Cormac McCarthy and Performance: Page, Stage, Screen by Stacey Peebles (review)

Early in Cormac McCarthy and Performance, Stacey Peebles notes that the prevailing view of Cormac McCarthy "as a reclusive, isolated author committed only to writing long fiction misses a great deal of his creative life and work" (1). Indeed, as McCarthy has achieved canonical status, few have turned their critical gaze to his engagement with stage and screen. Peter Josyph has considered the issue of performance in specific adaptations, and a few anthologies, notably Sara Spurgeon's Cormac McCarthy: All the Pretty Horses, No Country for Old Men, The Road (2011) and Lynnea Chapman King, Rick Wallach, and Jim Welsh's No Country for Old Men: From Novel to Film (2009), offer readings of specific film adaptations but provide no comprehensive examinations of this crucial aspect of McCarthy's work. Those of us who have benefited from Peebles's previous scholarship and worked with her at the Cormac McCarthy Journal know her as an astute reader of texts and an impeccable scholar unafraid to challenge critical complacency. In her new book she uses archival materials, correspondence, interviews, and scholarly studies to examine fully the McCarthy texts that were either created for the stage and screen or adapted for them. Her fascinating study demonstrates the tragic vision that runs through McCarthy's canon and reveals an intriguing portrait of McCarthy as an artist who consistently collaborates with others "to achieve the best expression of his vision" (40).

Peebles's study encompasses McCarthy's entire career, including unpublished works. Her introduction establishes the "influence of tragedy" on his works (4) and the various theories of tragedy she draws from, including those of Aristotle, Hegel, Nietzsche, and Girard. Chapter 1 focuses on McCarthy's relationship with his editor Albert Erskine and his interest in film early in his career, culminating in his screenplay for Richard Pearce's The Gardener's Son for PBS in 1977. In chapter 2 Peebles analyzes his rarely studied, unproduced screenplays dating from the late 1970s and 1980s, "Cities of the Plains," "Whales and Men," and "No Country for Old Men," two of which he would eventually revise as novels. The third chapter focuses on McCarthy's plays The Stonemason and The Sunset Limited and his involvement in their productions.

The second half of the study centers on McCarthy's translation to the big screen. Peebles focuses on All the Pretty Horses and The Road in chapter 4, demonstrating how Thornton's and Hillcoat's "curatorial" approach to adaptation ultimately failed because these directors slighted the novels' tragic potential in the end. Chapter 5 treats two successful adaptations, the Coen brothers' No Country for Old Men and Tommy Lee Jones's The Sunset Limited, Peebles arguing that these films succeed because the directors honored McCarthy's "plot, characters, dialogue, and themes" while bringing their distinct styles and "narrative practice" to the films (135–36). Chapter 6 homes in on Ridley Scott's The Counselor and James Franco's Child of God, films in which the respective director's narrative choices undermined the tragedy in McCarthy's texts. Peebles notes in particular Scott's elimination of Malkina's revenge plot in The Counselor, rendering Malkina a caricature of villainy instead of a "fully realized character" (182). Similarly, Franco's decision to end Child of God with Ballard's escape renders Ballard "freakishly triumphant rather than sympathetically tragic" in the film (191). The final chapter examines the many failed attempts to produce a film version of Blood Meridian, whose cinematic potential Peebles affirms, stressing "how productive it can be to think about Blood Meridian's engagement with tragedy, spectacle, witnessing, and performance" even though it has yet to be brought to cinematic fruition (206).

Throughout her study Peebles stresses two major points: that McCarthy's successful creative works—novels, dramas, and screenplays—are structured as tragedies that gesture toward the importance of community in the face of loss, and that McCarthy himself, far from being a hermitic artist, has...