The recently deceased, overwhelmingly successful and famously reclusive Cormac McCarthy is a better comparison to Wes Anderson than you’d think.
First off, if you play a little fast and loose with the numbers, their most recent releases came about at roughly the same stage in their career. Stella Maris, McCarthy’s 2022 book, was technically his twelfth, though it’s a companion to The Passenger, released just a month before.
It took that long (let’s call it his 11th book) for McCarthy to switch up his game, for the first time leaving behind his rugged male protagonists for a woman, and trading his southern gothic