I loved McCarthy’s novel “The Road.” I remember being thrown at first by the lack of expected punctuation and the sheer number of words he forced me to look up. But, in the end, the story got me–as did what I felt was the author’s gorgeous writing. Prose that was, to my ear, frequently poetry.

His book “Suttree?”

The jury, for me, is out on this one. Take this sentence:

“The infant’s ossature, the thin and brindled bones along whose sulcate facets clove old shreds of flesh and cerements of tattered swaddle.”

I’m sure–once I looked up all the words I didn’t know what they hell they meant–this sentence would paint a very vivid picture.

The thing is … do I want to work that hard just to read his damn book? Is it really going to be worth it in the end?

What’s McCarthy’s point here? Is he simply demonstrating that no one ever beats him at Boggle? Because it’s not just this sentence. A whole lot of the book reads like this.

Is this pretension? Do only vocabulary geniuses get him? Or am I really expected to be so thrilled that I get to read his brilliant writing that I won’t mind it takes fifteen minutes per page?

By the way, the prologue to this book is amazing. But also tedious with sixteen-ton words (or simply obscure words/nomenclature).

I just don’t know what to do with Cormac.

Maybe there should be two editions of all his novels. The “regular” super-challenging one. And the other one with the subtitle for readers like me. In this case: “Suttree (For Dummies).”