(no subject)

Reading as much McCarthy as I've been is a mixed experience. There's a tinge of the Flannery problem, where the better you understand him the less you want to - I think part of the appeal of The Road is that he's created a world where you and he are sure you agree for once - a problem made simultaneously easier and harder to take by his own wafflings. More like togglings: for someone who entertains several distinct perspectives in rotation he's always weirdly sure of himself. Folksy, mock-humble condescension is hard enough to take when it's consistent. Here too the late work is more appealing: it doesn't fit the setting or father-child dynamic of The Road so is for once exiled, becomes something the characters in Sunset Limited have to push past once they realize they'll need to explain themselves, is entirely undercut by Chigurh and what he represents. After its eventual narrative chaos I'd say its several distinct flavors of testy tendentiousness are the main flaw of The Border Trilogy. Forgivable in All the Pretty Horses, where everything's both planned out and minutely imagined, but downright annoying in the second half of The Crossing, where time constraints caused by block or deadlines or whatever give us our first real sense of a McCarthy on autopilot. A lot of which is pretty good as headlong Western poetry, and of course there's several oases of closer writing, but it's when authors forget what they're talking about that you start to pay attention to them as people, and it's hard to stop once you've started.