All the Pretty Horses- through page 20, Matt

I dove in last before I went to bed, and I have a few thoughts.  It took nearly twenty pages before I really wanted to read more, but at this point I am hooked and I am looking forward to returning to the book and to John Grady Cole.

I find the reading to this point to be laborious.  I often finish a sentence, especially a longer one (of which there are plenty real whoppers) only to find myself wondering what the hell the sentence was about.  This necessary review is one reason beyond my own tiredness of why I am only to page twenty.  Perhaps the problem is mine more than McCarthy’s, but I am more of the school that great writing does not have to be confusing, and the best writing is almost certainly not.  I look forward to your points of view, and whether you also find the reading laborious or if the problem lies mostly with me.

The lack of punctuation, particularly quotation marks, is a major complaint I have.  In my college writing workshops, leaving out the quotation marks seemed en vogue amongst my classmates, who seemed to do it solely because they were in their first free thinking writing workshop setting and there was no longer a high school English teacher to put them in with a red pen.  I did not like it then and I do not like it now.  I am no grammar expert, which I am sure will become abundantly clear to anybody reading this with regularity, or a stickler for perfect grammar.  I do feel though, that if you are going to break a rule of grammar on purpose (I assume that McCarthy is familiar with quotation marks and their omission was not an oversight), you should have a good reason for doing so.  I wonder what McCarthy’s reason is, and I have ever heard only one good one for their omission.  In Sandra Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street she does not use quotation marks, and she wrote in an introduction to a later release that they were omitted to purposely leave ambiguity in who said what.  The ambiguity exists, and it is real, and Cisneros wants the reader to decide who is saying what when there is more than one option.  That explanation makes sense to me, and I think it works in the vignettes because there is not a tradition plot you need to follow.  By omitting the quotation marks, McCarthy creates ambiguity and it adds to the laboriousness of reading his already verbose prose.

I thought it started slow, the lack of quotation marks is driving me slowly mental, and I find it tough to slog through at times, but all that being said, the bottom line is that I am looking forward to picking it up again.
Until Next Time,
Matt