ABSTRACT
I was saddened by Cities of the Plain. Same character doing much the same things, making much the same mistakes, but McCarthy had run out of energy; he had nowhere to go.³
Edwin Arnold, a consistent McCarthy apologist, provides a more considered and sympathetic judgment of the text, placing it in the context of the trilogy as a whole:
All the Pretty Horses is a bildungsroman set on a foundation of philosophical and ontological speculation . . . A much denser, more demanding work, The Crossing is a painful and exhausting and finally devastating narrative whose purpose seems almost a corrective to . . . popular
readings of the first book. . . . Some will view Cities of the Plain as a lesser work and certainly it is more constricted than either of the first two volumes, . . . is is a diminished world McCarthy creates in Cities of the Plain, a post-war West suffering through its final mockeries and subtractions, . . . But Cities of the Plain is also a necessary work, the one towards which the first two have journeyed in all their richness, and it is not without its own quiet moments of splendor. It may, in fact, prove ultimately to be the wisest of the books and, in its cumulative effect, the one that in retrospect will move us most deeply.⁴
ose critics who comment seriously on Cities of the Plain, if only in the context of the trilogy as a whole,⁵ clearly reject Josyph’s view by implication. Stacey Peebles analyses the Epilogue and Dedication in terms of Latin American influence, a field that has been neglected so far in my view:
One of the most significant influences on the epilogue, . . . is the genre of Latin-American literature known as “lo fantastico,” . . . which is best represented in the writings of Jorge Luis Borges and Julio Cortázar.⁶
But criticism dealing exclusively with Cities of the Plain remains relatively scarce.
