rigging, Adelman presents his interpretive methodology as an attempt to inhabit the “literary imaginations” of McCarthy, DeLillo, and Stone, restoring their “moral viewpoint” by aligning their work with that of Beckett, Dostoevsky, and Kafka, among others. Chapter 1 describes McCarthy’s artistic evolution as an increasingly unsatisfying effort to affirm the presence of hope and God in the world. For Adelman, the near-proselytizing of No Country for Old Men and The Road is a sign of artistic desperation; by contrast, the violence and rage of the earlier Suttree and Blood Meridian evoke Dostoyevsky and testify to McCarthy’s “genius in constructing pageants of hope throttled.” Chapter 2 sets out to wrest DeLillo’s fiction from the grip of postmodern critics who have privileged ideology over the significance of his “lapsed Catholic upbringing.” Through brief engagements with each of DeLillo’s major novels, read in light of Beckett and T.S. Eliot, Adelman argues that DeLillo is a “chronicler of the end of moral consciousness.” Chapter 3 presents Stone’s work as the most hopeful of these three American writers despite its recurring focus on the Vietnam War. Here Adelman employs a contemporary Vietnam War novel, Denis Johnson’s Tree of Smoke, to chart connections between the collapse of patriotic and religious faith in Stone’s fiction – particularly in Prime Green, Dog Soldiers, and A Flag for Sunrise. In his brief conclusion Adelman portrays these “renegade Catholics” as corrupted by a postmodern sense of futility concerning hope and faith.

The strongest chapter of Sorrow’s Rigging is the one devoted to Stone. As Adelman points out, there is as yet no field of criticism devoted to Stone’s fiction, and his reading charts a helpful introductory map of the territory. By comparison, the chapters on McCarthy and DeLillo cover material much more familiar to specialists while failing to engage relevant contemporary scholarship. Though I began this review by presenting Adelman’s study as part of a wave of recent work on religion in post-war American literature, Adelman himself makes no similar gesture and directs his efforts, instead, to debunking postmodern theory that has not informed cutting-edge research on these writers for at least a decade. This failure to engage like-minded scholarship is unfortunate and robs Adelman of the opportunity to highlight those aspects of his study likely to be of most interest to his audience.

A second limitation of Sorrow’s Rigging is that, while impressive in its range of literary reference, it remains rigidly bound to a Catholic view of the relationship between hope and faith, despite considerable evidence of Eastern spiritual influences on DeLillo and Stone. In reading these authors, Adelman should have attended even more closely to the form of Johnson’s Tree of Smoke, in which the simultaneous collapse of Christian faith and American patriotism is repeatedly juxtaposed against the spiritual viewpoints of the novel’s Buddhist Vietnamese characters. From this Buddhist perspective, hope does not enjoy an unambiguous relationship to faith; on the contrary, Buddhism often looks with suspicion on hope because it substitutes investment in the future for mindfulness of the present. Attending to the influence of Eastern spirituality on DeLillo and Stone would have enriched Adelman’s...