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Rating: He materializes, forceful, without even knowing his name: the bearded jaw, complexion, and attire of a grayish hue of neglect, dirty earth, unkempt and yellow mustaches on decaying teeth, and moldy wood-carved cheekbones, poorly carved. The profile of Abraham Lincoln and the indifferent gaze of someone who has seen little of the world beyond the mountains guarding his nest, his valley in wild Tennessee, the red and sky-blue gaze of someone who found in baseball—he's a white North American born in the first half of the century, what can you expect?—in homemade whiskey, and in hunting, his palliative pre-death cure. He boasts a rigorous Christian upbringing, rants about our savior like a black preacher from New Orleans. He is an American stereotype in flesh, one who has chewed tobacco, the unconscious bulwark of an endangered race, a damned apathetic Clint Eastwood of the province. A racist with a hat, a miserable son of God who doesn't know Socrates and certainly doesn't grasp the invaluable richness of not knowing, unable to understand the wisdom hidden by his semi-illiteracy, the lyrical charm of being bucolic.
They will call him a narrator, the experts, a voice-over: I imagine him this way, with a pronounced accent that I don't even know, but very pronounced, while you will forgive my lack of inventiveness, my non-existent notions about the customs and habits of Tennessee, and in your imaginary of Americanophile experts you will paint a portrait certainly more fitting. That is not the point, or maybe it is. Because the narrator, the Cormac McCarthy who learned the art from Flaubert and possessed the hillbilly up there to the point of self-annihilation, warns us from the very first pages: Lester Ballard he knows, he is a son of God just like us, like you. There's no escaping it. A favored son, your brother, blood of your blood and yes, created in His image and likeness, ipse dixit. If that sounds good to you, you'd better stop.
This master of free indirect speech, of mimetic narration, of words that stink of shit and smell of green moss, McCarthy, with the blanket over his legs, the hat and the Tennessee accent mocks the worldview of the good Christian in a short novel, or a long story if you like, simply marking the events of a rural, peaceful town with short slides, of a bearded little man always accompanied by his rifle, Lester Ballard, a poor white ant hustling and conquering the eternal and magnificent nature of winter, a perfect nature, masterfully painted with strokes of sublime, spontaneous poetry. Hunting, some thievery, and a hovel occupied illegally, his only means. A little romantic hero of Chateaubriand in short, our brother, almost an example for future generations. Almost.
Ballard is alone, in the wilderness that counts Conrad's Kurtz among its most famous victims, he is alone and has the gene of madness, nothing to lose and nothing to gain; a filthy bundle of nerves, misanthropy and gunpowder, pure instinct, cynicism incarnate. And when he gets tired of masturbating while watching parked couples at the usual rest area, on the side of Frog Mountain, Ballard will kill, and it will be natural, physiological, without remorse: he will kill to screw the still warm corpses of other daughters of God, he will dress them and adorn them with care, storing them in an underground cave until they are covered in mushrooms, together with the dolls aggressively won at the amusement park years ago, his tender faithful companions. Tigers, teddy bears. The man, the prodigal son, who knows no emotion and finds comfort in prison, beans, bread and water, in the asylum, in his cell next to the psychopath who ate the brains of his victims with a teaspoon: son of God himself, like the landfill keeper who beats and rapes his daughters, and the deformed child who bites the bird’s legs to keep it from flying away, under Ballard's amused eyes. Just like us, yes.
Do not read Child of God if you fear your brother, if you share with the good Christian storyteller that after all, that filthy necrophiliac fetishist murderer Ballard is still a son victim of this world -someone sang- because you should know that you might find yourself disobedient to the dogmas in your inability to forgive, to find morality and redemption in a dry and cold ending like few others; or worse for you, you will doubt, you will have flashes of clear disgust for the human being because deep down you know that beyond the literary fiction there is a reality capable of producing even more terrifying monsters, and then you will discover that McCarthy has got you, you will despise him because there will be no words of comfort for you. But if a cynical nihilism that finds its aesthetic counterpart in a dry prose,inspired with flashes of grandiloquence -the descriptions of the environments starting from the details, a true specialty of McCarthy, guaranteeing chills- but strictly cold, sometimes ironic, pure, and raw to the limits of exaggeration, and in blind verbal violence you find yourself at ease, then you will be seduced, you who have no need for meanings but love to lose yourself in the significants of a crystalline, icy pen stained with blood; like that winter in Frog Mountain, Tennessee.
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