McCarthy made his famous dismissal of Proust and Henry James in the NYT in 1992 and in the Oprah interview, on the grounds those writers didn't deal with deep issues of life and death. But from all that has been revealed about his personal library, including this Bernhard book, one wonders if that was a put-on.

Surely he meant their work. Dealing with deep issues of life and death in his work didn’t require him to be serious all the time about every topic in his own life.