Chaos was the set of ideas persuading all these scientists that they were members of a
shared enterprise. Physicist or biologist or mathematician, they believed that simple,
deterministic systems could breed complexity; that systems too complex for traditional
mathematics could yet obey simple laws; and that, whatever their particular field, their task
was to understand complexity itself.

Lydia Cooper is certainly one of the best literary critics at work today among McCarthy
scholars; she knows his works intimately and is expert at drawing connections between
them to deliver larger insights, with an especially finetuned sense of their ethical
dimensions. She excels at bringing together disparate commentators and writing about them
eloquently—for example, in her latest book, Cormac McCarthy: A Complexity Theory of
Literature, as she canvasses topics such as Thomas Piketty's capital versus wages problem …