Last week I finished All the Pretty Horses, a novel by Cormac McCarthy. This is my third novel by this author. I have also read No Country for Old Men and The Road.
McCarthy has come up with some of the best lines I have ever read. In All the Pretty Horses, I stopped reading and actually looked for a pen when I came across, “He’d half meant to speak but those eyes had altered the world forever in the space of a heartbeat.” In The Road, describing a father and his young son surviving in post-apocalyptic American, he writes, “Then they set out along the blacktop in the gun metal light, shuffling through the ash, each the other’s world entire.” That line gives me chills every time I read it.
What amazes me most about McCarthy, and what I admire, is the courage of his style. He’s not big on punctuation. He uses periods—most of the time. Commas are kind of hit and miss, and he never uses quotation marks—ever. What’s real interesting is when he drops a period and forgets a capital letter at the same time. You don’t know where one sentence ends and the next one begins. But McCarthy’s prose is such that you can figure it out.
And he gets away with it. McCarthy tells such compelling stories that his readers forgive him for his style. He has won the National Book Award, the Pulitzer, and a host of other awards. His name and the Nobel Prize are often mentioned in the same sentence.
I am amazed that he found an editor who would publish him back in the late 50s.. (His first editor at Random House also was Faulkner’s editor. That explains everything.) His manuscripts would never make it through a critique group. People would go crazy.
Then I came across a blog post by Seth Godin (let me admit right here that I am not a big reader of Seth). He argues, “ … the contradiction (it seems) between Poke the Box, which argues that you must consistently ship innovations to the market (and frequently fail), and The Dip, [these are both books by Godin] which argues that quitting a project in the middle is dumb, that the real success comes after the quitters have left the building.”
On occasion you hear about writers who are working on an experimental novel (poking the box), but McCarthy started early and never quit (pushing through the dip). It takes a lot of courage. I only hope I have as much.
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