Author’s note: This piece is based solely on my opinion. If you agree, great, if not, that’s cool too. I hope we can still be friends. Everyone has different tastes. For example, one of my wife’s favorite novels is, Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road.” I have not told her I wrote this for the simple fact that I’m not stupid.
As an author, I should never hate on other authors. It’s bad form. Hey, gang, we’re all on the same team, fighting the same fight, suffering the same setbacks, and celebrating the same victories. I love the writing community I’ve discovered online because that’s what we’re all about. We either know where other writers are and want to help them over their hump, or they know where we are and want to help us for exactly the same reason.
So, I would never talk shit about another author, especially one who’s won a Pulitzer Prize. I’ve honestly said since I pecked my first story into a Macintosh 512K at the only newspaper in 1987 that would give a job to someone as inexperienced as me—if I ever win a Pulitzer, I’m wearing it around my neck on a big gold chain 24/7.
Damn right, that’s what I would have done.
I’ve moved on from that. I’m here for my fellow writers who need a digital hug, or (hopefully) a literal kick in the pants when it comes to making their writing better. I love you all.
Except Cormac McCarthy. Fuck that guy.
McCarthy won the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for distinguished fiction by an American author for his post-apocalyptic novel, “The Road,” even though authors have written about that kind of thing for years and no one paid them any attention. John Hillcoat directed the 2009 movie based on “The Road” that starred Viggo “Aragorn from The Lord of the Rings” Mortensen, Robert Duvall, and Charlize Theron.
What a great cast. I nearly went to the theater to watch this movie, but like I try to do with every film based on a book, I stopped at the public library to read “The Road” first (support your public library, folks).
Hey, gang, I have a question. Have you ever slogged through “The Road”? Come on, be honest. If so, good for you. You have the kind of strength to actually survive the post-apocalyptic hellscape America will become soon enough. However, that wasn’t me.
The same year McCarthy won the Pulitzer, Elizabeth Gilbert’s “Eat, Pray, Love,” came out (and white-trashed so many American kitchens with those words painted on barn wood), as did “The Boy in the Striped Pajamas,” “Water for Elephants,” Gillian Flynn’s “Sharp Objects” (Flynn can write. Damn, can she write), and another post-apocalyptic work—which is highly more entertaining than McCarthy’s—Max Brooks’, “World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War.”
McCarthy can’t hold the jocks of these authors. They create characters, they paint a scene with something other than dirt and plants described in the depth of a surgeon discussing a recently-freed bowel obstruction, and they do not—I REPEAT, DO NOT—write shit sentences like this:
“He rose and stood tottering in that cold autistic dark with his arms outheld for balance while the vestibular calculations in his skull cranked out their reckonings.”
Wait. What? This is the kind of faux-poetry nerds get beaten up for writing in junior high school.
I’m fully convinced people say they like McCarthy’s work only because others have said they should. You want to feel like garbage at an intellectual dinner party, say you don’t understand the appeal of Cormac McCarthy, and twenty people will start lecturing you on how you failed to understand the deeper meaning of “Blood Meridian” that made such a violent book so goddamned boring, or the fact that Cormac really would know how to use a fucking quote mark if he thought it necessary, thank you very much.
Dear Pulitzer Prize committee: Never consider me for your award. I’ve seen what you think is good, and it ain’t.