Good suggestion about the asterisk. Maybe italics?

McCarthy’s other book are all relatively normal punctuation wise. One person I talked to said these literary tricks made the book feel like a poem, to which I responded: Even poems have punctuation…

But I say McCarthy is highly unlikely to have a legitimate reason to leave out the commas and mess with the structure. He did it in order to give the literary world a secret handsahke that he was a ‘nonconformist’ and ‘innovative’ writer of literature, rather than a money-grubbing genre writer like the rest of us.

The irony, of course, is that he will thereby make bucketloads of money.

PS to Jordan. It may just be my contacts getting blurry, but I missed your asterisk on the Neverending Story and so sat there trying to figure out how the last bit fit logically with the subject before. Maybe making your footnote a smaller font would help?

I bought The Road well before it was recommended by Oprah, but I still haven’t gotten around to reading it. Now I’m putting it at the top of the list. Not because of Oprah.

I love him, but I’m going to wait a while before checking his other stuff out.

Andrew J. Offutt also wrote 6 or 7 Cormac books back in the 70s. Some of them were good, others not, but all entertaining to some degree or other. I’ve only read 2 of them from front to back, but I’ve got the others and have perused them a bit. Between Howard and Offutt, you’ll definitely learn a lot about pre-Christian Ireland.

But honestly — and I’ve made this point elsewhere — leaving out punctuation and indulging in such stylistic froo-frah accomplished nothing but pointing out their absence. Because McCarthy left them out, I spent part of the time I should have been absorbed in his story wondering why the hell he did that. If he had used punctuation the way we’re all taught to use it, I wouldn’t have thought about punctuation AT ALL while I was reading his gripping book.

In my opinion, “The Road” is a worthwhile book despite the literary pecadillos. Why McCarthy chose to risk making readers stumble over something as silly as puncuation — heck I dunno. You’d have to ask him.

– Steve

Howard? The only thing I’ve read by him is Conan. Are the Irish Warrior stories any good?

James,

The Road is excellent writing. I’m hooked. My objection was that the lack of punctuation adds nothing to the story and feels like a cheap ploy to appear literary. You should read it simply because it’s sci-fi and Oprah chose it for her book club (which makes you an instant millionaire).

Steve,

Totally agree with your comment. Well said. Why in the heck do you think he chose not to use commas though?

– Steve

As to this Cormac McCarthy: I won’t read it. If what you say is true, then it sounds like a terrible endeavor. I would rather read Jane Austen.