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This is from James Wood's essay on 'The Road.' I edited it a bit for the main points, but it's wonderful summary of his style, just laid out plain and simple.
>McCarthy’s prose combines three registers ... He has his painstaking minimalism ...
>The second register is the one familiar to readers of 'Blood Meridian' or 'Suttree', and again seems somewhat Conradian. Hard detail and a fine eye is combined with exquisite, gnarled, slightly antique (and even slightly clumsy or heavy) lyricism. It ought not to work, and sometimes it does not. But many of its effects are beautiful--and not only beautiful, but powerfully efficient as poetry.
>When McCarthy is writing at his best, he does indeed belong in the company of the American masters. In his best pages one can hear Melville and Lawrence, Conrad and Hardy.
>Yet McCarthy’s third register is more problematic. He is an American ham. When critics laud him for being biblical, they are hearing sounds that are more often than not merely antiquarian, a kind of vatic histrionic groping, in which the prose plumes itself up and flourishes an ostentatiously obsolete lexicon. Blood Fustian, this style might be called.
>Still, as in Hardy and Conrad, who were both at times terrible writers, there is a sincerity, an earnestness, in McCarthy’s vaudevillian mode that softens the clumsiness, and turns the prose into a kind of awkward secret message from the writer.
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>>9789149
Damn. That is the best write-up I've ever read I think. Bleeding accurate, critical, and above all honest.
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>>9789149
That was pretty damn stupid.
>When critics laud him for being biblical, they are hearing sounds that are more often than not merely antiquarian, a kind of vatic histrionic groping, in which the prose plumes itself up and flourishes an ostentatiously obsolete lexicon. Blood Fustian, this style might be called
I love it how he just makes a baseless assumption that he knows the minds of other critics.
>If I don't like it, other critics like it for the reasons I don't
>I am the supreme contrarian
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>>9789362
I don't think he's necessarily dispraising him there.
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>>9789369
>He is an American ham
That doesn't sound too promising considering McCarthy is a "serious" writer.
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>>9789362
Dude, relax. I love Wood (no homo) because he reads everyone--everyone--like they're in a freshman creative writing workshop. He'll call out individual paragraphs, sentences, fragments, or even single words as excellent or poor. All he's doing here is breaking down McCarthy's style and pointing out his strongest and weakest points. Wood likes stylistic consistency, what comes natural to the voice being created, what flows easily and honestly from that. Sometimes McCarthy reaches too far. I think we all know what he means by "Blood Fustian."
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>>9789149
OOH! piece of candy
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James Wood is a great writer on literature, he has helped me see things that I never would have otherwise. However, it must be terribly sad to be James Wood. His vision of literature is stuck in the 1800s and if everyone thought like him there is no doubt that the varieties of beauties that have been created in books in the past 100 years would be reduced to dusty attics. He has an incredibly sharp and analytical mind but there is zero evidence of an imaginative bone in his body.
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>>9790993
>James Wood, and he's far from alone in that regard, sees some low points in corncobbers' midcultish bric-a-brac.
>Uuugh, he juz liek, duzn't understaaaand maaaaan.
McCarthy fans, everyone.
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>>9791043
hmm i think you need to reread what I said because it doesn't appear like you even responded to my comment. Maybe you misquoted me?
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