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Average Customer Rating:

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.

Mixed Reviews	Customer Rating:
I must be reading McCarthy in the wrong order. Started with No Country For Old Men and loved it, his earlier books are much darker. Content was a bit confusing to me but the style makes you keep coming back for more.