Cormac Mccarthy

He's bleak. She's chipper. He sees dark clouds. For her, it's strictly silver linings. She says, "Live your best life now!" He says, "Life? Who needs it?" She's one of the most famous people in the world. He could take the bus seat right next to you and you wouldn't look up from your newspaper.

It's bleak, despairing and apocalyptic -- and it's coming to "The Oprah Winfrey Show." "The Road," Cormac McCarthy's dark vision of a post-holocaust America, was chosen Wednesday as the latest selection for Winfrey's book club. The novel by McCarthy, 73, an author who almost never gives interviews, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle award in fiction and is also thought to be a major contender for a Pulitzer Prize this year.

BEFORE a morgue culture determined to hang a tag on every toe, Cormac McCarthy stands defiantly alive and untagged. Born in New England, he came of literary age in the South with 1965's "The Orchard Keeper" and thus was a "Southern writer" in the eyes of the New York publishing world. Twenty years later, wandering around Texas and New Mexico, he became a "Western writer." Writers who live and work in New York are "American writers."

The publication of "No Country for Old Men," Cormac McCarthy's first novel in seven years, is an event: Many believe McCarthy to be America's greatest living author, if not our greatest novelist since Faulkner and Hemingway. Academics hold McCarthy conferences and seminars, and his novels appear regularly on university syllabuses. First editions of his first five novels sell for thousands of dollars to collectors and devotees.

In the second part of Cormac McCarthy's epic trilogy, as in the first, the border between the United States and Mexico plays the same role as the rabbit-hole and the looking-glass in Lewis Carroll's two books of Alice. The young adventurers--McCarthy uses a pair--set out from a real though vividly charged Arizona and New Mexico, and cross into a world where realism, folklore, out-sized passions and gnomic myths swirl in stormy colors.

When John Cole's grandfather dies in 1947, leaving the 18,000-acre Texas ranch he spent his life to assemble, the 16-year-old begs his mother to lease it to him. She is determined to sell out; she is an actress, likes a good time and cannot stand the place. So John and his buddy, Rawlins, take two horses, two guns and a little money, and light out for Mexico. Cormac McCarthy's "All the Pretty Horses" is the ambitious first part of a trilogy.