Hey guys,

Music to write by: “Love in an Elevator“ by Aerosmith

So I finished The Neverending Story by Michael Ende*in record time on my vacation and found myself in O’Hare airport with nothing to read. The only thing even faintly sci-fi in the pitiful bookstore I visited was Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.

I picked it up because it’s the story of a man and a boy walking across a post-apocalyptic America in search of the world’s last canned food. Two things about this appealed to me. Another member of my writing group, Andrew LeBlanc, is writing a screenplay called “High Nuclear Noon on the Radiation Range” which is a similar and yet disturbingly different idea, and Opera actually picked it for her book club. Which, in theory, should give the rest of us genre writers hope.

It doesn’t.

Judging from the writing, McCarthy is one of those pretentious literary authors who believe that the english language is their bitch. Commas have been deemed irrevalent. Contractions like can’t and don’t have had their apostrophes amputated (but, interestingly enough, “it’s” still has its punctuation (I’ll riff on this in the comments if anyone prompts me)). Mercifully, dialogue is given its own line (but no quotes). Even the lowly sentence isn’t spared. Check out some of these gems…

Deep stone flutes where the water dripped and sang.

Until they stood in a great stone room where lay a black and ancient lake.

Its bowels, its beating heart. (okay, I lied, there are SOME commas but they’re as rare as a virgin on Hollywood Boulevard.)

Now, I’m an English minor, and thus, I was forced to read such literary excrement as James Joyce’s Potrait of an Artist as a Young Man, and To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf. Normal humans don’t like these books. In fact, both were self-published. Even my lit prof, whose job it is to like Joyce, claimed that Joyce’s third book, Finnegan’s Wake was basically unreadable. You need to reach a certain level of pretentiousness before you can get into these books, and thankfully I haven’t hit that point yet.

Now, I’m not saying that McCarthy’s book is horrible. It’s a pain to read because of the above issues, but it’s actually quite well written. My objection is that he’s trying to artificially make his book literary by using these parlour tricks. He’s saying, “Look at me, I’m so good that you can like the book even though it’s a pain to read.” There’s a certain segment of the literary community that will like the book simply because of these parlour tricks. In my opinion, the book gained absolutely nothing from these stylistic indulgences.

I’ve said this before about Joyce’s work, and I’ll say it again about McCarthy’s. A great writer should be able to write masterpieces without resorting to Stupid Pet Tricks. Sure, break the rules if it adds to the work. In The Road, they don’t. McCarthy’s tactic is a cheap trick to get attention from the literary community. Unfortunately, it seems to have worked.

*The Neverending Story, the novel, is much, much better than the movie. The movie only covered the first third of the book, and the rest of the book is truly awesome. For instance, Bastain ends up raising an army and attacking Atreyu. The Ivory Tower is burnt to the ground. Many of the books true life lessons are contained in the last part of the book. It’s for kids for sure, but adults will love it. Highly suggested reading.