I decided to read Suttree, an excellent novel, after reading an essay by Roger Ebert [0]. The essay is about his losing his ability to eat, taste, and speak due to cancer, and how it has expanded his writing experience, and how he's ultimately content. He writes:
At first when I could not speak, I could not read easily, because sedation had undermined my attention span. I was depressed. I could turn on the TV, but why? My wife brought a wonderful DVD player to my hospital room, but I could not make myself watch movies. My life was stale and profitless. I would spend hours in a murky stupor. Knowing I had always been reading a book, my concerned wife began reading to me: Jane Austen, Charles Dickens.
Curiously, my love of reading finally returned after I picked up Cormac McCarthy's Suttree, a book I had already read not long before my first surgery. Now I read it two more times. I was not "reading the same book." I was reentering the same experience, the same occult and visionary prose, the life of Suttree so urgently evoked. As rarely before, a book became tactile to me. When Suttree on his houseboat pulled a cord and brought up a bottle of orange soda pop from the cool river, I savored it. I could no longer taste. I tasted it more sharply than any soda I've ever really had. When Suttree stopped at the bus station for a grilled cheese, I ate it, and the pickle, and drank the black coffee. I began to live through this desperate man's sad life.
Blood Meridian obviously and rightly gets the most attention, but Suttree is a sleeper favourite for a lot of people. There's something about the way McCarthy's descriptions of filth and muck and water and garbage blend into some of the funniest scenes many will read, the incredible rendering of the vernacular language from the Tennessee River, that is utterly arresting. Reading it feels like finding oneself in that space between wakefulness and dreaming, like you are occupying the main character's life entirely.
It’s definitely his most personal book, he spent many years writing it and it feels like everything he had written before that point was just a prelude to Suttree. It also helps that it’s less unrelentingly bleak than his other work, for instance in the episode of the ‘moonlight melonmounter’. He’s always had an impressive way with words
The Passenger is similar in tone but very different in style. Less of the stylized biblical poetic language and more focus on dialogue and character. Haven’t read the followup yet but I have a feeling things won’t be wrapped up neatly. They never are in McCarthy books
Yes exactly, and I love the understated dignity the characters exhibit amidst the squalor. Throughout the story’s various episodes, described in some of the most lyrical writing I’ve ever read, you will be moved to cry, laugh, sigh, hope, wince, and smile, right alongside Suttree.
I read Suttree a few years ago while on a long roadtrip around the American south and loved it. Thanks for that link - I can identify with his perspective. It is more about experiencing a world and a time than anything else.
Just started his recent release, The Passenger.
Years ago, I remember reading The Crossing to my young children, at least up until it starts to get a bit violent. I'd act out the bits where he'd wrangle the wolf, etc so they'd understand the action. They found it quite gripping and kept asking when we would continue.
The author mentioned that McCarthy had placed a character at Mosca's. I grew up down the road from Mosca's and to this day have never eaten there. Growing up, everyone used to talk about the mobsters (Carlos Marcello and associates) who would show up to eat at the establishment. It was only open on the weekends, and you can definitely drive right past the place without even noticing that it's there. A little white building capable of holding maybe 2 dozen patrons at its best, but supposedly some of the best Italian food you can find anywhere in the US.
It's funny that the author mentions that Mosca's didn't serve clams. Growing up, clams to people in the area were garbage food and not worth messing with because of all the other seafood options. Not because of any pretense, mind you. It's just that when families wanted to have unpaved driveways and road construction crews wanted to use a filler of sorts to make for temporary roadways, down there we used dredged clam shells. I know that at some point, it went out of practice... my grandparents' drive was covered in clam shells... and I distinctly remember bailing on my bike one day while attempting to ride down to the crevasse pond and getting a clam shell stuck in my knee. Had to dig that out with a pocket knife and some pliers. I still went on my way to fish after that, and to this day am amazed by my good fortune of not catching an infection because I still have the scar.
I fed one of the reviews to ChatGPT and told it to write a review of the Burbank WalMart in this style. Result:
> Two Stars
>The Burbank WalMart is a behemoth of consumerism, a vast labyrinth of plastic and steel where the soul withers and dies. I wandered its sterile corridors, searching for some scrap of humanity amidst the endless rows of merchandise. But all I found was the dull glint of metal shelves, the hum of fluorescent lights, and the dull roar of consumerism.
> I took my chances with the food court, hoping for a glimmer of salvation. But all I found was a false burrito, swaddled in tinfoil and wrapped in a lie. I looked upon it with disgust, knowing that it was a symbol of all that is wrong with this place.
> As I left the Burbank WalMart, I felt a sense of despair wash over me. I had been to the abyss, and it had left me cold and empty. I will not return to this place of soulless consumerism, and I recommend that others stay away as well.
When you say “ I fed one of the reviews to ChatGPT” do you mean you put it in the input box and said write a review in this style? I wasn’t aware of this functionality!
Thanks for this. I'd been getting ChatGPT to write captions for my YouTube videos, but didn't realise I could seed it with a quote to push it from its usual pedestrian style.
Seriously, is this the future of HN? Seems every thread is infected with some loser going, hey, look what ChatGPT puked up about something nobody else asked about, or cares about.
i actually tried prompting chatgpt for mccarthy-style writing a few weeks ago, and like this it sounded nothing like him; more like a teenager who has heard somebody describe his writing trying to guess what it sounds like
> This is not by the real Cormac McCarthy. He is out there somewhere pulling a novel out of a horse skull. This tumblr is a writing experiment by E.D.W. Lynch
I’m not ashamed to say I’m gullible on first blush but it’s better knowing it’s satirical.
I’ve noticed this too about David Lynch. McCarthy and Lynch write about very different topics and for different mediums but both writer’s works resonate with me in similar ways.
Diners to me feel like Toll Houses or waystations between worlds or along passages between worlds. There is something that feels pivotal about them even though they are like stasis chambers of archived milieus.
I have thought this about Lynch and Haruki Murakami as well. At their best they are able to create very simple worlds without any excess or meaningless details that somehow still feel real. Like characters obsessing about pie in Twin Peaks or Murakami narrators describing eating a sandwich and beer. Its somehow relaxing because you get a break from having to filter out extraneous details.
Very much so. The character of Agent Cooper is interesting in this regard because his core nature imbues a cozy appreciation of these simple pleasures even though he is journeying through dark experiences.
This prompted me to seek out and find blog posts and Reddit screeds by other readers who, like myself, picked up All the Pretty Horses, thought it was awful, and have been reliably confused by the Cormac MaCarthy's fame and success ever since.
I haven't read All the Pretty Horse but No Country for Old Men is in my top 5 favorite books of all time. The movie is great but couldn't really do the book justice. The opening monologue from Sherriff Bell (Tommy Lee Jones's character) is just one of many in the book, with Bell telling stories about his past as a lawman and soldier and the sorts of people he encountered at the start of each chapter. His monologues provide a context to everything that's happening in the story, making it clear that it's about the nature of evil and what men can (and can't) do about it.
No movie can do a book justice, movies inherently lack fidelity. There just isn’t the same information density, at least not in a way that makes an interesting movie. I find it interesting that even this movie gets the same criticism; the Coen brothers described the screenwriting process as “one of us holding the book flat so the other can read and type at the same time”.
Hmm, I don't think his border trilogy is as good as Blood Meridian or Suttree, but not awful, just mannered. I will admit to finding The Road fairly disappointing, maybe it's just the usual problem of serious-literary-author-does-genre.
At first when I could not speak, I could not read easily, because sedation had undermined my attention span. I was depressed. I could turn on the TV, but why? My wife brought a wonderful DVD player to my hospital room, but I could not make myself watch movies. My life was stale and profitless. I would spend hours in a murky stupor. Knowing I had always been reading a book, my concerned wife began reading to me: Jane Austen, Charles Dickens.
Curiously, my love of reading finally returned after I picked up Cormac McCarthy's Suttree, a book I had already read not long before my first surgery. Now I read it two more times. I was not "reading the same book." I was reentering the same experience, the same occult and visionary prose, the life of Suttree so urgently evoked. As rarely before, a book became tactile to me. When Suttree on his houseboat pulled a cord and brought up a bottle of orange soda pop from the cool river, I savored it. I could no longer taste. I tasted it more sharply than any soda I've ever really had. When Suttree stopped at the bus station for a grilled cheese, I ate it, and the pickle, and drank the black coffee. I began to live through this desperate man's sad life.
[0]: https://www.rogerebert.com/roger-ebert/i-think-im-musing-my-...