The Orchard Keeper

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The Orchard Keeper is the first novel by the American novelist Cormac McCarthy. Like all McCarthy's fiction, it has been heavily influenced by William Faulkner, probably more so than any of his other works.

The novel is set in a small, isolated community in Tennessee, during the inter-war period. It is the story of John Wesley Rattner, a young boy, and Marion Slyder, an outlaw and bootlegger, who has killed Rattner's father, a fact to which both are oblivious.

[edit] Themes

Main themes of the novel include fostering, hospitality, and nature. Woven in beautiful description of harsh surroundings, sudden actions -- a swing of a tire iron, a porch falling off a building, a car falling into a creek, or owl swooping down -- become a turning point changing everything the way a lever's action is altered by a fulcrum. These unexpected changes become the new environment the characters evolve in.