July 27, 2005
I didn't get a chance to start Cormac McCarthy's No Country For Old Men until yesterday, and I'm now about a third of the way through it. It's fast. And, somewhat suprisingly if not unwelcomely, very pulpish. The New York Times' review seems pretty accurate - "a darting movie-ready narrative," it claims, and indeed, its easy to see why Scott Rudin jumped the gun in snapping up the film rights.
The Times review also contains as a sidebar a lexicon of all the paper's criticisms of McCarthy's literature (along with its interview with the man himself, the only one he's ever given). I turned to this piece from eleven years ago concerning The Crossing, the novel that made McCarthy my favorite author, and reading it made me long to throw all these other words aside and pick my up old rainwater-warped copy again. I'd recommend the review to anyone curious as to why I hold his fiction in such high esteem; it includes enough text from the book itself to give an overall idea of its simple magnificence. The author puts it on the same level as Morrison's Beloved and Faulkner's As I Lay Dying - and while it's perhaps not as important a work as either of those, it more than deserves their company (interesting, too, particularly to me, are the comparison to Bunuel and Fellini).
This is all putting me in a good mindset to continue with (one of the many) tasks I've set at hand: a third (or is it fourth) quick polish on Henry Lee, this one to give the dialogue a much needed brush-up before I send the whole thing off to France. Some of it is too excessive; too blatantly archaic; or just plain bad. And while I do think I can write good and realistic dialogue, I've come to the conclusion that I am not a 'clever' writer; I can't craft spontaneity; sustained laughter heard during my segments of Deadroom notwithstanding, my attempts at aping the Wilder-Diamond style generally end up on the cutting room floor (or deserve to). Time to take a pre-emptive strike.
Posted by David Lowery at July 27, 2005 11:53 PM