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Carver is your example of extraneous detail?
I always saw detail in his work as part of the setting and establishing narrative voice. There’s some writing you can’t just rip through.
I haven’t read why don’t you dance though, so whatever.
Your example sentence was a weird one to me because the brands, description of griminess, detail of syrup on the coffee table and inclusion of a rust belt chain restaurant all come together to paint a very vivid picture. That one sentence tells me about where and when your character existed and where he exists now. How he lives and how he sees himself, and in a more abstract vernacular establishes a particular type of dude.
Maybe it’s just hard to write badly.
Rax
It’s incredible how Mr Delicious sunk the company back in the day, but would probably be one of the most popular ad characters today.
I think they can be really add to a novel if done right, a good metaphor or simile can help set the scene and make the writing more evocative. It can also be a nice, subtle way to give the reader some insight into the POV character’s emotional state without being too direct.
That being said, a bad metaphor really sticks out and makes the text actively worse to read.
I actually just finished The Road this morning. It was meh.
When a Salman Rushdie type or a Tom Robbins type goes all florid on you you can tell it’s because they genuinely enjoy playing with language, which I respect even when it doesn’t work (which is often enough, in the case of those two.) I doubt McCarthy would use the words ‘enjoy’ or ‘playing’ to describe any part of his process. He writes like a witch put a curse on his family three hundred years ago and the only way to lift it is to use every word in the English language at least once in a published novel.
He must have been (and still is?) a real asshole…
After marrying fellow student Lee Holleman in 1961, McCarthy “moved to a shack with no heat and running water in the foothills of the Smoky Mountains outside of Knoxville”. There, the couple had a son, Cullen, in 1962. When writer James Agee’s childhood home was being demolished in Knoxville that year, McCarthy used the site’s bricks to build fireplaces inside his Sevier County shack.
While Lee cared for the baby and tended to the chores of the house, Cormac asked her to get a day job so he could focus on his novel writing. Dismayed with the situation, she moved to Wyoming, where she filed for divorce and landed her first job teaching.
McCarthy has not publicly revealed his political opinions.[92] A resident of Santa Fe with a traditionalist disposition, he once expressed disapproval of the city and the people there: “If you don’t agree with them politically, you can’t just agree to disagree—they think you’re crazy.”[21]
:side-eye-1:
Regarding his own literary constraints when writing novels, McCarthy said he is “not a fan of some of the Latin American writers, magical realism. You know, it’s hard enough to get people to believe what you’re telling them without making it impossible. It has to be vaguely plausible.”
:stalin-gun-1::stalin-gun-2: No wonder he’s been divorced three times lmao
