3 ms·

I read this few months ago. Hated it. First time I can say that about a McCarthy novel. What about it did you think was good? Sorry if that sounds argumentative

• brudgers 9y ago
  It is perhaps the only book I've ever read where my opinion changed significantly within a few hours of reading it. It was about 10 or 11 at night and I'd just knocked out the last 1/4 or third of it, and I was a bit indifferent. I'd been reading it, and sort of thinking about subsequent novels, e.g. Chigurh from No Country for Old Men and The Road's depravities and Blood Meridian's gun violence. But I was sort of left hanging by the references to 'bluebills' and 'whitecaps' that appear in the last part. And so I googled them up and spent the hour or two after I finished the novel reading various results. And for me, it made the work pop with a "Wow!" Of course, as a McCarthy fan I'm probably predisposed to such a response. Having lived in the south, it sort of hit closer to home than it might have for someone else. It took me longer to appreciate McCarthy's earlier works because the frontier in the American east is less an ordinary idea than the frontier in the American west. But those parts of Tennessee where wild an unsettled just fifty years before the American West was mostly settled.