Rebecca, I agree that ultimately we have to judge writers at their best, though what their “best” is may also come up for debate. Some I’ve spoken with like The Road because it is more accessible and less violent than McCarthy’s other novels. While I agree that we can’t make “correct grammar” our cut-off point for good literature, and that the most extreme critics quoted here are, as you say, standing by their personal taste as if it represents an objective standard, I am not so sure how we can tell that you and The Kid (who also quotes a passage he considers definitive) aren’t doing the same in reverse. Is it really so self-evident that these sentences refute criticisms of McCarthy’s style?

I think it’s rather a shame to make a judgment on McCarthy being a good or bad writer based on The Road. It’s a fine book, but McCarthy at his best is where we should judge his prose (and from that point I’m fine taking issue with his other works in relation to how they fail to hit that mark). In other words, we should look to Blood Meridian.

The criticisms based on grammar are laughable in my opinion. As another commentator said, what’s really going on there is personal taste masquerading as an objective flaw. Faulker, Joyce, Woolf, and many others did amazing things with grammatically incorrect prose, just as McCarthy does.

Last, how can anyone call the man a terrible writer who wrote this line?

“He thought the world’s heart beat at some terrible cost and that the world’s pain and its beauty moved in a relationship of diverging equity and that in this headlong deficit the blood of multitudes might ultimately be exacted for the vision of a single flower.”

But in any case, this post is about starting a process, not finishing it. Reading one book is an important step, right, because that’s what determines whether you’ll go on and read more — especially when, as with McCarthy, the style is unusual to the point of provocative. My impression is that his style across his oeuvre has many similar features: if The Road were considered completely atypical then we’d be in a different situation.

Even so–even though (based on the discussion that the post has prompted) I think the questions The Road provoked in me do have wider application–I do regret having given the post such a broad title! But I think the post itself focuses on pretty specific details and on legitimate questions about McCarthy’s style raised by The Road — and the discussion in the comments has been, for me, extremely stimulating and informative.

I take it that you have read more McCarthy than I have so far: I’m curious whether you are an admirer, and if so, whether you appreciated his style immediately or, as was the case with me, you had to think about it before you committed yourself.