Immediately remembered an old thread ;-)
http://forum.thefreedictionary.com/postst8867_What-is-the-Greatest-Literary-Achievement-in---.aspx

I'm not a great fan, but I think he stretches the grammar rules just like any good author is supposed to do.
Language is a tool.

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I don't know half of you half as well as I should like; and I like less than half of you half as well as you deserve.

It's interesting, because Cormac McCarthy wrote a book about the fall of civilization, law, and order. Now, I don't know about everyone else here, but I personally believe that the reason he had almost no punctuation is because of the topic of his book. In order to emphasize the theme of the fall of civilization, law, and order, he almost completely left out punctuation. Hope that helped.

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"Unless someone cares a whole lot about something, nothing is going to change. It's not." - Dr. Seuss

Very true Geeman. Going back to his lack of punctuation. I found it strange at first, but then got into his style and it did not bother me. In fact I felt, given the story,it had force.

I will look out for other books by him.

Does he always use the style of lack of punctuation or is this a one-off?

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It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it. Aristotle

I'm constantly on the lookout for special authors or outstanding novels. I've never heard of Cormac McCarthy, so I had a look at Wikipedia and saw they have a long list of the awards the author got and he is named beside authors such as Thomas Pynchon, and is even named as a candidate for the Nobel prize of literature just as Thomas Pynchon.

So I think I have to put McCarthy on my list of authors to read, especially as I like SF and The Road seems to belong to the SF genre.

I have read Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow - a novel of a thousand pages - that you can't stop reading. The setting is Germany after the end of WWII and the run of Americans and Russians to get at the German scientists and inventions in the field of war technology. But it's a lot more than that - it's an overwhelming picture of a situation in Europe with an astonishing wealth of information - I have read things about German war industry I've never heard of.
And Pynchon's mastery of language, style and technique is awe-inspiring. One of those books of which few are produced in a century.

Cormac McCarthy is most definitely worth reading and I like his style very much. But I see nobody's mentioned his novel "All the Pretty Horses" which was very big in the early nineties, and was the novel that first brought him to my attention, probably alongside most Brits. It was also made into a film, as was "The Road". However, I'd be hard pressed to find any film as good as the book, although Road and No Country were very good indeed.

As for "Gravity's Rainbow", that was almost a cult book of the 70s. Still on my bookshelf. Maybe I'll get it out again. There's just so much good literature now however, so many new writers. Gone are the days when you'd find an author you liked and just read everything they'd written. The Man Booker prize is a great source if you're looking.

All the Pretty Horses, a cowboy story, published in 1992. The central figure is young John Grady Cole, who travels with his friend southward into Mexico, with adventurous situations during which he lands in prison. There is a love affair - but it comes to nothing. After getting out of prison Cole begins his travel home.

The story doesn't seem so extraordinary, nevertheless it was a bestseller and the novel was made into a film.

All the pretty Horses

Well I will read it sometime later, keeping these reviews in mind:


"I've always appreciated McCarthy's writing style and All The Pretty Horses is him at his best.
The scene you laid out tells about a man trying to come to grips with the death of another and the first paragraph sets the scene of the man laying in state. The predecessor to the modern "living room" came from the now-antiquated tradition of having a person who had recently died lie in their casket in the parlor for family & well-wishers to come and pay their last respects before the burial. Remember- this is in the days before highways and fast cars... many times it would take days for everyone to arrive.

The man is noticing that the mortician didn't know the dead man, saying that the hair was combed irregularly. The rest of the first paragraph helps to try and transport the reader to the same mood as the main character and to be able to visualize exactly what's going on...

Once he's seen the deceased, he decides to go outside and it's right at dawn, so you have the slight light beginning on the eastern horizon described. It's still dark enough, though, that he can see the spotlight of the approaching train from far away. Remember also, most of the mid-west during this era was grazing land, so next to the tracks they'd run a fence to keep livestock off... these fences would attract brambles & bushes. The light of the fast moving train on these vertical posts and bushes as they grow looming from the sheer darkness and then as they grow most bright, extinguish suddenly (note a similarity with the death theme?)
Hope this gets you on the right path. Good luck!!"



"I admit that I found this style of writing difficult to begin with, but after the first ten or fifteen pages I became familiar with it, and the rest of the novel posed no significant difficulties. In fact, I was so immersed in the narrative that I began to wonder why writers bother using speech marks at all…"

It's pretty much a standard for him.

One of the 20th century trends in poetry is what sometimes gets called "prosety" meaning that it's really just prose put into stanza format and then read with all the gravitas that one normally reserves for more serious literature.

McCarthy is the opposite of that. His work is poetry put into paragraphs. I posit his parsimonious punctuation is punctilious and purposeful.... That is, he's hinting that he knows very well that his "prose" is of a quality beyond that of other mortals. His lack of quotation marks, for example, is a hint that he's not just giving a dialogue; it's a duet.

He's not the first guy to do that, of course. William Carlos Williams did it with great effect--and he was also a poet of some renown.

Using punctuation the way McCarthy does, and the way WCW did, forces the reader to pay a bit more attention than they are accustomed to because you have to check who is speaking at any given moment. In that sense, it might be a bit of a cheat. I wouldn't say that's ALL he's doing, though. Were McCarthy less of a wordsmith I'd give more weight to the possibility that he's "cheating" his prose. Were Dan Brown, Rawlings or any number of other prose authors to use the technique, it would be hamfisted and awkward. For McCarthy, it works.