[cal_dent]

No one is obligated to like anything because someone else likes it. It doesn't work for you, it's a big whole world out there and this is just one of may subjective representations of it.

On the point about punctuation, you just infer where they should be. It takes some getting used to but once you're in the rhythm and cadence of the style (& era Cormac writes about) you kinda don't notice it and pause at the natural places.

Anyway I like his stuff. Not all of it but plenty of it. One of my more favourable lines from him (Blood Meridian I think): "All progressions from a higher to a lower order are marked by ruins and mystery and a residue of nameless rage"

[ctrlp]

Honestly, it's less about the lack of punctuation and more about the apparent lack of cohesion or even relation among the list elements. It sounds like these are just what items occurred to the writer's mind in a sort of ecstatic frenzy (that register he favors). What I'm hoping is that I'm just blind to the intricate relatedness of the images, symbols, word choices, etc... They read like just whatever he thought of at that moment of his febrile brain running along and not to have more intentionality than that. If the listicles were in a poem (even a lengthy one, like Whitman) I might be inclined to do the work of teasing out the relationships. But the enumerations are frequent and endless. That's a lot to ask if there aren't visible markers of genius. Surely there a hermeneuticists among the fandom that can shine a light on the necessity of this prose style as structural supports for the work overall. Otherwise it's just pulp and doesn't mean anything except a vibe. Which, ok, whatever, but that's not much of a selling point. Are we to say that Bach and Taylor Swift are equally artistic just because they can both appeal to different tastes? That sounds like the argument here.

[philipkglass]

Are we to say that Bach and Taylor Swift are equally artistic just because they can both appeal to different tastes? That sounds like the argument here.

McCarthy has his champions among ordinary readers but he also won many "serious" awards. Which authority could satisfactorily bless his work if not the reading public and not professional critics/professors/writers?

I like McCarthy, but I also understand not liking authors that other readers love. Hillary Mantel's Wolf Hall garnered widespread acclaim, and I generally like historical fiction, but I had to give up on it after a few chapters. Sometimes an author doesn't fit with one's tastes. Trying to persuade a reader to feel differently is like trying to persuade someone who loves/hates fish how they should feel about grilled salmon.