I'm at home, still goofing off, having accomplished nothing other than going to the bank and picking up some poker cash. I've been reading Cormac McCarthy's
No Country for Old Men and liking it a lot. I haven't read this book before, nor have I seen the movie. Most people will recognize the latter for generating the Tommy Lee Jones newspaper stare meme.
This is the third book of his that I've read. I read
Blood Meridian back in the '90's and
The Road when it came out in 2006.
His prose is something else. It's a bit like Hemingway but even more laconic and emotionally shut away if that's even possible. His stories always brim over with shocking violence, but very little of it is personal or fueled by anger or envy or rivalry. His characters never actually come out and say "sorry about that," when they blow each other to kingdom come, but it wouldn't come as a surprise if they did.
McCarthy doesn't use quotation marks in his dialog, and it works for him. You always know when someone is talking, and you can hear them in your head perfectly fine.
Señor, Moss said.
Bueno, the old man said.
You speak english?
He studied Moss, holding the broom handle in both hands.
He shrugged his shoulders.
I need a doctor.
The old man waited for more. Moss pushed himself up.
The bench was bloody. I've been shot, he said.
The old man looked him over. He clucked his tongue. He looked away toward the dawn. The trees and buildings taking shape. He looked at Moss and gestured with his chin. Puede andar? he said.
What?
Puede caminar? He made waking motions with his fingers, his hands hanging loosely at the wrist.
Moss nodded. A wave of blackness came over him. He waited till it passed.
Tiene dinéro? The sweeper rubbed his thumb and fingers together.
Sí, Moss said. Sí.
He also does this thing with sentence fragments.
He looked away toward the dawn. The trees and buildings taking shape. The gerund 'taking' is only barely a verb that turns the latter fragment into a sentence. It should come across as awkward, but it doesn't; quite the opposite.
I would have written it: He looked away toward the dawn, looked at the trees and buildings taking shape, and it wouldn't have been as good.
There's a definitive dearth of commas in McCarthy's writing, not to mention very few instances of exotic punctuation: colons, semicolons, ellipses or em dashes. As someone who rarely passes up the chance to punch out a seven-jointed, compound sentence lovingly filled with all of the above marks, I find McCarthy's writing to be fascinating.
For instance, when I want people to read a section of text quickly, I'll shave off the punctuation and try to throw in mostly short words broken up with a few compound words that seem to prime the pace even more for whatever reason. Like this bit from Nit-tastic Tales:
The flash came from a man dressed in a grey Champion hoodie, loping in a quick beeline straight from the mall hallway to the back of my store. I sidestepped out to the center aisle and caught sight of him. He was holding a big black shopping bag and heading towards the back. I looked away almost immediately and thought of other things to do.
Boombada boombada boom.
When McCarthy cuts back on the punctuation--which is always--and weaves in the alternating small and big words--which is often--it has quite the opposite effect, as it slows me down and gets me reading it at a leisurely pace, like some old Texas county sheriff is spinning a yarn over a cup of coffee, which is the actual case here:
Here last week they found this couple out in California they would rent out rooms to old people and then kill em and bury em in the yard and cash their social security checks. They'd torture em first, I dont know why. Maybe their television was broke. Now here's what the papers had to say about this. I quote from the papers. Said: Neighbors were alerted when a man run from the premises wearing only a dogcollar. You cant make up such a thing as that. I dare you to even try.
But that's what it took, you'll notice. All that hollerin and diggin in the yard didnt bring it.
That's all right. I laughed myself when I read it. There aint a whole lot else you can do.
I think it might be the grammar that slows me, 'kill em and bury em, I dont know why, didnt bring it." How is it authentic that a sheriff doesn't use apostrophes in his contracted words when he talks? I don't know, but it just is.
All right, I've goofed off enough. Time to get to the tables.
Last edited by suitedjustice; 09-05-2019 at 09:40 PM.