Sep 26·edited Sep 26Liked by Postliberal Book Reviews
I have a great deal of respect for authors (like David) who will push their prose, being willing to fall flat in pursuit of interesting or beautiful sentences. Nice review, I liked Improvidence a lot.
Great review. You would make a better line editor with your attention to detail than most people I’ve seen charge to make line edits.
One thing I’ll push back on is your assessment of McCarthy as a low definition writer, and especially your conflation of high definition with high interiority. “If the text were an image, you could pinch to expand to a microscopic scale and still see distinctness and outlines of hidden or microscopic objects; you would describe this kind of photo as high definition.” Read the first couple sentences of the first chapter of Suttree and you are “Peering down into the water where the morning sun fashioned wheels of light, coronets fanwise in which lay trapped each twig, long flakes and blades of light in the dusty water sliding away like optic strobes where motes sifted and spun.” That is a ton of microscopic objects described for a man just looking over a lake on a boat. You can’t get more high definition than that, and McCarthy’s early work is full of this level of detail.
Now the famous “legion of horribles” passage you quoted does zoom out rather than in and for good reason. Much of Blood Meridian is written in the Homeric/epic style which eschews interiority for scale. McCarthy isn’t trying to make anyone more human here, but rather mythologize to grotesque proportions. Yes, you have material signifiers atop stick figures but it’s what they symbolize that is important here: what does a group of barbarians wearing stovepipe hats and wedding dresses as war apparell right before they go raping and ripping someone’s guts out (I think thats the same scene, it’s been a while since I’ve read it) tell you about humanity? You have man at his basest signifying polite society. A complete refutation of history as progress. Or for a more gnostic reading (as seems common lately with a lot of McCarthy’s work), you have the demiurge itself mocking humanity with its material notions of civilization. Theres probably hundreds of interpretations of that passage by now but none of it would have been given more meaning had McCarthy zoomed in on the shredded sleeve of the calvalry jacket, or the or the crusted silk of the bloodshot wedding veil, or the thin clavicle bones of the barbarians. Those things would have just distracted from what McCarthy was trying to achieve here.
Thomas Mann is of course a masterful writer as well, and that is an excellent passage, but he zooms out for much of The Magic Mountain. Both Mann and McCarthy at their best knew when to zoom in and when to zoom out.
Thanks for the comment. You could be right. That said, I have not been impressed with anything he’s done other than Blood Meridian, which I think truly is kind of art house genre fiction. I’m happy to be wrong, though.
Which is fine, but I do think interiority is a different thing than definition. Though I don’t believe you can call Blood Meridian art house genre fiction without saying the same thing about Moby Dick, and neither fit the dramatic structure of genre fiction.
I will say I find All The Pretty Horses good but not great, The Road overrated, and Child of God to be a twisted little Halloween treat but nothing more. McCarthy himself admitted to writing that one for a paycheck.
Suttree and Blood Meridian are his two masterpieces. Followed by those are The Crossing and Outer Dark.
I agree that interiority and definition are different. Definition, I think, should mean like the author’s ability to describe biological or mechanical or psychological or technical or chemical or whatever process in detail. Whether it is warranted or not is another question. ARX-Han does this throughout Incel; Mann does it throughout Magic Mountain. When it works, I think it adds depth. When it doesn’t, it’s an “info-dump” or “didactic”—like the extended history of whales in the middle of Moby-Dick or John Galt’s radio address on money in Atlas Shrugged.
I love Moby-Dick and Blood Meridian and count them both among my top five or ten favorite books. But I think Moby-Dick is a much more substantive story.
Sep 26·edited Sep 26Liked by Postliberal Book Reviews
Wow-- your reviews are terrific, sometimes challenging in a good way with new ideas that startle me. I like this. Also your prose is good--well done, drives forward with energy, and fun to read. The high/low definition approach to literary analysis gives me something to think about, setting aside agreement or disagreement at first. I wonder, is it indeed high definition/ low definition, deeper/more shallow, with shallow in the derogatory sense? Does a catalog into organs and their constituents make a work more deep? How linked to plot and theme? Or is it a rejection of prosody, McCarthy style? Bold the contrarian take on McCarthy-- I enjoy a strong opinion matched with argument. How much can prosody convey by poetic samples tone and hints? It might be taste, or is it somehow an imputation of ideology connected to style? At some point a dive into details becomes a liability, but where is that point? Is there a principle to the limit? Reminds me of the start of Musil's The Man Without Qualities, a long passage on weather details. When does that become self indulgent at the cost of quality? I myself have been wondering about pros/cons of looking at books under various binaries... Testing ideas, see if it works... An essay attempt coming soon. Anyway I was just listening to stories by Thomas Mann while on a ladder painting the trim of the house. "Tristan" 1903, set in a sanitarium of course, some sort of last hurrah for old Tristan Isolde ideals in ether, vs shallow pragmatic commercialism, I think. In short, lots to think about and ruminate upon, I enjoy the thoughtful challenges.
Re: deep/shallow: I don't know for certain (but I think so). If I didn't have a day job, a family, a daily workout commitment, and a fondness for walking in the woods, I'd spend more time reading and investigating this idea. I *think* it's true, but I don't have enough textual evidence. Maybe one day there will be a literary focused Chatbot who can figure this kind of thing out.
Excellent literary analysis. Helps remind of the importance of style indistinguishable from content and the importance of building an audience. Thank you
I have a great deal of respect for authors (like David) who will push their prose, being willing to fall flat in pursuit of interesting or beautiful sentences. Nice review, I liked Improvidence a lot.
Great review. You would make a better line editor with your attention to detail than most people I’ve seen charge to make line edits.
One thing I’ll push back on is your assessment of McCarthy as a low definition writer, and especially your conflation of high definition with high interiority. “If the text were an image, you could pinch to expand to a microscopic scale and still see distinctness and outlines of hidden or microscopic objects; you would describe this kind of photo as high definition.” Read the first couple sentences of the first chapter of Suttree and you are “Peering down into the water where the morning sun fashioned wheels of light, coronets fanwise in which lay trapped each twig, long flakes and blades of light in the dusty water sliding away like optic strobes where motes sifted and spun.” That is a ton of microscopic objects described for a man just looking over a lake on a boat. You can’t get more high definition than that, and McCarthy’s early work is full of this level of detail.
Now the famous “legion of horribles” passage you quoted does zoom out rather than in and for good reason. Much of Blood Meridian is written in the Homeric/epic style which eschews interiority for scale. McCarthy isn’t trying to make anyone more human here, but rather mythologize to grotesque proportions. Yes, you have material signifiers atop stick figures but it’s what they symbolize that is important here: what does a group of barbarians wearing stovepipe hats and wedding dresses as war apparell right before they go raping and ripping someone’s guts out (I think thats the same scene, it’s been a while since I’ve read it) tell you about humanity? You have man at his basest signifying polite society. A complete refutation of history as progress. Or for a more gnostic reading (as seems common lately with a lot of McCarthy’s work), you have the demiurge itself mocking humanity with its material notions of civilization. Theres probably hundreds of interpretations of that passage by now but none of it would have been given more meaning had McCarthy zoomed in on the shredded sleeve of the calvalry jacket, or the or the crusted silk of the bloodshot wedding veil, or the thin clavicle bones of the barbarians. Those things would have just distracted from what McCarthy was trying to achieve here.
Thomas Mann is of course a masterful writer as well, and that is an excellent passage, but he zooms out for much of The Magic Mountain. Both Mann and McCarthy at their best knew when to zoom in and when to zoom out.
Thanks for the comment. You could be right. That said, I have not been impressed with anything he’s done other than Blood Meridian, which I think truly is kind of art house genre fiction. I’m happy to be wrong, though.
Which is fine, but I do think interiority is a different thing than definition. Though I don’t believe you can call Blood Meridian art house genre fiction without saying the same thing about Moby Dick, and neither fit the dramatic structure of genre fiction.
I will say I find All The Pretty Horses good but not great, The Road overrated, and Child of God to be a twisted little Halloween treat but nothing more. McCarthy himself admitted to writing that one for a paycheck.
Suttree and Blood Meridian are his two masterpieces. Followed by those are The Crossing and Outer Dark.
I agree that interiority and definition are different. Definition, I think, should mean like the author’s ability to describe biological or mechanical or psychological or technical or chemical or whatever process in detail. Whether it is warranted or not is another question. ARX-Han does this throughout Incel; Mann does it throughout Magic Mountain. When it works, I think it adds depth. When it doesn’t, it’s an “info-dump” or “didactic”—like the extended history of whales in the middle of Moby-Dick or John Galt’s radio address on money in Atlas Shrugged.
I love Moby-Dick and Blood Meridian and count them both among my top five or ten favorite books. But I think Moby-Dick is a much more substantive story.
Wow-- your reviews are terrific, sometimes challenging in a good way with new ideas that startle me. I like this. Also your prose is good--well done, drives forward with energy, and fun to read. The high/low definition approach to literary analysis gives me something to think about, setting aside agreement or disagreement at first. I wonder, is it indeed high definition/ low definition, deeper/more shallow, with shallow in the derogatory sense? Does a catalog into organs and their constituents make a work more deep? How linked to plot and theme? Or is it a rejection of prosody, McCarthy style? Bold the contrarian take on McCarthy-- I enjoy a strong opinion matched with argument. How much can prosody convey by poetic samples tone and hints? It might be taste, or is it somehow an imputation of ideology connected to style? At some point a dive into details becomes a liability, but where is that point? Is there a principle to the limit? Reminds me of the start of Musil's The Man Without Qualities, a long passage on weather details. When does that become self indulgent at the cost of quality? I myself have been wondering about pros/cons of looking at books under various binaries... Testing ideas, see if it works... An essay attempt coming soon. Anyway I was just listening to stories by Thomas Mann while on a ladder painting the trim of the house. "Tristan" 1903, set in a sanitarium of course, some sort of last hurrah for old Tristan Isolde ideals in ether, vs shallow pragmatic commercialism, I think. In short, lots to think about and ruminate upon, I enjoy the thoughtful challenges.
Re: deep/shallow: I don't know for certain (but I think so). If I didn't have a day job, a family, a daily workout commitment, and a fondness for walking in the woods, I'd spend more time reading and investigating this idea. I *think* it's true, but I don't have enough textual evidence. Maybe one day there will be a literary focused Chatbot who can figure this kind of thing out.
Those are good reasons. I enjoy the project of thinking about it. I’ll come up with something to offer and get back to you. Cheers.
Excellent literary analysis. Helps remind of the importance of style indistinguishable from content and the importance of building an audience. Thank you
It's an honor just to be included in your review series. Thank you for taking the time to read and consider my work so deeply!!