Six years ago, Jonathan Franzen sparked what passes for a media frenzy in the literary world by expressing discomfort that the Oprah's Book Club sticker might adorn The Corrections. Notwithstanding his fumbling explanations about mass media or commercialism or some such thing, this inevitably came across as an insult to the club's membership, Oprah Winfrey or both, and she withdrew her invitation for him to be interviewed on the show. His attempt at a principled stand having come across as asinine rudeness, Franzen crawled back into his cave and poured out a series of somewhat unflattering, soul-baring personal essays.

One can only wonder what Franzen thought when word came this spring that one of the greatest living American writers, the anything-but-middlebrow Cormac McCarthy, would give his first-ever televised interview as the book club's featured author. This was hardly Oprah's first venture into serious literature; even before its re-launch in 2003, the club's fare had been more substantial than often portrayed. In recent years, she has led her followers through heavy-hitters from Tolstoy to Garcia-Marquez to an entire summer of Faulkner. Ultimately, that road led to The Road, McCarthy's bleak tale of a father and son's trek through a post-apocalyptic wasteland.

For McCarthy's longtime fans, the prospect of finally seeing the man on TV, but with You-Go-Girl icon Oprah Winfrey in the opposite chair, is the very essence of cognitive dissonance. Yet from the beginning, Oprah gives the sense that this is the most natural thing in the world. Treating him with respect verging on reverence, she nonetheless maintains the natural ease and confidence that have made her the master of every situation.

The interview begins with the question of McCarthy's reclusive nature, which proves nothing as studied or fraught as Salinger or Pynchon. Of publicity tours and the like, he says simply, "I don't think it's good for your head. If you spend a lot time thinking about how to write a book, you probably shouldn't be talking about it, you probably should be doing it."

"It's nothing against the press or the media?"

"You work your side of the street and I'll work mine," he says with a smile.

With that out of the way, Oprah mentions having read Blood Meridian and No Country for Old Men, immediately winning points for not sticking with the bestselling, Hollywood-friendly All the Pretty Horses — which, while a great read, is by far the most accessible, least harrowing of his books. Indeed, for those familiar with his less-known work, much of the fear in reading The Road lies in knowing just what McCarthy is capable of: Blood Meridian, with violence to make Sam Peckinpah blanch. Child of God, with the unholy cave where "Ballard turned his light on ledges or pallets of stone where dead people lay like saints." As the unnamed child in The Road shuffles through the barren ash — his father's last bullet promised for his death to cheat worse horrors — his most excruciating vulnerability might be to the imagination of his author.

But the sweetness of fatherhood late in life — his son John is now eight — seems to have mellowed McCarthy. His latest book offers a depth of sentiment absent from his earlier work, and a new sense of mercy for characters and readers alike. On camera, he comes across as nothing more nor less than a sweet old man, slightly shy, slouched unself-consciously in a leather armchair. His soft Appalachian accent is just as gravelly as you assumed it was, and he chooses his words carefully — no surprise, given the stone-chiseled, biblical prose that fills his work. But he is also a lively conversationalist, and his warmth and charisma fill the screen.

The interview was filmed at the Santa Fe Institute, McCarthy's favorite place, an organization "devoted to creating a new kind of scientific research community, one emphasizing multi-disciplinary collaboration in pursuit of understanding the common themes that arise in natural, artificial and social systems." He confesses that he doesn't really hang out much with other writers, and it's hard to picture him joining a food fight at Yaddo or holding forth at Soho House. At the same time, he is clearly a writer's writer, quoting Faulkner on writing and citing James Joyce and Andersonville author McKinley Cantor as influences.

Although hardly the MFA type, McCarthy is a natural teacher, his thoughts on the craft of fiction simple and down-to-earth. Of his decision to eschew quotation marks and semicolons, he says, "You shouldn't block the page up with weird little marks. If you write properly, you shouldn't have to punctuate." At the same time, "You really have to be aware that there are no quotation marks to guide people, and write in such a way that it won't be confusing as to who is speaking." On a more inspirational level, he says that anyone with enough determination can manage to avoid day jobs and compromises just as he has. "You're just here once, life is brief, and to have to spend every day of it doing what somebody else wants you to do is not the way to live it."

Both McCarthy and Oprah clearly enjoy their conversation, showing a kind of opposites-attract chemistry as two people who have excelled at the highest level of very different fields. She catches him blushing as he admits that The Road is a love letter to his son, and chides him for his failure to understand women even after three marriages. As she leads him through topics from life to literature to personal finance, he never seems inclined to dumb down or dress up his answers, but gives carefully considered responses that show real respect for the questioner.

At the same time, the contrast can be striking between Oprah's can-do, The Secret-inflected positivity and McCarthy's drier, more humble philosophy. Early in the interview, she asks him about his passion for writing, the importance of being passionate about your work being a key theme in her message for young people. He answers with a shrug and characteristic shy laugh.

I don't know. Passion ... it sounds like a pretty fancy word. I like what I do, and I suppose I ... some writers have said in print that they hated writing, it was a chore and a burden, and I certainly don't feel that way about it. Sometimes it's difficult, you always have this image of the perfect thing, which you can never achieve, but which you never stop trying to achieve. But I think at the core of it there's this image you have, this interior image, of something that is absolutely perfect, and that's your signpost, your guide. You'll never get there, but without it, you won't get anywhere.

In a single exchange, the difference between entrepreneur and artist is made plain.

This is not to say that McCarthy doesn't have his quirks. His riff on the concept that there is somebody out there who happens to be the luckiest person in the world reduces Oprah to a blank stare and polite nodding. Later in the show, at a dinner party with Sidney Poitier and other guests who have viewed the interview but without McCarthy, Oprah corrects the record: "There's no such thing as luck; it's preparation meeting the moment of opportunity."

But she does humor him, and he makes a good case that he just might be the luckiest guy on Earth. There's the time he was house sitting in Memphis without a penny to his name, surviving on the food left in the pantry, when a courier arrived with a check for $20,000 from a charitable foundation. Or the time he was living in a shack in Tennessee and ran out of toothpaste and couldn't afford more, and went down to the mailbox and found a free sample in it. "There's hundreds of anecdotes like that, that's the way my life has been," he says. You know it's true, and you'd love to hear them all.

In spite of his many laurels — fellowships from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Lyndhurst, MacArthur and Guggenheim foundations; the trifecta of National Book Award, National Book Critics Circle Award and Pulitzer Prize — McCarthy's instincts are purely minimalist, even monastic. He types his work on a manual Olivetti, and says that the two most important things in a man's life are food and shoes. And there are two things you always know about a Cormac McCarthy character: the conditions of his shoes, and how hungry he is — whether he's yet eaten the last of the tortillas.

His ambitions lie in a different dimension from Oprah Winfrey's, but surely she can relate to his ethos: "You always have that hope that, today, I'm going to do something better than I've ever done." (Again the self-deprecating laugh: "How's that for hubris?") And ultimately it was she who managed to hunt him down and bring him back alive. For readers who've waited decades to see the great man live and in color, you couldn't ask for better than this plainspoken explanation of the meaning of The Road:

Just simply care about things and people and be more appreciative. Life is pretty damn good, even when it looks bad, and we should appreciate it more. We should be grateful. I don't know who to be grateful to, but you should be thankful for what you have.

Nicely done.

— J. Daniel Janzen (dan at clownyard dot com)