Child of God

is a great example of this master storyteller's art. It is a novel without any hint at artifice. It can be read by virtually anyone. What distinguishes it from equally "accessible" works is that it can be read on so many levels. In other words, it is a work that naturally has broad appeal. It will appeal to those who enjoy reading about disturbed murderers and psychopaths. On the other hand it will hold enormous interest to readers who are thoroughly familiar with the Southern Gothic fiction of William Faulkner and Flannery O'Connor. Not to denigrate McCarthy, but on the surface, this work might even be called "Faulkner Lite." McCarthy's acknowledgment to Faulkner in fact occurs in the opening sentence of the novel (which also happens to be the work's longest sentence) < They came like a caravan of carnival folk up through the swales of broomstraw and across the hill in the morning sun, the truck rocking and pitching in the ruts and the musicians on chairs in the truckbed teetering and tuning their instruments, the fat man with the guitar grinning and gesturing to others in a car behind and bending to give a note to the fiddler who turned a fiddlepeg and listened with a wrinkled face. > This alliterative run-on is clearly McCarthy's way of paying homage to the master.

Like Faulkner and O'Connor, this novelist peoples his fiction with grotesque, or at the least, exaggerated characters. The Cornelius Suttree of the novel could just as easily be a member of the Sutpen family in Faulkner. And the main character in this work, Lester Ballad, is every bit as amoral and unconcerned with human life as is "The Misfit" in "A Good Man is Hard to Find." In fact, if one were looking for a literary model for Lester Ballad, one should turn to O'Connor before going to Hannibal Lecter. Ballard is a kind of amalgam of The Misfit and Harper Lee's Boo Radley, the "child of God" sequestered away in . The difference being that whereas Boo Radley was only a scarecrow, Ballard is something far more sinister and malignant.

Malignancy, in fact, is what this novel is about essentially. Lester Ballard is a tumor that has been growing and festering within the body of the community. He is a case of "out of sight, out of mind." Because he has been repeatedly shunted off by the insular southern town that McCarthy depicts, he is free in his isolation to let his psychotic mind's tendrils expand and propagate unchecked. McCarthy's underlying message may be that the more we neglect those on the periphery of society, the more we invite evil into our lives. The very title of the book seems to beg the question. It recalls in some respects Christ's warning/appeal that "as you do unto the least of these (God's children), so you do unto me." So in a very large sense, Lester Ballard represents every street-person you pass in San Francisco or New York or wherever you happen to be a member of a larger community. Ballard is in this sense more avenging angel than irredeemable villain. The malignancy is growing in our collective communities, for the most part unseen, but festering, nevertheless. The greater our neglect, the greater the chance for evil rebounding upon us.

If you have not read McCarthy, this is a great place to start. You can read this novel in one or two sittings, as it flows so smoothly and uninterruptedly that you will not even notice that he is planting these seeds of inquiry as you are rolling along. Yet after you put the book down, you will no doubt take away a lot more than you noticed in passing.


Loveless.   October 7, 2000
In One Ear Out Your Mother (East Brunswick, NJ USA)
37 out of 39 found this review helpful

McCarthy even goes so far as to force the reader to *identify* with Lester Ballard.... Not Ballard the serial killer, or Ballard the necrophiliac, but rather that "misplaced and loveless simian" scavenging the Tennessee backwoods for some handhold of purpose and adulation. A grizzled wood troll haunting the rutted roads of civilized men, he becomes a secret collector of beautiful objects, the corpses of his victims laid alongside stuffed animals won at the county fair (Ballard is an expert marksman). He may even have found a place for himself in the "mountain man" communities of old, tending his kudzu and hunting hare and squirrel in the frigid hill country, in a land bereft of money and property (Ballard's madness is ignited by the foreclosure and auctioning off of his family estate in the opening chapter). As it is, civilization has encroached to dislodge his persona, making him the free captain of this Hell ship, a soul-shaking Southern gothic if there ever was one.

McCarthy presents us with such an unforgettable case-study of an irredeemably *loveless* existence. Lester Ballard, like all alienated citizens who murder their own, is *our* monster, the watchman and exterminating angel of our own pat, irrational, self-satisfied civil society. Unlike most purveyors of the mass-murderer yarn, McCarthy's austere, hacksaw language cuts a heinously convincing, but always humanistic portrayal of mental illness stemming from the most extreme alienation, urging us to forget Bret Easton Ellis, to dismiss Hannibal Lecter, the figure of Lester Ballard striking to the heart of things with each finely minutia'd stab of chiseled prose, a star of madness in this, the most legitimate representation of a lone wolf serial-killer you will ever read.


Grotesque masterpiece.   April 17, 2000
11 out of 12 found this review helpful

This may be the scariest ride in contemporary American fiction. A tale of the crazed Lester Ballard and his gradual slide into absolute depravity--necrophilia is just the beginning of it--this is dark, dark stuff. It could have been merely a freak show in prose, but fortunately we're in the hands of a master stylist, who makes this a rich, haunting, blackly comic experience. Nor is the violence extraneous to the point, as McCarthy puts forth the notion that even a Lester Ballard--"a child of God much like yourself perhaps"--may somehow occupy a vital place in the human family. A first-rate novel.


I had nightmares but couldn't stop reading. And then I read it again. And again and again.   June 5, 2007
Carol Toscano (New York City)
12 out of 12 found this review helpful

"The travails of a homeless, retarded necrophiliac killer roaming the hills of Kentucky. It sounds like a joke but somehow, it's not. (Though, if I were John Waters, I'd option it immediately.) Not only do you take this ghoul seriously, once you're halfway through the book, you realize you're on his side. Without psychologizing, or even getting into the protagonist's completely non-reflective head, McCarthy makes us understand him; what he's doing makes total sense to him, given what he knows. He comes to seem merely an extreme version of all people - blind, cosmically and comically ignorant, doing what makes sense to us given what we know."
- Mary Gaitskill From The Salon**com Reader's Guide to Contemporary Authors, pg 156.


Mary Gaitskill has given the best description of this novel that I've read anywhere, going so far as to suggest that it almost seems jokey in description. I can roughly imagine what would happen to someone trying to pitch this idea to a publisher or a producer today. Almost.

I will say this with absolute certainty: this book is a MASTERPIECE. McCarthy is a master. He is a master of language most of all. He is a master of manipulation. He's given us a character nearly void of emotion and interior and yet we find ourselves choking on our own emotions.

Lester Ballard's existence in Child of God is spare, fragile. McCarthy's depiction of Lester's interior is even sparer - like bones bare of tissue and muscle - a skeleton of conjoined events void of excess flesh in both thought and description. Even the punctuation is spare. McCarthy takes us through the life of Lester Ballard, a disjointed creature surviving in the wild, by delicately weaving a story that is, at once, full of despair and depravity yet lyrically beautiful, ruthlessly harsh and stunningly exquisite in its physical depiction of nature.

I am overwhelmed by McCarthy's mastery of minimalism in his choices of what information to give to the reader about or even from Lester. In Child of God, McCarthy never really tells you what Lester looks like, is thinking, wearing or feeling in any absolute form unless it is entirely necessary. I've read the book several times now. I still don't know for certain what Lester Ballard looks like. I don't know what color his hair is. Or his eyes. I don't know how tall he is other than not very. And really, none of this matters.

Without getting into specifics, I will say that this book is a very upsetting book to read. The main character, Lester, commits acts that are of the most disturbing nature one can (or in my case, never thought I could) imagine. And my warning is that it is NOT for everyone. Those who can step into the darkness of Lester's existence will experience words so thoughtfully joined, so carefully drawn and pared to their most delicate state. A tale unlike any other. One of the most finely crafted novels I've ever read.

On that note, Mary Gaitskill said it and I agree. So, here are my top ten reasons why John Waters should make Child of God, the movie:

10. Celluloid goldfish
9. Demon yodelers
8. Mountain gnomes who dress in leaves
7. Use of the term "follerin"
6. Testicles referred to as "cods"
5. Women named Urethra, Cerebella and Hernia Sue
4. Men in drag (down to the undies) and frightwigs ("fashioned" from dried human scalps)
3. Frozen gals
2. A cannibal in the cage next door

And the number 1 reason:

1. Dialogue that contains:
Say you want to blow me?
I said owe.



Intense and disturbing   December 28, 2001
Robert Ortiz (The Southwest)
1 out of 2 found this review helpful

This is a gripping novel that probes the breadth of human depravity and perversity while plunging the reader into a malevolent and sinister world. Lester Ballard is a deeply deranged and demented individual with sexually perverse lusts that resides in the Eastern Tennessee countryside. He's accused of rape, imprisoned for a short time, then released after which he commits unspeakable acts against his fellow man. It's doubtful his incarceration had anything to do with his behavior since it's obvious from the start this man is troubled. This is a wonderful novel filled with effective imagery and stunning descriptiveness. I found the chapter where the town sheriff, deputy and old Mr. Wade rowing the boat through the flooded town streets to be quite interesting. A recommended book, but beware the subject matter is quite graphic and might not be suitable for those without strong stomachs.