My Favorite Book, Part 20.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: some readers love Cormac McCarthy, and some readers hate Cormac McCarthy, and there are very few readers to be found in between.

He’s not a writer you read to “escape.” You know, those kinds of books you crack open and fall into and zone out and breeze through without working up a sweat or having to stop to catch your breath. Or think.

You have to pay attention when you read Cormac McCarthy. And even then, you’re apt to find yourself re-reading a passage here and there because something unexpected happened; a surprise you didn’t see coming but, on reflection, had to happen.

And there’s his style of writing. He isn’t big on quotation marks, so, again, you have to pay attention when he’s writing dialogue. But his vivid language, searing descriptions, complex characters, and stories where a lot happens below the surface will engage your mind and infiltrate your consciousness and never let go.

All the Pretty Horses is one of McCarthy’s masterpieces. It won the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award, among other honors. And it sold wagonloads of copies for years, and probably still does, which is a rare feat for a Western novel.

It inspired a Hollywood movie of the same name, which I did not see for years. Having read the book several times, instinct told me which aspects of the complex, interwoven stories movie cameras would focus on, turning the tale into something of a high-class soap opera. I was right. What a shame.

All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy deserved better. It’s a remarkable novel. I think I will now go and pull it off the shelf and read it again.

My Favorite Book, Part 5

Cormac McCarthy is, to say the least, a divisive author. I know many readers (and writers) who, like me, admire his books. And I know many equally capable readers and writers who do not like him, for a variety of reasons.

McCarthy has little respect for the conventions of punctuation. He’s big on ambiguity. He often circles around a scene and sneaks up on you rather than confronting you head-on. He is not easy.

But, to quote Kurt Vonnegut, another author I admire, “So it goes.”

Blood Meridian, Or, The Evening Redness in the West, is among my favorite books and my favorite by McCarthy. Professor, author, and literary critic Harold Bloom calls it “the ultimate Western, not to be surpassed.” This, despite the fact that he was so overwhelmed by the book’s violence he set it aside twice before finally finishing it.

And there’s no question it is a violent book. It’s based on history—the exploits of a band of murderous scalp hunters operating in the American Southwest and northern Mexico.

Whether it’s violence or just about anything else he’s writing about, McCarthy has a way of saying things that’s unsurpassed. His descriptions are so spare, yet vivid, they surprise you—forcing me, at least, to re-read passages for their beautiful language.

Bloom also has this to say about Blood Meridian: “The book’s magnificence—its language, landscape, persons, conceptions—at last transcends the violence, and converts goriness into terrifying art, an art comparable to Melville’s and to Faulkner’s.”

Not bad comparisons for a Western novel.

Lies They Tell Writers, Part 32: details, details, details.

Many writing instructors encourage, and many writers practice, descriptive writing rife with details. They’ll tell you descriptive details of people and places and things that involve all the senses make stories more interesting and help readers create mental pictures. I’ve heard “critics” in critique groups complain about lack of description of characters in the writing of others, and say that details about characters’ appearance and manner and such will help us “get to know them.”

Maybe. Maybe not.

There’s another approach—one I prefer—that gives lie to that norm. It is summed up admirably by these two simple rules:

“Avoid detailed descriptions of characters.”

“Don’t go into great detail describing places and things.” That rule goes on to advise avoiding such descriptions “unless you’re Margaret Atwood and can paint scenes with language. You don’t want descriptions that bring the action, the flow of the story, to a standstill.”

I put those rules in quotation marks because they’re not mine. They belong to the late, great Elmore Leonard—author of many best-selling novels and winner of numerous literary awards, including the Owen Wister Award for Lifetime Achievement from Western Writers of America and induction into the Western Writers Hall of Fame. Leonard’s Western works include Last Stand at Saber River, Hombre, Valdez is Coming, and “Three Ten to Yuma.” He was also a giant in crime fiction, with several prize-winning novels (many that became movies) to his credit.

His sparse, bare-bones style appeals to me. And, beyond avoiding bringing a story to a standstill with detailed descriptions, Leonard’s approach is more involving for readers—it allows us to participate in the story, to create our own mental pictures of people and places and things, rather than have them handed to us.

In his award-winning and best-selling novel All the Pretty Horses, Cormac McCarthy—despite his ability to write florid descriptions—provides not a single clue as to the appearance of the book’s main characters, John Grady Cole and Lacey Rawlins.

We could go on.

The point is, there’s more than one way to write about people, places, and things. So don’t believe everything they tell you—at least not in every detail.

There will be further discussion of this topic—in greater detail—to come.