McCarthy Appreciation

How Intriguing

Maximalism?? Pretentious?? What the fuck did you even read??

Love that book. Most brutal shit I've ever read out in such beautiful language.
There was an effort by a number of artists to illustrate something from every page, but they either lost interest or I just can't find the site anymore.

The Crossing is outstanding. I tend to enjoy it more than ATPH as I find Billy Parnham to be a very compelling protagonist, specifically his relationship with Boyd. I have mixed feelings about Cities of the Plain as its main appeal is it being a sequel where John and Billy are brought together. The Crossing is very special, I adore the opening couple of pages.

>class and meter
Have you ever even opened Suttree? Read the first paragraph. Or how about Blood Meridian?

Huh, cool. I'll nab it from the library.
I honestly didn't find John Grady to be a very interesting protagonist. He's a stand up, respectable guy, but he seems very two dimensional.

I am about 3/4s through Blood Meridian, I do not get what people see in it. It has some nice imagery and the odd nice line, but that is about it. It reads like someone sat down with a thesaurus and decided to rewrite Leviticus with a nothing special cowboy story thrown in, just vulgar, the contrast is nice, but over used, at this point it is just more of the same. Not completely sure I will finish it, but I have not given up on it yet. It is very 80s action flick.

It has given me a very strong aversion to "and," I no longer can use it in writing,

Blood Meridian could have been a 50 page novella

>aversion to "and"
Sounds about right. But it's like a outlaw Josey Wales coming of age story, so it's based.

It takes me a bit to understand what McCarthy is trying to say in Blood Meridian. Am I dumb or does the pseudo-Biblical prose take a while to adjust to?

>pseudo-Biblical prose
He really failed here, it is like a high schoolers mockery of biblical prose, add in the gore and it seems even more like he was writing for angsty teenage boys.

I had to do some rereading in the beginning, took awhile to settle into the style.

is there a chart for him, if not where should i start?

Ah, that makes me feel better. Thanks user. I suppose I found the action in the beginning somewhat clunky at the beginning with his prose. Like when the kid and Toadvine initially met and fought, I didn't understand why a third man came and knocked the kid out. And then they suddenly got all buddy-buddy and I had to re-read to make sure I didn't miss anything. I was a bit strange. I guess that's the point though.

I loved Blood Meridian but found The Road boring. What should I read next? Suttree?

Stuttree is his best book everything else isn’t even on the same level. If you haven’t read it do yourself a favor and do it

Currently going through all of them. Just finished All the Pretty Horses and started The Crossing. I was hoping John Grady would be the protagonist in The Crossing but it seems to be all new characters. Blood Meridian is still my favorite. I spent weeks trying to figure out the ending and I still don't think I fully understand. Was the kid a pedo or what?

you're not a man

Shit opinion.
Yeah it takes a while to adjust to his prose but he succeeded in that style, not "failed" like that faggot suggested.

John Grady comes back for Cities of the Plain, but The Crossing is the best of the three, to be frank.

The Road is one of the tightest novels I've ever read. No idea what you read, user.

Excellent. I'm enjoying it so far. I don't know what that other guy was talking about; the way McCarthy describes the setting is like no other.

This. The Crossing is one of the most beautiful books I have ever read. The opening pages where he watches wolves play at night in the snow is amazing. Definitely one of my favorite McCarthy books.

>but he seems very two dimensional.
I understand what you mean, but I don't agree at all - because I think there is so much going on when things are NOT SAID in the novels.

Dumbest post this year, by far. What a massive, massive tool.

>T O R S I O N A L

I call it a highschooler mockery of biblical prose and I get edgy highschooler rebuttals. You are not succeeding in making your point.

Your moronic post doesn't deserve to be taken seriously.

And the highschool level arguments continue.

am reading suttree and it¨s really calm and melancholic ... also sometimes i twitch a little over how inflated (as mentioned) it is, but mostly it is really ... he's got apt and interesting metaphors and a really good atmosphere

Thriller writers know enough to save this kind of syntax for fast-moving scenes: "... and his shout of fear came as a bloody gurgle and he died, and Wolff felt nothing" (Ken Follett, The Key to Rebecca, 1980). In McCarthy's sentence the unpunctuated flow of words bears no relation to the slow, methodical nature of what is being described. And why repeat tortilla? When Hemingway wrote "small birds blew in the wind and the wind turned their feathers" ("In Another Country," 1927), he was, as David Lodge points out in The Art of Fiction (1992), creating two sharp images in the simplest way he could. The repetition of wind, in subtly different senses, heightens the immediacy of the referent while echoing other reminders of Milan's windiness in the fall. McCarthy's second tortilla, in contrast, is there, like the syntax, to draw attention to the writer himself. For all the sentence tells us, it might as well be this: "He ate the last of the eggs. He wiped the plate with the tortilla and ate it. He drank the last of the coffee and wiped his mouth. He looked up and thanked her." Had McCarthy written that, the critics would have taken him to task for his "workmanlike" prose. But the first version is no more informative or pleasing to the ear than the second, which can at least be read aloud in a natural fashion. (McCarthy is famously averse to public readings.) All the original does is say, "I express myself differently from you, therefore I am a Writer."

The same message is conveyed by the stern biblical tone that runs through all of McCarthy's recent novels. Parallelisms and pseudo-archaic formulations abound: "They caught up and set out each day in the dark before the day yet was and they ate cold meat and biscuit and made no fire"; "and they would always be so and never be otherwise"; "the captain wrote on nor did he look up"; "there rode no soul save he," and so forth.

The reader is meant to be carried along on the stream of language. In the New York Times review of The Crossing, Robert Hass praised the effect: "It is a matter of straight-on writing, a veering accumulation of compound sentences, stinginess with commas, and a witching repetition of words ... Once this style is established, firm, faintly hypnotic, the crispness and sinuousness of the sentences ... gather to a magic." The key word here is "accumulation." Like Proulx and so many others today, McCarthy relies more on barrages of hit-and-miss verbiage than on careful use of just the right words.

. In interviews he presents himself as a man's man with no time for pansified intellectuals—a literary version, if you will, of Dave Thomas, the smugly parochial old-timer in the Wendy's commercials. It would be both unfair and a little too charitable to suggest that this is just a pose. When McCarthy says of Marcel Proust and Henry James, "I don't understand them. To me, that's not literature," I have a sinking feeling he's telling the truth.

rape your food doesn't seem like a good idea

>hit-and-miss verbiage
Not every writer is a Flaubert.

No, you're just a faggot.