The Knock at the Door

When Cormac McCarthy's sixth novel, All the Pretty Horses, won the National Book Award last year, journalists naturally wanted a word with the author. McCarthy possesses a lifelong habit of refusing questions, however. As a Texas lawyer buddy says, "He solicits publicity like a man evading process." A prestigious literary honor did nothing to change his mind; for that matter, he didn't go pick up the award. It made for a good story all the same. Here was a man with a fine hand with the language and a clear scope on the darkness out there, an impoverished artist on the high rim of his middle years, a writer whose books until Horses had never sold more than 2,500 copies in hard-cover, and here, with recognition and cash at last on his cheap tin plate, he wouldn't talk.

As a result, the press in many cases diminished McCarthy's great value by making him out to be some sort of hermit caballero and by all but ignoring his remarkable prose. Not that any of it bothered him enough to respond. He just kept working, and this week bookstores are receiving copies of The Crossing (Knopf; 426 pages; $23), the centerpiece in a trilogy that began with Horses. The hero of that book was a boy ahoof in Mexico in 1950, to whom it was easy to give your heart. The Crossing moves two orphaned brothers on ( horseback across the same spare terrain, this time just before World War II. Violence, raw land, unlettered people, love, loss and a throat-slit dog have something to do with the new narrative; or you could say it is about that mean crossing from child to man, told as cleanly as you'll find.

But don't expect to hear McCarthy talking about it. It does the heart good to report one of life's little constants: he still won't speak. With basically one exception, McCarthy has never drummed for himself. The exception came with the publication of Horses two years ago. At the time McCarthy was 58 and unknown outside a small mob of readers, quite a few of them critics, English professors or writers, who thought he was God. Being God didn't pay spit, though, and after five books and 30 years, McCarthy had his first agent, Amanda Urban, and a new editor, Gary Fisketjon, two of publishing's more glamorous figures. They impressed upon him the idea that a little publicity never hurt. "It was very simple," Fisketjon remembers. "He had no interest in it." They leaned on him. "He said, 'If you start making exceptions . . . ' He said, finally, 'If it will help -- and I trust you in thinking it will help -- but never again."'

McCarthy allowed the New York Times to seek him out in El Paso, where he hangs his hat more days than not, but the paper didn't gain much purchase on the novelist. Meanwhile, due in the main to old-fashioned word of mouth, All the Pretty Horses broke free, sold some, won some awards and was acquired by Mike Nichols for the movies. The author bought a new pickup truck, set to work on The Crossing and clammed up.