To read Cormac McCarthy is to enter a climate of frustration: a good day is so mysteriously followed by a bad one. McCarthy is a colossally gifted writer, certainly one of the greatest observers of landscape. He is also one of the great hams of American prose, who delights in producing a histrionic rhetoric that brilliantly ventriloquizes the King James Bible, Shakespearean and Jacobean tragedy, Melville, Conrad, and Faulkner.

There is intense disagreement about McCarthy’s literary status, which his new novel, “No Country for Old Men” (Knopf; $24.95), an unimportant, stripped-down thriller, will only aggravate. Some readers are alienated by his novels’ punctual appointments with blood-soaked violence. (“No Country for Old Men” opens with a prisoner strangling a sheriff’s deputy with the chain of his handcuffs.) Others think his work bombastic, pretentious, or claustrophobically male-locked: McCarthy has a tendency to omit half the human race from serious scrutiny. But a balanced assessment has been hard to come by, because his reputation, at least since the publication of “Blood Meridian,” in 1985, has been cultic. He is swarmed over by fans, devotees, obsessives, Southern and Southwestern history buffs, and fiercely protective academic scholars. He lives quietly in New Mexico, and has given just two interviews in the past decade. His granitic indifference to his readership only feeds its almost religious loyalty.

Surely no one disputes McCarthy’s talent. He has written extraordinarily beautiful prose. He generally disdains the intermediate interference of small-bore punctuation. His sentences are comma-less convoys, articulated only by the Biblical “and”: “They’d had their hair cut with sheepshears by an esquilador at the ranch and the backs of their necks above their collars were white as scars and they wore their hats cocked forward on their heads and they looked from side to side as they jogged along as if to challenge the countryside or anything it might hold.” They take on a hard, obstructive, processional quality; this is one of the reasons that McCarthy is so often called a mythic, or Biblical, or primordial writer.

He is also a wonderfully delicate noticer of nature. His first novel, “The Orchard Keeper” (1965), has this picture of lightning: “Far back beyond the mountain a thin wire of lightning glowed briefly.” The protagonist of “Child of God” (1973), a psychotic necrophiliac named Lester Ballard, lights a fire in an old grate, and as it races up the disused chimney sees a spider that “descended by a thread and came to rest clutching itself on the ashy floor of the hearth.” How strange and original that “clutching itself” is, and how appropriate that the loveless Lester Ballard might think this way about a spider’s shrivelling. “Blood Meridian” is a vast and complex sensorium, at times magnificent and at times melodramatic, but nature is almost always precisely caught and weighed: in the desert, the stars “fall all night in bitter arcs,” and the wolves trot “neat of foot” alongside the horsemen, and the lizards, “their leather chins flat to the cooling rocks,” fend off the world “with thin smiles and eyes like cracked stone plates,” and the grains of sand creep past all night “like armies of lice on the move,” and “the blue cordilleras stood footed in their paler image on the sand like reflections in a lake.” McCarthy liked this last phrase so much that he repeated it, seven years later, in “All the Pretty Horses” (1992): “Where a pair of herons stood footed to their long shadows.”

In McCarthy, such repetition is a sign not of haste but of a style that has achieved consistency. That curious word “footed” is characteristic of his willingness to stretch the sinew of language with Shakespearean liberality. “Footed to their long shadows” perfectly conveys the sense of a bird that is all foot and leg, and that, moreover, seems fastened by its feet to the ground. (“Footed to” surely suggests “fitted to” or “fastened to,” and for this reason “legged to” wouldn’t work.) McCarthy pulls off something similar in “All the Pretty Horses” when he bends an adverb to describe the horses: “The horses stepped archly among the shadows that fell over the road.” And he can describe the human form just as exactly; in the same novel, Rawlins is attacked in prison and flinches backward, “with his shoulders hunched and his arms outflung like a man refereeing his own bloodletting.”

McCarthy is probably best known, though, for a rather different register, in which his prose opens its lungs and bellows majestically, in a concatenation of Melville and Faulkner (though McCarthy always sounds more antique, and thus antiquarian, than either of those admired predecessors). “Blood Meridian” is full of such writing, in which the ragged and sordid band of American scalp hunters and the avenging Indians are seen as Macbeth himself might have envisaged them in his blood-haunted soliloquies:

**{: .break one} ** A legion of horribles, hundreds in number, half naked or clad in costumes attic or biblical or wardrobed out of a fevered dream with the skins of animals and silk finery and pieces of uniform still tracked with the blood of prior owners, coats of slain dragoons, frogged and braided cavalry jackets . . . and all the horsemen’s faces gaudy and grotesque with daubings like a company of mounted clowns, death hilarious, all howling in a barbarous tongue and riding down upon them like a horde from a hell more horrible yet than the brimstone land of christian reckoning, screeching and yammering and clothed in smoke like those vaporous beings in regions beyond right knowing where the eye wanders and the lip jerks and drools. **

On the strength of this kind of thing, Harold Bloom has called “Blood Meridian” one of the major aesthetic achievements of the age, and “a universal tragedy of blood.” It is a risky way of writing, and there are times when McCarthy, to my ear, at least, sounds merely theatrical. He has a fondness for what could be called analogical similes, in which the linking phrase “like some” introduces not a visual likeness but a hypothetical and often abstract parallel: “And he went forth stained and stinking like some reeking issue of the incarnate dam of war herself.”

The danger is not just melodrama but imprecision and, occasionally, something close to nonsense. “All the Pretty Horses” opens with a now celebrated description of a train: “It came boring out of the east like some ribald satellite of the coming sun howling and bellowing in the distance and the long light of the headlamp running through the tangled mesquite brakes.” It is dawn, hence the train’s headlamp is seen as a satellite of the coming sun, and I suppose the wormlike train is vaguely phallic, hence “ribald.” But surely “ribald” is a meaning too far. Does a train ever seem “ribald”? In the same book, a Mexican police captain, who has taken the cowboy heroes into custody, is described in a tone that reads like a juvenile parody of Conrad:

**{: .break one} ** Yet the captain inhabited another space and it was a space of his own election and outside the common world of men. A space privileged to men of the irreclaimable act which while it contained all lesser worlds within it contained no access to them. For the terms of election were of a piece with its office and once chosen that world could not be quit. **