“With the change he bought a candy bar and he sat alone on a bench in the empty waiting room in his blanket eating the candy in micesized bites and reading from a black leatherette copy of the Book of Mormon he found in a pamphlet rack. The candy he managed to get down but the words of the book swam off the page eerily and he thought he’d never read a stranger tale.”

Also: I don’t believe in genius. Well, maybe Shakespeare and Joseph Smith. But I’m not seeing it at all in McCarthy. Perhaps I’ll change my mind after reading more of his work.

RAF: I agree. But just think if he could have pulled of the Dark Tower series alongside The Stand! (which is probably his non-Dark Tower novel that has the most resonance with the Dark Tower series, although bits and pieces show up from all of his other books, apparently. I’ve only read The Stand and The Dark Tower books).

I will say that the Dark Tower up until about 65% of the way through the Wolves of Calla and with the original literary minimalism version of The Gunslinger is pretty good.

I take exception to this, William; King’s “great post-apocalyptic very American work of fiction” is clearly The Stand. I haven’t been able to wade all the way through the Dark Tower series, and there may be a lot of fine writing there that I’ve missed out on, but whole thing, as you say, just tended too much towards self-reference and an ostentatious sewing together of disparate worlds–completion for completion’s sake, really–to work. But that doesn’t mean King’s effort to create a great American post-apocalyptic epic failed; on the contrary, he’d already finished writing it over a decade before any of the Dark Tower books were published. The Stand is not King’s scariest book, and it’s not a perfect book, but it’s a mighty, mighty post-apocalyptic/religious allegory monument of writing.

And I say this as someone who loves both literary and genre fiction (esp. sf/f) and really loves when the two meet. In particular, I think that McCarthy’s literary realism combined with his minimalism works against him. GST’s example above is one of the most glaring. If _The Road_ had gone a bit further in to allegory or metaphysics then perhaps it would have worked better. But literary artists tend to avoid that or conversely go heavy-handed with it. Both are forms of cowardice, imo.

Sadly, the other potentially great post-apocalyptic very American work of fiction Stephen King’s Dark Tower series engaged in its own form of cowardice in the latter part of the series with the move towards post-modern play of the author and what looked to me like a move for literary respectability.

Combine McCarthy and King and you might have a great American epic.

The Esquire review gave me a lot of hope for this movie.

I actually finished the novel flying into Salt Lake. I wept openly for a couple minutes. Maybe my seat mate thought I was flying in for a funeral? Was completely devastated by it. Didn’t help that I have a young son who calls me Papa. ~