No Book For A Cranky Old Woman

Well, Mr. McCarthy's book is not for me. I managed to get through about 35 pages before I gave in and called it a reading day. Why? I'll tell you.

It wasn't because of Mr. McCarthy's characters. Conventional is boring in the written world, and his characters are anything but conventional. In fact, they're some of the most sharply drawn after 3-4 pages of any I've come across, and I found them fascinating. They leapt off the page at me from their introductions and that was terrific. Ditto for his plotting. The pace of the story is perfect and it unfolds like the movie did: swiftly, but not so swiftly that I couldn't see the nuances of his work and the characters in my mind. Mr. McCarthy is an extremely visual writer. I'm not surprised that his work transfers to film as effortlessly as it does.

What about Mr. McCarthy's dialogue? you may ask. In a word: outstanding. The Coen brothers took it all but verbatim for the film and it worked there just as well as it does in the book. As I was reading I could hear the characters speaking in my head, and I don't think this was just because I was so struck by the movie. Dialogue writing is my best skill so when I come across a great writer of the stuff -- and I don't very often -- it's very exciting for me. The scene in the gas station between Chigurh and the attendant, which is the scariest in the film, is laid out in the same tense, steadily building panic, oh-my-god-this-guy-is-insane fashion as in the movie. It's just as frightening on the page. No Country For Old Men is full of flawless dialogue that I could see happening in real life should the book's action take place. For that Mr. McCarthy deserves a medal, or at least a lot of money.

Hmmm...great characters...marvelous dialogue...what in the world is wrong with this book, then? you are probably wondering. And here's your answer: I could not go farther in this book than 35 pages because Mr. McCarthy has never met a run-on sentence he doesn't absolutely adore and want to take home to his mother.

Now, I will be the first to say that a run-on sentence has its value in a story. In fact, I believe that all those rules we have to teach our students about DOs and DON'Ts in grammar can fly straight out the manuscript window when someone is writing fiction. (Somewhere Hemingway is smiling over a Margarita at this very moment.) Characters, real ones at least, do not live along proper grammatical lines. They stammer. They speak in fragments. They aren't always clear in their thinking or about to whom they're talking. I'm okay with that. They're characters; they can do whatever they need to do and I will love them all the more for it.

Still, the fatal flaw for me in Mr. McCarthy's book is those damned run-ons. I'm not talking about the occasional one used for effect, or to make a point, or just because it sounded good to him at the time or because he was too lazy to hit the period button on his keyboard. I'm talking about run-ons on every page, in almost every prose paragraph. Almost every prose paragraph. This book for me was 35 pages of "He did this and then he did that and then he did something else and then he thought about why he was doing it and it didn't make any sense to him and then he stood up and then he did it again and then he did something else and then somebody took a shot at him and then he started running and then he thought about that". This is not an exaggeration -- this book is page after mind-boggling page of non-stop "ands thens" that wore me out completely. I don't have a problem with the actions in those endless passages; doing something, then thinking about why, not having it make sense but doing it anyway, and eventually getting shot at for it are all perfectly legitimate activities for characters in my view. But take a breath between them, for the love of literature! Or at least let your reader take a breath.

After deciding not to finish No Country I took a hard look at what bothers me so much about those run-ons. When I was in college and had estrogen I think I could have read this book. I would probably have thought the run-ons terrible but would have assumed that Mr. McCarthy knew all sorts of things about writing that I didn't. I would have ascribed great mystical and intellectual powers to him that I did not possess; being young and worshipful, I could very well have been in awe of him for this. That's the reason authors get away with writing poorly composed work that makes no sense, right? People think such writings are beyond the abilities of mere mortals to comprehend, when in fact they're just badly done and completely ridiculous. "And now, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome one of the most non-sensical and, therefore, successful writers of our age!" I can see Albert Camus being introduced this way on Oprah.

Young people have the liberty of awe, but I am not young anymore. I'm 46 and do not have the patience to plow my way through sentence after sentence that runs to 25 words, containing 10 usages of "and then" before I hit the period. I like flow now. I like prose passages that glide smoothly and have at least a fleeting acquaintance with good grammar. Characters can talk to me like one of my students but their writers don't have that privilege.

Is this run-on hangup of mine nitpicking? I suppose it is. Who am (unpublished) I to tell (published) Mr. McCarthy to do some better editing of his prose? If run-ons are how he wants to express himself then fine, he should use them as much as he wishes. But I don't have to read him when he does.

If anyone needs me I'll be curled up with something by Dostoevsky.