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Summary:
An American classic, The Orchard Keeper is the first novel by one of America's finest novelists and author of the critically acclaimed national bestseller All the Pretty Horses. Set in a small, remote community in rural Tennessee, it tells the story of a young boy and the outlaw bootlegger who, unbeknownst to either of them, has killed the boy's father.
Customer Reviews:
Average Customer Rating:
The Bones of a Lost America
Customer Rating:
This is certainly one of our great American novels, and it might be the best "first" novel written in our country in the past 100 years. In many respects the America McCarthy reveals in The Orchard Keeper is one our politicians and rich folks like to pretend never existed, that back-woods land of poor country people living hard-scrabble lives in the hills that many of our folks grew up in at the end of The Great Depression. Forget Faulkner, for God's sake. Cormac writes beautiful prose that actually makes sense, and his novels are peopled with characters who are as real as anyone you'll meet in your travels today. This is the real deal. And you'll always find something new and refreshing in this wonderful book, each time you go back to read it again.
The Orchard Keeper reads like a Faulkner novel.
Customer Rating:
Cormac McCarthy is best known for his later novels Blood Meridian, The Border Trilogy: All the Pretty Horses, the Crossing, Cities of the Plain, and No Country for Old Men. Set in a remote Tennessee community, his first novel, The Orchard Keeper (1965), first caught the attention of Albert Erskine (William Faulkner's editor) at Random House with its obvious Faulkner influences. The Orchard Keeper reads like a Faulkner novel, and will appeal to anyone who enjoys Faulkner. It tells the simple story of John Wesley Rattner, a teenage boy, and Marion Sylder, the outlaw who killed Rattner's father, Kenneth Rattner. Both characters are oblivious to this connection. The novel follows the evolving dynamics between these two characters, and not only reveals the early genius of Cormac McCarthy, but promises his much greater work still to come.
G. Merritt
a great beginning
Customer Rating:
Beautifully written prose. McCarthey says more in one sentence than most any other writers say in pages. It's a small book, but not a quick read. I appreciate the language, words and his amazing style, but I found find the book a bit unsatisfying. Perhaps I enjoy more plot driven books. Often the characters muddled together and in general I felt a bit in a haze while reading, not completely understanding what was being conveyed. I've enjoyed other works by McCarthey more than this one.
disjointed and self indulgent
Customer Rating:
Having first read "The Road" McCarthy's brilliant apocalyptic tale I was expecting much more from this, his first novel. While the characters are developed nicely there is no story for the reader to grasp, just an occasional glimmer of continuity. What we expect never materializes and the reader is left wondering what they've just spent time trying to digest. McCarthy tends to ramble on about nothing in what appears, at times, to be a Miriam-Webster exercise in obscure and abstract terms. At times it seems as if Mr. McCarthy is peering down his nose at us and saying I'm just too smart for my own good and you, my layperson friends, just don't "get" me.
A Twist of Faulkner
Customer Rating:
Other reviewers have noted the extent to which McCarthy owes a debt to his forebear William Faulkner. While he has expanded and extended this into his own style over the course of his career, the obligation is most clear in this, his first novel. THE ORCHARD KEEPER derives its mometum not from plot--which is thin though not entirely inconsequential--but from the depth of characterization and descriptions of nature and the community and from the constantly shifting points of view and occasional italicized forays into memory. While each new section begins with a non-specified "he," this confusion does not last long and serves to unify a sense that all three major characters are operating within a large construct in which their individual identities are smudged. A powerful book about the integuments that underlie our connections.
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