5 ms·
I read post after post of gushing praise for Cormac McCarthy, so I bought The Road on Kindle a few years ago. A few pages in I wished I had bought a hardcopy --
by rspeele 4y ago
I read post after post of gushing praise for Cormac McCarthy, so I bought The Road on Kindle a few years ago. A few pages in I wished I had bought a hardcopy -- the e-book seemed to have been badly OCRed, and was missing most of the punctuation and a few of the spaces.
Another few pages later, I looked up whether other people had the same problem. I was surprised to find that there was no issue with the Kindle copy. That's just how McCarthy writes. Although it's no secret, most people don't mention it -- somehow it had never come up in any of the glowing reviews I'd read. It's not been mentioned in any of the 30-ish comments in this thread so far.
Now, it's a little thing, so it shouldn't bug me so much. But it did.
When I read a work of fiction, I do not want to be thinking about the writer or his stylistic choices. My brain's little imagination engine should be cranking away, running the projector, imagining the characters speaking, moving, thinking, and feeling. Words from the page flow into it like fuel.
With McCarthy, the engine would snarl and grind every time I hit some ugly looking naked contraction like "werent" or "didnt", or a bit of unquoted dialog that I didn't realize was a character speaking until the end of the sentence. The projector skipped a frame, and for that moment I was no longer thinking of "The Man" or "The Boy", but involuntarily thinking of "The Author" and his smug need to be special, to remind me of his presence, to prove that the rules of language are beneath him.
Ironically, the justifications I have read for this style are that it's supposed to flow more naturally. Apparently punctuation is unnecessary, baroque, and only slows the reader down. Perhaps many readers agree with that, but I don't. I've spent most of my life reading English that was written according to standard rules of grammar, so it parses readily. McCarthy's "house rules" grammar does not.
That all leaves a question. I finished The Road and found it to be OK. Would I have loved it, had it been written in conventional style? Still probably not. But at least I wouldn't be annoyed at the author.
- mellosouls 4y agoYour "meta" criticism is fair, and it's something I would normally bridle at as well, but in McCarthy's case, it just has me hooked, though it takes a while to get into the flow. In a less artificial way you could say the same about any writing that reads as non-standard, for instance it took me a long time to appreciate Shakespeare coming from a familiarity with modern English, but eventually I got it and it was life-changing. Obviously in McCarthy's case there is a "problem" of intent, but I think if you can replace your suspicion with an assumption of artistic good faith, you may be able to relax into the flow more easily.
- rspeele 4y agoI believe you hit the nail on the head with the whole problem of intent thing. I can enjoy reading antiquated works written in antiquated style, like Shakespeare, because I know that they were made in an effective way for the time. I get over it, I get used to it, I move on. Kind of similar to watching a black & white movie, for example Dr. Strangelove is one of my favorite movies of all time and it doesn't need to be colorized or remade. Even a movie made in B&W after color became standard, like Schindler's List, I can understand the effect the creators are going for. But if somebody came out with a movie where they did something wacky like invert all the colors for no apparent reason, I would find it annoying and distracting. It does lead to a fun hypothetical. If Cormac McCarthy was a dead author from the nth century, and his writing style was the way everybody wrote in the nth century, I wouldn't hold it against him. I would probably be able to get used to it, and quit muttering "this son of a bitch" aloud every two pages. Although I still doubt I would be a huge fan, I likely would be more appreciative of his work than I am now. But it would be exactly the same work, the same letters on the page. Why should the context change make any difference at all? So maybe that just makes me petty. But even if so, I can't argue myself into enjoying something I don't enjoy.
- piyh 4y agoThe thing that stuck with me after reading The Road was the crushing sadness. I finished the book on my honeymoon at midnight and cried for a long time.
- jasonladuke0311 4y agoYou should avoid House of Leaves at all costs.
- asdfqweqe12 4y agoYou got filtered.
- krelian 4y ago>When I read a work of fiction, I do not want to be thinking about the writer or his stylistic choices. That's the difference between "reading fiction" and literature: text as a work of art. Great authors are present through their style. How they tell their story is an important as what the story is about. Attributing it to the author being smug is as ridiculous as saying that Picasso should paint his objects in a way that conforms more to how they look in real life.
- rspeele 4y agoYou can hav a grat, distinctiv writing styl without distracting th radr with what look lik constant rrors. Rmoving parts of th languag that you find unncssary just fls lik bing cutsy for its own sak. I don't gt what it adds to th rading xprinc. Similar to how my rmoval of th most common lttr from this post dosn't simplify it, it maks it annoying to rad. But I admit I am a lowbrow typ and I don't work vry hard to lik things that I don't lik at first tast.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]