Geography, Genre, and Gender: Billy Parham's Crossings and the Search for American Masculinity

abstract:Cormac McCarthy's novels complicate the struggle of American men in search of themselves, seeking to shed the trappings of increasingly anachronistic masculine signifiers, reckon with the degree to which their conception of manhood has empowered and imprisoned them while often brutalizing others, and discover, perhaps, a way forward to a construction of masculinity that no longer threatens to make them men without a country. Like so many before him, Cormac McCarthy turned to the West and to the Western. This westward turn, after four novels that seemed to cement his status as a writer of the American South, represents an intentional generic shift and enables profound engagement with issues at the very center of American cultural life, particularly issues related to American manhood—many of which have gained cultural currency alongside McCarthy's writing career, which began in 1965. The revisionist, interrogative, and celebratory treatment of masculinity reaches a crescendo in The Crossing, a novel that demonstrates the surprising plasticity of a genre which McCarthy exploits to examine issues at the heart of contemporary American culture, specifically issues related to a perceived crisis (or series of crises) in American masculinity and the concomitant emergence of masculinity studies.