SOURCE: "'Daddy Quit', She Said," in The New York Times, December 5, 1973, p. 45.

In the following essay, Broyard discusses McCarthy's writing, and his ability to make readers empathize with evil, immoral characters.

It's interesting to see how a good writer can make us care about a "bad" character. I mean bad in a moral sense. Talent, it seems, can find the humanity behind the inhuman, the pathos that comes from being out of step with the world, the loneliness, like death, that is the wages of sin. In spite of our increasing disillusionment in fiction and in the social sciences with homo sapiens, he is still all that we've got and only the most obdurate misanthrope can resist him when he is presented in the round, when even his imperfections pulse with life and hope.

An evil character brilliantly portrayed will awaken our empathy—even sympathy—more readily than...