I first heard of Cormac McCarthy when he won a MacArthur Fellowship (one ofthe so-called genius grants) in the early 1980s. The MacArthur is intended to be a life-changingly sizable award for otherwise obscure achievers -- biologists who have fallen off the career track, social workers, mimes, garage inventors, people who construct beautiful objects in the desert -- and I supposed that McCarthy, who lived in El Paso, Texas, was the writer-version of one of these.

Not long after, in the mid-1980s, I went to work for the Ecco Press, a very small operation then located in two rooms on 30th Street in Manhattan amid antique wholesalers and Korean-toy importers. Ecco at that time held the paperback rights to several of McCarthy's novels, it turned out. McCarthy had published five books over a span of more than 20 years, but he was then still so little known outside the world of writers and serious readers that his reprint rights were available for the pittance a press the size of Ecco could pay. I got hold of his novels by the means those who work for publishers (even small ones) do, took them home and shelved them, full of the usual good intentions.

A few years later I read "Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West," a novel set in southwest Texas and the Mexican state of Chihuahua in the years after the Civil War, tracing the crooked travelings of a band of drifters and ex-soldiers turned marauders and assassins. I discovered that I had been sitting on one of the neglected masterpieces of postwar American fiction, a book of immense lyrical power and symphonic violence. McCarthy, it so happened, had indeed been making beautiful objects in the desert, for the desert of the American Southwest and north Mexico was in his hands a landscape of almost monstrous beauty.

They were crossing the western edge of the playa when Glanton halted. He turned and placed one hand on the wooden cantle and looked toward the sun where it sat new risen above the bald and flyspecked mountains to the east. The floor of the playa lay smooth and unbroken by any track and the mountains in their blue islands stood footless in the void like floating temples.

Toadvine and the kid sat their horses and gazed upon that desolation with the others. Out on the playa a cold sea broke and water gone these thousand years lay riffled silver in the morning wind.

[Shortly after this tableau is established, Apaches attack from the east.]

... By the time the animals were secured and [the men] had thrown themselves on the ground under the creosote bushes with their weapons readied the riders were beginning to appear far out on the lake bed, a thin frieze of mounted archers that trembled and veered in the rising heat. They crossed before the sun and vanished one by one and reappeared again and they were black in the sun and they rode out of that vanished sea like burnt phantoms with the legs of the animals kicking up the spume that was not real and they were lost in the sun and lost in the lake and they shimmered and slurred together and separated again and they augmented by planes in lurid avatars and began to coalesce and there began to appear above them in the dawn-broached sky a hellish likeness of their ranks riding huge and inverted and the horses' legs incredibly elongate trampling down the high thin cirrus and the howling antiwarriors pendant from their mounts immense and chimeric and the high wild cries carrying in that flat and barren pan like the cries of souls broke through some misweave in the weft of things into the world below.

I was prompted to read "Blood Meridian" in 1991, some six years after it was published, when Don DeLillo called it one of the best American novels he'd read in the previous decade. That I'd never heard the title uttered by anyone before that, or seen it mentioned in print, was a shock that kept intruding on my reading.

Now McCarthy, a bona fide bestselling, National Book Award-winning author, has published "Cities of the Plain," the last of three novels he together calls his "Border Trilogy." The first, "All the Pretty Horses," appeared in 1992, won the aforementioned and other awards and sold an immense number of copies. "The Crossing" followed in 1994. A dreamy, at times lovely, but fundamentally chaotic book, it was greeted with mixed reviews and a quick ride to the remainder tables.

"Cities of the Plain" brings together the two surviving cowhands from each of the previous novels: John Grady Cole, the original horse whisperer, now 19 years old (he was 16 at the end of "All the Pretty Horses," riding off, literally, into the sunset) and Billy Parham, now 28. The year is 1952. They work and live together on Mac McGovern's ranch, a large cattle spread (once much larger) located in the far southeast corner of New Mexico a few miles from El Paso and Juarez over the Texas and Mexico borders. As young men they are painfully aware that the life they have chosen is on the verge of disappearing, that their futures hang in the balance. What's left of the operation from its more robust years is now fully doomed: The Army, we are told, will soon be taking it over. McCarthy doesn't bother to speculate for what purpose, but given the year and the locale, you are seeing mushroom clouds in your mind's eye. Modernity with a bang.

McCarthy's main preoccupation in "Cities of the Plain" is with that turning moment after the war (the war changed everything, one of his characters says) when an old kind of life, including life between men and women, was being lost and something newer and more horrible was in the offing. The old men in this book have lived, have married well on the whole, have made themselves on the land. The young men stand at the opening of this same path, milling around, unwilling to go down it because they can already see the landslide that has blocked the route forever. They enjoy, as best they can, the waning time: They chase cows, they hunt down wild dogs, they break horses, they eat the good food of the border after long days of work.

If you've read any or most of McCarthy's first five novels, you may think of his fictional imagination as overpowering and baroque, especially in its renderings of violence. But, in fact, his imagination has an astonishing range. I found myself at first strongly affected, and then admiring, of the following passage, an elegiac preparation for an evening game of chess between the young John Grady Cole and the recent widower Mac, his boss and the owner of the ranch:

He walked back up the hallway. Socorro brought the pot from the stove and spooned the last of the caldillo onto his plate. She brought him more coffee and poured a cup for Mac and left it steaming on the far side of the table. When he was done eating he rose and carried his plate and cup to the sink and he poured more coffee and then went to the old cherrywood press hauled overland in a wagon from Kentucky eighty years ago and opened the door and took out the chess set from among the old cattleman's journals and the halfbound ledgers and leather daybooks and the old green Remington boxes of shotgun shells and rifle cartridges. On the upper shelf a dove-tailed wooden box that held brass scaleweights. A leather folder of drawing instruments. A glass horsecarriage that once held candy for a Christmas in the long ago.

You can see here, too, even in the lovely precision of this evocation, a deep sentimentality to McCarthy's writing that is never far from view, in his violence at times, in his sense of loss and history at others, and in his romance always. In "Cities of the Plain" he offers up, without a hint of apology, that durable creature of male |ber-narrative, the Whore With a Heart of Gold. Of course, he is too good a writer to try fobbing off a straight Whore With a Heart of Gold: The symbolically named Magdalena, McCarthy's lady of the sorrows, is afflicted with seizures and a wan saintliness, an Evita-meets-St. Teresa type. The other Mexican whores gather around her and light candles. She spasms and bites through sticks. We gather that she makes love quite well. John Grady Cole falls in love with her just looking at her, and from that moment forward McCarthy, who does just as well with no plot at all, has burdened himself with a story to tell. Much, much blood will be shed over this Idea of Woman before the book comes to a close.

What McCarthy is after in the "Border Trilogy," what he has always been after in a way, is an American re-creation of an Elizabethan, or you could even say Shakespearean, literature -- lyrical, neologistic, tragic, allegorical. Often he is not so much employing a language as creating one, a condition the Elizabethans found themselves faced with by historical coincidence and that McCarthy has created by force of his geographical sensibility and his imaginative will. He blends the uncomfortable tongues of the past and the present. He litters the stage with corpses. He is capable of moving from the witty to the horrifying and from the ornate to the severe with a certainty of footing and speed worthy of Shakespeare. He is forgivable (mostly) where he is too broad and brilliant where he is narrow, also in the way of Shakespeare. In the "Border Trilogy" he has created a kind of Romeo and Juliet tragedy, rehearsed in "All the Pretty Horses" and fully realized in "Cities of the Plain." These are doomed, ultimately fatal romances of American boy with Mexican girl, and in McCarthy's vision the two nations are the Montagues and the Capulets, forever hostile yet inseparably, catastrophically linked.

'You think you'll ever go back there?'

'Where?'

'Mexico.'

'I don't know. I'd like to. You?'

'I don't think so. I think I'm done ...' Billy sat with his hands crossed palm down on the pommel of his saddle. He leaned and spat. 'I went down there three separate trips. I never once come back with what I started after ... Sooner or later they're goin to run all the white people out of that country. Even the Babmcora wont survive. ... I damn sure dont know what Mexico is. I think it's in your head. Mexico. I rode a lot of ground down there. The first ranchera you hear sung you understand the whole country. By the time you've heard a hundred you dont know nothin. You never will. I concluded my business down there a long time ago.'

You may well end up mildly irritated by the sentimentality of "Cities of the Plains," by its muscular promises put aside in favor of romantic melodrama. And yet as the book settled back into my remembering imagination I found myself wiping away the excesses, the oils and dust spilled at its edges. The characters are thoroughly likable, the landscape a vast seduction (as it always is in McCarthy's novels) and certain scenes -- most, in fact -- stand unblemished, lovely or harrowing or both, by any soppiness of the plot. I can say why a writer has succeeded to my way of thinking, or failed, but I'm harder pressed to explain why I'm more willing to forgive one author or work more than another. Perhaps this: McCarthy is a genius, like the old MacArthur crowd said almost 20 years ago. On every page, he still shows it.