In a 1992 interview with Cormac McCarthy titled, "Cormac McCarthy's Venomous Fiction," New York Times writer Richard B. Woodward refers to McCarthy's writing and elements thereof as "...tense encounters in forbidding landscape...dark humor in the face of facts...painful quietness." Woodward moves forward to describe McCarthy's then upcoming novel, All the Pretty Horses:
[McCarthy is] A man's novelist whose apocalyptic vision rarely focuses on women, McCarthy doesn't write about sex, love or domestic issues. All the Pretty Horses, an adventure story about a Texas boy who rides off to Mexico with his buddy, is unusually sweet-tempered for him--like Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer on horseback. The earnest nature of the young characters and the lean, swift story, reminiscent of early Hemingway, should bring McCarthy a wider audience at the same time it secures his masculine mystique.
But whatever it has lacked in thematic range, McCarthy's prose restores the terror and grandeur of the physical world with a biblical gravity that can shatter a reader. A page from any of his books--minimally punctuated, without quotation marks,
avoiding apostrophes, colons or semicolons--has a stylized spareness that magnifies
the force and precision of his words. Unimaginable cruelty and the simplest things,
the sound of a tap on a door, exist side by side... (2).
Consider Woodward's critique of the novel. Does he provide an accurate assessment of McCarthy's writing? Is he missing or misinterpreting something? Consider whether McCarthy deserves praise for his literary achievements as a writer--as Woodward describes him--"...who has almost ceased to exist."
(To read the full text of "Cormac McCarthy's Venomous Fiction," click on the link below.)
McCarthy Interview