The Road (to bad writing)

My friend Jen called last night. She has been trying to read The Road, by Cormac McCarthy. It was recommended to her by several people at work who told her she just had to read it. The critics simply couldn’t say enough good things about The Road and the taciturn genius who wrote it.

But Jen hated it. She wasn’t quite sure why. It won a Pulitzer for fiction and a bunch of other hyphenated prizes that critics like to create and hand out to reinforce their positions as the arbiters of literary worth. “And they made a movie out of it, after all! So it must be good, right?” Jen’s not a writer, of course. She just likes to read fiction, so she couldn’t really put her finger on why she didn’t like it. Though a smart and fairly well-read woman, she doubted her own intelligence rather than question the literary experts. But to quote her, “Am I stupid or something? Because I think this book sucks.” I agree.

McCarthy gets endless props for his “dark vision” and innovative style. About that innovative writing . . . McCarthy uses no quotation marks for dialog. Okay, James Joyce tried that, using dashes before each line of dialog instead of quotation marks. It didn’t catch on, probably because it was not in any way an improvement on the existing norm. It was a solution to a non-existent problem. McCarthy also runs lines of dialog together in the same paragraph, confusing the reader as to who is speaking. Yeah, even Hemingway lost track in long runs of unattributed dialog now and then. But at least he used quotation marks. We are to think this is edgy writing because McCarthy is too great a writer to use the conventions that mere mortals employ. This is part of what Jen couldn’t put her finger on. For authors like McCarthy, it is the reader’s job to forget conventions, re-learn and adapt to his style and absorb his genius. If a passage seems obtuse or unclear, you have the problem, not him. A better word than genius for this would be hubris. McCarthy seems not to care a whit about his actual readers. The way I see it, a carpenter doesn’t build a house to find unique ways to use a hammer—no one who needs a house cares. And no one who needs good stories cares about McCarthy’s effort to join the pantheon of literary greats by sneering at conventions meant to make meaning clear.

McCarthy imparts his “dark vision” via language called bad poetry in good English departments. Here is a line describing, in part, the bodies in burned out cars:

“. . .Ten thousand dreams ensepulchred within their crozzled hearts."

Ensepulchred? Trapped is too pedestrian for him. Even entombed is too run-of-the-mill for Cormac McArt-y. And crozzled? Being just a redneck boy from the country without a single hyphenated award to my name, I had to look that one up on the internet. It wasn’t in the tattered old college dictionary on my desk. Turns out it’s a cooking term, new to the lexicon of literature. Innovative. Genius.

Or how about this:

"All of this like some ancient anointing. So be it. Evoke the forms. Where you've nothing else construct ceremonies out of the air and breathe upon them." He strokes the boy's head and thinks: "Golden chalice, good to house a god."

This is what good fiction teachers call a “purple patch,” a passage so over-written that gothic romance editors would have stricken it from the first draft as a bad imitation of Shakespeare. But McCarthy has not a single editor with the courage to override the judgment of an award-winning and certified genius. And the critics dance and chant around the fire of McCarthy’s brilliance and leave people like Jen to think they are not bright enough to read good fiction.

I’m not the only one tired of having bad writing pushed on me and told the problem lies with me, the reader, if I don’t like it. Folks like Jen and me are allowed to assume—or are even told outright—that we lack the education, sensitivity or sophistication to appreciate writers like McCarthy. The corollary to that argument is that those critics who like his writing are fellow travelers on the genius train.

I call bullshit. Critics who lavished praise on The Road fell in love with the wrong part of the book: the style. And the style is what sucks. And that’s too bad, because McCarthy knows what makes a good story. He just doesn’t know how to tell it without pissing me off. My grandfather could make me listen to a story of his for fifteen minutes before I realized he was telling me how he mowed the lawn. He knew how to use language to rivet the listener to a boring tale. McCarthy has the opposite problem; he ignores useful conventions and uses out of place, pompous, high-minded language to wreck a fine story. Yes, they did make a movie out of it, but there are a bevy of screenwriters who make a comfortable living turning bad books into good scripts.

No, Jen, you are not stupid. You just instinctively know crap when you read it.