Child of God

It's really quite hard to figure out what to say about a book centered around the main character's necrophilia. The one thing I'm sure of is that I'm deeply jealous of Cormac McCarthy, an author who manages to write beautiful, lyrical, books about mass murder, incest, cannibalism (he's obsessed with cannibalism), and, yes, necrophilia. While he stops short of allowing us to sympathize with or pity the characters who perform such acts, he also stops short of allowing us to condemn them outright. He makes it clear that we belong to the same species as these characters and, "there but for the grace of God" and so on.

This is the premise of Child of God. In the first description he gives us of the novel's main character, Lester Ballard, McCarthy makes this premise explicit, saying: "A child of God much like yourself perhaps." From the very beginning, then, McCarthy makes clear the contention that the reader has more in common with Ballard than not. And yet, the question that shapes this slim novel is also clear: is it possible to become so depraved as to no longer be a "child of God?"

Ballard is essentially a hunter-gatherer, fulfilling his needs through his wits and his gun. He eats what he can find and what he can kill; if he has money it is because he stole it. His interactions with those around him--and especially women--are more or less cro-magnon--although not necessarily more so than those who surround him. McCarthy makes a particular point of describing a neighbor who has more daughters than he can count (or whose names he can remember) and multiple grandchildren on the way, yet who treats his daughters as whores at his disposal.

In this context it's hard to say that Ballard's necrophilia is really the ultimate depravity. Indeed, the whole town seems steeped in a kind of sexual hypocrisy, with primal lust trickling just below the surface. At first Ballard satisfies his sexual urges by spying on couples who drive up into the woods to have sex; it's almost natural, McCarthy seems to be saying, that when he comes upon a couple dead mid-coitus he (hunter-gatherer that he is) claims the girl's body for his own use. And then Ballard crosses the line that separates the civilized from the uncivilized, the sane from the insane (or does it, asks McCarthy?). Ironically, Ballard treats the dead girl better than any other woman he encounters, buying her clothes and brushing her hair. McCarthy's description of his ministrations is almost sweet, if one can forget the context:

He sat and brushed her hair with the dimestore brush he'd bought. He undid the top of the lipstick and screwed it out and began to paint her lips. He would arrange her in different positions and go out and peer in the window at her. After a while he just sat holding her, his hands feeling her body under the new clothes. He undressed her very slowly, talking to her. Then he pulled off his trousers and lay next to her. He spread her loose thighs. You been wantin it, he told her.

This is far and away the most sympathetic sexual encounter in a book full of sexual encounters. Ballard is not just using the dead girl for sex; he is also using her to fulfill a need for companionship that cannot be filled by any living woman. He is astounded by the novelty of having a woman to buy clothes and lipstick for, the novelty of looking into his decrepit house and seeing a woman sitting inside. The fact that she is dead is almost incidental.

When it becomes not incidental is when Ballard, convinced that he has found the solution to his loneliness, begins killing women in order to satisfy his urges. It's clear that the necrophilia isn't really the problem for McCarthy--there are plenty of rapes in the novel that are obviously much more abhorrent--but rather the need to kill live women because one can't interact with them. That's when Ballard becomes a ghoul, when he takes to living in a cave surrounded by "ledges or pallets of stone where dead people lay like saints."

Child of God is ultimately an indictment of Ballard, but it is every bit as much an indictment of the society he lives in. He is the product of all their illicit desires, all their mistreatment of women, their incivility and uncivilizedness, taken to an extreme. No surprise then, that he ends up not in a jail cell, but in a psychiatric hospital. No surprise that his society looks at him and sees not a felon but a crazy man.