I can’t agree there at all - to me Outer Dark and Child of God are by far the high points of his body of work. I don’t see huge stylistic departures between these and his later novels (Suttree seems to be where he’s especially mired in Faulknerisms) and there’s a cryptic, unsettling sense of mystery and depravity to their stories that I find lacking in most of his other work.
I guess I’m as educated as most people when it comes to literature, so I don’t think that’s a fair assessment of what is merely an opinion.
It’s a subjective view - he clearly isn’t competent in the sense that he’s failed to engage me (and, let’s remember, many other “educated” readers) with his work.
You can argue about what a writer’s “goal” should be (if indeed it makes any sense to ask that), and that he doesn’t owe me anything as a reader, but the fact that this avid bookworm, who normally enjoys the US thriller genre, is just about set to give up on a book by an author I’d heard was amazing is a disappointment to me.
Perhaps “egregiously stylistic” might be a better term. He’s certainly a more than competent story-teller, but his style can be off-putting. The first time I saw his - shall we say - “apostrophobia”, I had to stop and roll my eyes at the unnecessary affectation. It takes a conscious effort NOT to type the words correctly, and his books certainly don’t need any grammatical twitches to make them stand out. I got more-or-less used to it fairly soon, but it still causes my eyes (and concentration) to hiccup when I come across it.
Just for the record, in addition to Meridian, I’ve read the border trilogy, No Country, and The Road. It’s difficult to pick the next one, as reviews on Amazon are all over the place. Recommendations?
Blood Meridian is his best novel. Suttree is another really good one.
Unless it DOES come off to someone as being like an excited child. Literature is subjective and your personal opinions are not objective fact.
While I will happily agree that McCarthy is a genius, I will disagree that his refusal to use apostrophes & quotes is the mark of brilliance or anything but an affectation. It’s not even minimalism. It calls attention to itself needlessly; it takes the reader out of the story for a few moments while he orients himself to the breaking of rules, while adding nothing to the comprehensibility or beauty of his prose.
McCarthy’s still brilliant, though, because his prose is artful enough to overcome that. But he’s brilliant despite the lack of [del]proper[/del] standard punctuation, not because of it.
Agree completely with this. I’m a McCarthy fan, but I find his eccentric punctuation a needless annoyance that adds nothing worthwhile to the writing. Blood Meridian is probably my favorite, as well; the one misstep IMO was The Road, which I thought suffered from a Hollywood ending (the deus ex machina of the sole other survivors who weren’t psychopaths rescuing the boy) when the rest of the book led me to believe the conclusion would maintain the tone of the first 3/4. Other than that. I think he’s worthy of accolades.
Solution to the lack of apostrophes - Audiobook
If it calls a attention to itself, then how is it that multiple people in this thread have said they’ve read entire novels without noticing it?
Just as many have said they do notice it.
Because something that draws attention to itself either does so with every single reader, or with no readers. There’s no in between state. Right?
Look, I love McCarthy, I love his style, and I found the apostrophe thing very distracting at first, along with other things he does like dialog in Spanish with no translations. But adjusting to it was part of the process of getting into the McCarthy groove for me, and once I did, I really liked being there.
There are many possible responses to his quirks. Some people don’t notice them. Some people notice them and loathe them. Some people notice them and like them. I’m in the last camp, but we have folks from the others in this thread.
The significant question, I think, is whether there’s any point to his abjuration of apostrophes etc. I think there is, although I’m not sure I can explain it; I do think his writing would be less compelling if he changed this style.
Well, clearly they disagree with me. But such only bothers me when the person disagreeing with me has a loaded gun aimed at me, I do not have such a weapon aimed at him, and the disagreement is over my bodily integrity and/or wallet. 
And, of course, since two or three persons in the thread have complained about the lack of punctuation in McCarthy, they disagree with you on the issue. It’s as if neither of us is infallible.
Different things affect different persons differently. I adore reading poetry, and Emily Dickinson is one of my favorite poets; her idiosyncratic punctuation doesn’t bother me a bit. It adds to the experience, in fact; reading this
[QUOTE=a brilliant woman who’s been dead for about a hundred & forty years, so I’m pretty sure it’s out of copyright]
I heard a Fly buzz – when I died –
The Stillness in the Room
Was like the Stillness in the Air –
Between the Heaves of Storm –
The Eyes around – had wrung them dry –
And Breaths were gathering firm
For that last Onset – when the King
Be witnessed – in the Room –
I willed my Keepsakes – Signed away
What portions of me be
Assignable – and then it was
There interposed a Fly –
With Blue – uncertain stumbling Buzz –
Between the light – and me –
And then the Windows failed – and then
I could not see to see –
[/QUOTE]
with the punctuation and capitalization “cleaned up” as some editors as wont to do, seems unnatural to me. I hate the altered version. Yet some persons who love poetry and love Dickinson prefer to read the other. Similarly, while I like The Road, my enjoyment of it is reduced by the McCarthy’s idiosyncrasies, which frankly seem self-indulgent frippery. I put up with it 'cause the dude’s a fracking genius, but it keeps him out of my top-five-writers list.
The Pedants’ Manifesto (to which I am signatory) requires that I point out that you mean its contractions. Nothing personal. I never should have signed that fricking manifesto, but there was a girl involved.
I can’t believe I did that. It’s one of my peeves when other people do it. If I ever write “alot” as one word, please shoot me.
Part of the message I got from The Road was that the father was actually paranoid beyond what was reasonable. I understand that sounds a bit crazy, considering all the horrors seen in that world, but there are several points throughout the book where we’re sort of forced to ask whether the father or the son is right in how paranoid/leery of other people they are being.
The fact that the boy ends up with another family of “non-cannibals” suggests that while the father’s paranoia most certainly kept them alive it also possibly kept them segregated from others like them (who we see in the end certainly exist.)
Given the context, I was sure it was on purpose. You shoulda just said woosh.
For myself, I wonder whether my appreciation for e.e. cummings ties into my Cormac love. It may be that both authors’ weird punctuation slows me down, and that’s a good thing: the amount of decoding I need to do keeps me from glossing over some of the turns of phrase, or something like that. I dunno.
You’re right, pretention does not really work here. Let’s remove that from the discussion. The problem is actually not so much that he’s pretending to literary brillance through (not so) clever removals of apostrophes, rather the problem is that it’s either meaningless or badly done: meaningless, because he’s doing it in all his books, and unless he’s a very monothematic writer, it’s hardly possible that it’s a stylistic choice as much as an inability to actually alter his style.
And it’s bad, because if it’s supposed, as you say, to emphasize his “hardscrabble” protagonists, I don’t see how you can defend it on this ground when the rest of his style wavers so heavily between Hemingway-esque parataxis and late Romantic effusion. Here’s a quote from Blood Meridian ((sorry, can’t tell the page, it’s a PDF I used in lieu of typing it all up myself):
They ate and moved on, leaving the fire on the ground behind them, and as they rode up into the mountains this fire seemed to become altered of its location, now here, now there, drawing away, or shifting unaccountably along the flank of their movement. Like some ignis fatuus belated upon the road behind them which all could see and of which none spoke. For this will to deceive that is in things luminous may manifest itself likewise in retrospect and so by sleight of some fixed part of a journey already accomplished may also post men to fraudulent destinies.
If the lack of apostrophes and other stylistics that we’ve talked about indicate “hardscrabble people,” then one might expect the narrative to adhere to this general notion in its stylistics overall: but here, you have “ignis fatuus”, “things luminous,” and the entirety of the diction. This happens all the time in Blood Meridian, and becomes especially annoying when the shift is between the banal observations of the Kid, for example, which suddenly get turned into lyrical effusion on a whim.
I think the evidence points pretty clearly to this play with apostrophes etc. being an affectation with no real merit, which makes it, literally, a bad choice.
Oh, and Skald: Dickinson is actually one of the most heavily copyrighted (Link), sadly enough. Harvard UP sits on those re-print rights like a (gentle, I have no beef with HUP) vulture…
Note the difference. I’m saying it appeals to me and works for me. You’re saying it’s meaningless and bad. You’re being far too objective about the aesthetic.
Hhhm. First, no, you did not say “it appeals to you and works for you,” you said it was a stylistic device which was successful at relating a certain larger concept of the work and, as such, was justified.
Second, I thought we are arguing on that basis, not on the assumption that works of art are a free for all and all equally good, well-crafted and successful, as long as someone says they are. I don’t suppose that that’s a great basis for having more of a discussion than “no it’s not/yes it is”…
The first time I read anything of his it was All The Pretty Horses, and I found his style distracting at first, and then I about lost it when he started writing huge swaths in Spanish (which I don’t understand at all) but I hung on and got to the end of the book and was glad that I did because that is one of the best payoffs ever.
I decided to try that same book again about three months later and it dawned on me that it wasn’t his writing that was screwing me up, it was my reading. I had the same idea when I was slogging through Trainspotting and American Psycho - two other books that I initially struggled with until I was able to adapt my reading style to the writers style.
When I was in high school I took a speed reading class and one of the things that they taught was to not focus on individual words but to try and read whole sentences at a time and get a feel for what’s being presented instead of a literal interpretation of every single word. Now by doing that same thing with McCarthy (just not at warp speed) I was able to get the setting and feeling of every single scene without needlessly sperging out over grammar and punctuation - which allows him to set a very different pace in his writing than anyone else that I’ve ever read, there’s a panic and desperation to what he can do that I’ve never experienced before. He also uses strong and direct words that can cause a visceral reaction to let you know how the tone changes without going on and on about it like a Stephen King would.
It’s a sparse style, but it’s evocative, it’s hard in a way that nobody else has ever done hard. You get bits and pieces of things…food, place, danger that really flows with your imagination and is really close to the way that people think and process information on their own. Once I learned how to read him, I was blown away by his writing. The man is absolutely a genius.
I’m sorry but I have demobbed my battalions of iniquity. Perhaps LHoD can help you.