I didn’t mind the style, but thought it was terribly written from a plot/story perspective, especially the ending, which made no sense.
Yeah - I was not a fan of The Road or No Country. (Never finished The Crossing, either.) Which is weird, because those were when he became most popular.
(Really didn’t care for Blood Meridian either. Tho I have heard many people - mostly around here - profess their great fondness for that book.)
I agree with what was posted upthread. I generally do not appreciate authors who go out of their way to write in a difficult style. WTF is wrong w/ quotation marks?
Not to mention the content. I got halfway through The Road and said “I think I need to be depressed, or in the mood to get depressed, to finish this.”
Is Henry James’s style at all similar to Cormac McCarthy’s?
In the sense of having huge run-on sentences:
Fifty things came up as she stood there before him, some of them floating in from the past, others hovering with freshness: how she used to dodge the rotary movement made by his pince-nez while he always awkwardly, and kindly, and often funnily, talked—it had once hit her rather badly in the eye; how she used to pull down and straighten his waistcoat, making it set a little better, a thing of a sort her mother never did; how friendly and familiar she must have been with him for that, or else a forward little minx; how she felt almost capable of doing it again now, just to sound the right note, and how sure she was of the way he would take it if she did; how much nicer he had clearly been, all the while, poor dear man, than his wife and the court had made it possible for him publicly to appear; how much younger, too, he now looked, in spite of his rather melancholy, his mildly jaundiced, humorously determined sallowness and his careless assumption, everywhere, from his forehead to his exposed and relaxed blue socks, almost sky-blue, as in past days, of creases and folds and furrows that would have been perhaps tragic if they hadn’t seemed rather to show, like his whimsical black eyebrows, the vague, interrogative arch.
In a context like that, it makes sense to me, trying to capture that feeling of fifty things coming to the character at once as he stood there. Long sentences tend to give me a sense of urgency, unease, stream-of-consciousness. Not necessarily all feelings in all contexts, but those are some that come through from having long sentences. Or they could indicate tediousness and routine. There’s many reasons for them. And sometimes, they’re just a plain ol’ slog. But after reading so much these days in peppy pointed prose with paragraph breaks after seemingly every second sentence, I enjoy a little literaryy lavishness.
I read The Road and Blood Meridian for book club.
Cormac is an acquired taste. I appreciate many like him, I just do not see the things fans are talking about in the books I just read. I didn’t get the same reactions and was held up with other details I guess were included only for setting or mood. It’s all dark, depressing and violent. The mystery he likes to explore is the reason for suffering or finding any meaningful purpose in a grotesque life. Not one character of his have I ever pondered later, there is no complexity of behavior, people are just animals. Great. His writing feels like walking around a hot hay barn, unrefined and raw but an intense experience. I think that later part is the attraction, like a modern day Bukowski.
I could go into plenty of specifics but as a data point I’ve just come to accept he isn’t an author for me.
And he may not be for the OP.
I consider his style pretentious and off-putting. I favor conventions (quotation marks, punctuation, and so on) to be conveniences for the reader, so he may focus on the content, and unconventional uses of such things to be ways an author has of drawing attention to his particular style. I’ve tried reading his stuff but gave up after a short time.
I found this to be very much the case for Blood Meridian. He thinks he’s quite clever and he wants you to know it. I find that this lands especially poorly for white male authors, especially as their works age long enough for society to change its mind about what’s clever. What’s quirky today is seen as affected and obnoxious tomorrow. See also: Infinite Jest. Great read in 1999, not so much now.
I didn’t feel the same about The Road, although with it being a post-apocalyptic novel, I let a lot of sins slide without even noting them, because that’s a favorite genre of mine.
I can see that, “What Cormac, you think you’re e.e. cummings and can do whatever you want with grammar and punctuation. Fuck you, pal.”
I see it as raw, “Oh Cormac, I see you couldn’t be asked to run it through the spell checker like my 5th grade son who also slacks on his homework.”
In my experience, really good writing (and music, and food) make a positive impact right away.
You may think, “hmm, that’s got something” and only later fully get into it.
But if significant elements are poorly done, distracting and obnoxious, I’m not going to bother with a work (or dish) in hopes that it will later become an “acquired taste”. 
I don’t mind lyrical or convoluted language.
For exactly this reason, I did not enjoy it or let his sins slide.
Lack of punctuation eventually didn’t bother me, but in Blood Meridian he has A LOT of untranslated Spanish. Not like an aside, but full conversations. I thought that was a bit much.
But he writes things like:
A legion of horribles, hundreds in number, half naked or clad in costumes attic or biblical or wardrobed out of a fevered dream with the skins of animals and silk finery and pieces of uniform still tracked with the blood of prior owners, coats of slain dragoons, frogged and braided cavalry jackets, one in a stovepipe hat and one with an umbrella and one in white stockings and a bloodstained wedding veil and some in headgear or cranefeathers or rawhide helmets that bore the horns of bull or buffalo and one in a pigeontailed coat worn backwards and otherwise naked and one in the armor of a Spanish conquistador, the breastplate and pauldrons deeply dented with old blows of mace or sabre done in another country by men whose very bones were dust and many with their braids spliced up with the hair of other beasts until they trailed upon the ground and their horses’ ears and tails worked with bits of brightly colored cloth and one whose horse’s whole head was painted crimson red and all the horsemen’s faces gaudy and grotesque with daubings like a company of mounted clowns, death hilarious, all howling in a barbarous tongue and riding down upon them like a horde from a hell more horrible yet than the brimstone land of Christian reckoning, screeching and yammering and clothed in smoke like those vaporous beings in regions beyond right knowing where the eye wanders and the lip jerks and drools.
and
The truth about the world, he said, is that anything is possible. Had you not seen it all from birth and thereby bled it of its strangeness it would appear to you for what it is, a hat trick in a medicine show, a fevered dream, a trance bepopulate with chimeras having neither analogue nor precedent, an itinerant carnival, a migratory tentshow whose ultimate destination after many a pitch in many a mudded field is unspeakable and calamitous beyond reckoning.
so I can forgive it.
Well I finished The Road. I would give it a 7.5-8/10.
I did adjust to the style and was absorbed by the atmosphere. Some passages felt like entire pages were edited out because events were so abrupt.
“The man and boy were eating beans for breakfast. Then they dragged the shopping cart onto the road. Near dinner time the man shot a nomad who sliced his shins with a lawnmower blade then tried to steal the boys shoes. They slept to the sounds of the ocean and awoke the next morning”
The only part of the story that really started to drag on was scavenging the stuff off the boat. I kept waiting for something to happen but it never really did.
The ending was very abrupt and unexpected. I didn’t realize I was so close to the end, the big event happens, there are like 3 paragraphs about what happens after the event. The end.
It was roughly a 300page book but probably more like 250 by normal standards because of how the dialog was presented.
I know The Road is not the first story of its type but The Last of Us came out in 2013 and now feels like it copied huge chunks of The Road with the biggest difference being Joel was a reluctant companion in TLoU and the man was the boys father in The Road.
Agreed, it sounds like he got some feedback to be more crisp, and took it on with a vengeance.
Once upon a time, I was what you might call a strongly-opinionated prescriptivist. But I’ve let all that go and find that I really enjoy McCarthy’s writing.
But maybe even better, possibly the best thing I’ve seen on the internet, is the ‘Yelping with Cormac’ blog. Someone is writing Yelp reviews in his style and the incredibleness of it all overwhelms me. It’s easily on par with Werner Herzog’s (actual Werner) reviews of Trader Joe’s.
Union Square - San Francisco, CA
Cormac M. | Author | Lost in the chaparral, NM
Two stars.
Given the way my uncle died havin a drink directly after his funeral just didnt seem right so I went for a walk instead. One of them downtowns where all there is is stores. Came across a store was a big cube. Two stories tall and all silver. There was folks outside just standin there. Line stretchin round the block. Maybe a hundred people. I saw a man who’d brought his own chair. He had a shirt on with the same logo as the one on the store. I figured he worked there so I asked him what the line was all about. What were all these people waitin for. He told me it was for a apple phone or some such. I said dont these folks have telephones already? He told me they all had apple phones but it was the older one. I asked him what would happen to the old apple phones. He told me about a fella named Craig had a list and everbody sold their old telephones on it. A telephone sellin list.
Well I told him that all made about as much sense as a horse with two heads and he laughed like that was the funniest thing he ever did hear. Said he was goin to twinkle it. I left before he said anythin else that didnt make no sense and I went to the nearest bar and ordered a double whiskey and sat there drinkin it. I guess I sat there for a long time. Wonderin if when Rome was fallin all the Romans was standin in line waitin to get that new chariot or the like. The barbarians at the gates and them just standin there waitin.
The Road has stuck with me in the years since I’ve read it. Definitely worth finishing, IMO.
Did you read the entire book in a bit over 24 hours?
I’ve not a slow reader, but I’ve never been able to sit down and rip through books like this (I have friends that can devour them as well). I also cannot binge watch any TV shows. One episode per night is enough for me, occasionally my spouse can talk me into a second.
Im shocked to say that I did and I’m generally a slow reader. I think what made this one extremely fast for me was that there are not a bunch of characters or locations to keep track of. Literally only 2 for 95% of the story and neither of them have names. Once i adjusted to his style it actually turned into a really simple read.
In hindsight i was very premature starting this thread because within an hour of posting it i was good to go.
I was visiting my inlaws with my wife (then girlfriend) way back when The Road first came out, and I saw it and picked it up to read a bit before bed.
I finally fell asleep after 2 am, having devoured it.
It’s the only truly post-apocalyptic book I think I’ve read. It hit me like a kidney punch.
That, and Blood Meridian, are my two favorite books by him, of the five or six that I’ve read. At his best, reading his books is like falling headfirst into someone else’s nightmare, and his peculiar style adds to the sense of unease and surreality. I get why he doesn’t work for everyone else, but when he’s on, I think he’s amazing.