From the blurb:
Myers makes a serviceable, if debatable, case that DeLillo et al., and by extrapolation much of contemporary literary writing, have strayed from the clarity and artfulness of expression that earlier authors, from Woolf to Conrad to Bellow, achieved; and that the true heirs of yesterday's giants may be today's genre writers. What makes this entertaining book so important isn't the point-by-point relative correctness of Myers's argument, however, but that at last someone has dared to say, with energy and insight, what many have privately concluded: that at least some of our literary emperors are, if not without clothes, wearing some awfully gaudy attire, and that certain sectors of the lit-crit establishment have colluded in the sham, all at the expense of... readers.My emphasis.
Put me down as a guy who definitely thinks genre writers are better than so-called literary writers. I think, pound for pound, you're going to find better writing in a Theodore Sturgeon story or a John D. MacDonald novel than you would in a, say, Cormac McCarthy novel. But that's just me.
I mean, I've tried to read Cormac McCarthy. Tried, and failed! His language is needlessly florid, unnatural and affected, and the lack of proper punctuation is just infuriating. I mean, come on! What makes you so special that the rules of writing don't apply to you? Use proper punctuation! And don't give me that Hubert Selby "but that's the way I type" excuse. Don't you have an editor?! And if your editor isn't correcting the quirks of your typing, what are they doing? Fanning the air and repeating, "We're not worthy?"
Seemingly so. Here's the first three sentences from McCarthy's The Road:
When he woke in the woods in the dark and cold of the night he'd reach out to touch the child sleeping beside him. Nights dark beyond darkness and days more gray each one than what had gone before. Like the onset of some cold glaucoma dimming away the world.What imagery! What poetry! What...crap!
In the interests of clarity, the first sentence could use at least one comma, but even if you add in a comma, you're left with a clunky bit of faux-poetry. "In the woods in the dark and cold of the night?" This cluster of prepositional phrases may "paint a picture" but it does so with fingerpaints and broad, childish strokes. It's so tin-eared that if you heard someone speaking this way, you might think that English was their second language.
But that first sentence is just badly written. The second sentence is just bad writing.
Nights dark beyond darkness and days more gray each one than what had gone before.We've already seen that McCarthy has no qualms about jamming a bunch of comma-free ideas into a single sentence. Here he demonstrates that he has no qualms about even making a sentence.
Nights dark beyond darkness and days more gray each one than what had gone before.Is a fragment. And there's nothing wrong with fragments. Fragments are perfectly okay. They can even be good. Writers should not be afraid of fragments.
What they should be afraid of is writing a fragment as clunky, silly, and amateurish as that one. Nights dark beyond darkness? Can you even get "dark beyond darkness" or is there some kind of darkness quotient where you say, "Woah, that's dark" and it won't be getting any darker?
I've heard many clever metaphors about darkness. Michael Connelly wrote a book called "A Darkness More than Night," which I think he stole from Raymond Chandler. "A darkness more than night," now that's evocative.
But "dark beyond darkness?" What does that even mean? I'll tell you what it means. It means you're reading crap! You're reading a guy being flowery for being flowery's sake.
"Days more gray each one than what had gone before?" Okay, Yoda. What's wrong with just saying, "Each day more gray than the one that had gone before?" I know, I know, can't be too straightforward or anything. Instead, we've got to talk like we've got a poor grasp of grammatical structure. It's poetic!
And that brings us to sentence #3.
Like the onset of some cold glaucoma dimming away the world.What's like "the onset of some cold glaucoma?" The days that are "more gray each one than what had gone before?" The night that is "dark beyond darkness?" I wish it was more clear, but --again-- that sentence is just a fragment. It's missing something.
Like a subject.
And really? A "cold glaucoma?" As opposed to a "hot glaucoma" or a "painful glaucoma" or "a milky white glaucoma." Using inappropriate adjectives can, at times, contribute to interesting juxtapositions, say the case of the Beatles' "Long Hard Night." But sometimes it's just a writer being pretentious and lazy.
Considering that two sentences away we suffered through the "in the woods in the dark and cold of the night," and the second sentence we suffered through "Nights dark beyond darkness," it's only natural that now we have to have cold glaucoma.
Because -- and I don't want to seem repetitive-- what I'm trying to say is that it's dark and cold.
Now maybe it's just a taste thing, but I'm not so sure. Having decided I couldn't read The Road due to what I deemed stylistic excesses, I tried to listen to it as a book on tape.
Predictably, what's clunky on the page is just as clunky when being read aloud. Indeed, listening to it makes it sound even more unnatural and affected and repetitive than it is on the page!
And they say this guy is America's greatest living writer? Oh well. I guess I'll stick with the dead ones....