My favorite novelist Cormac McCarthy passed away last week. Since then, writers have been coming out of the woodwork with obituaries and tributes. To add my voice to the mix, below is an excerpt from my craft book, So You Want to Be a Novelist.
In a chapter on close reading, I analyzed the opening pages of All the Pretty Horses. What I love about McCarthy is that he always gives you something interesting to study at the sentence level, and the more you review his language, the more he reveals.
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An excerpt From So You Want to Be a Novelist:
THIS MOVE — FROM THE particular to the universal, and from the concrete to the abstract — is fundamental to understanding how fiction works. When you read fiction, to study it, one approach is to get down to the sentence level and interrogate it. Ask questions: Why did this word follow that word? Why did the author break the paragraph here? What does this line of dialogue tell us about the character? What question is the author raising here that needs to be answered? Why is this compelling? And sometimes, what even is happening here?
For example, let’s look at the opening few pages of Cormac McCarthy’s novel All the Pretty Horses. This novel is set around 1950 and is about a teenager named John Grady Cole and his adventures on horseback in Mexico. At the beginning of the novel, his father is somewhat out of the picture, his grandfather has just died, his girlfriend has just dumped him, and his mother is about to sell the family farm and move off to San Antonio. I’m starting with McCarthy because he has such a distinctive style. His prose is recognizable and strikingly clear when you get into it, but I think it can be a little opaque for someone approaching it for the first time. He is unusual in that he seldom tells you what his characters are thinking. He is an impressionist who shows you their actions and records their words and trusts you to figure out what is going on inside their heads. All the Pretty Horses opens:
The candleflame and the image of the candleflame caught in the pierglass twisted and righted when he entered the hall and again when he shut the door. He took off his hat and came slowly forward. The floorboards creaked under his boots. In his black suit he stood in the dark glass where the lilies leaned so palely from their wasted cutglass vase. Along the cold hallway behind him hung the portraits of forebears only dimly known to him all framed in glass and dimly lit above the narrow wainscoting. He looked down at the guttered candlestub. He pressed his thumbprint in the warm wax pooled on the oak veneer. Lastly he looked at the face so caved and drawn among the folds of funeral cloth, the yellowed moustache, the eyelids paper thin. That was not sleeping. That was not sleeping.
What do we make of this passage? I can say that for me, the first sentence is odd. When I first read it, I had to look up the definition of “pierglass” (it’s a kind of mirror you hang on the wall). Unpacking what it literally says, John Grady walks into the door, and when he does, the whoosh of air causes the candle to flicker, first when he comes into the hall and again when he shuts the door. Why render it this way? Why not simply say, “When John Grady came in the door, the candle flickered”? Obviously, McCarthy’s way of saying it sets a different tone. The book on the whole asks you to slow down, as a reader, to experience the laconic cowboy life, so he’s indicating from the first sentence what kind of book you’re in for. In this first paragraph, McCarthy also buries his lead, which is his dead grandfather lying in state. You get the image of the candle, and then the creaky floorboards, and then the cold hallways and the photos on the wall, and then you get John Grady mashing his thumb into the candle wax, and then — only then — do you see the dead man. The double phrase — “That was not sleeping. That was not sleeping” — is uncharacteristic for McCarthy, in that it takes you inside his character’s mind, and we see John Grady is experiencing a kind of denial. It probably took him a moment, coming into the hallway, to register and process his dead grandfather there. What McCarthy has done, when you pause to analyze the paragraph, is show you the workings of his character’s mind. These sensory inputs — the candleflame, the chill air, the melted wax — come at him impressionistically, and he doesn’t know how to process it all and he takes a moment to put his thumb in the candle wax before acknowledging his grandfather’s body. This is grief made manifest through images.
Over the next few paragraphs, John Grady (or “he,” since McCarthy hasn’t told us his name) goes outside and stares at the stars for a while, “a thin gray reef beginning along the eastern rim of the world.” A train whistles by, and then he goes back inside where a woman is at the stove, and she greets him, “Buenos días, guapo,” and then goes back to fixing breakfast. He pours a cup of coffee, and then this is the first exchange of dialogue in the book:
I appreciate you lightin the candle, he said.
Cómo?
La candela. La vela.
No fui yo, she said.
La señora?
Claro.
Ya se levantó?
Antes que yo.
We learn a few things from this exchange. We know we’re on a ranch somewhere in the American southwest, and John Grady’s family employs a few Hispanic workers. In this dialogue, we learn something about John Grady’s character. His grandfather is lying dead in the other room, yet he still says thank you to the cook. He’s learned her language and is willing to converse in it (even if English is his default).
McCarthy doesn’t translate for us. I don’t know why, except to suggest there is a certain amount of artifice in translating something, and he tends to shy away from that kind of artifice. If you speak Spanish or take time to plug it into Google translate, you see that “la señora” (presumably either John Grady’s mother or grandmother here, and it turns out to be his mother) was the one who lit the candle. She was up early, before the cook—awake before her son arrives home from a night out. If you translate this into modern casual English, you can infer a few more things:
Thanks for lighting the candle.
It wasn’t me.
Mom?
Yep.
She’s already up?
She got up before I did.
You can almost see him wince. We don’t know what he was out doing all night, but when your parents wake up before you get home, that can be a problem. You’re busted, for one thing. As long as he was home before Mom got up, they could have the fiction that he was home at a respectable hour. Alas, not the case. Putting ourselves in her shoes, her father has just died, so we can imagine she’s grieving. We soon learn John Grady’s father is out of the picture, which means Mom is in charge of this ranch, so she’s also likely got a number of responsibilities. Estate planning for her dead father, getting her head around the ranch’s finances, et cetera, et cetera. No wonder she was up early. The question is, where is she now? What are she and John Grady going to do?
There’s more to say about the opening to All the Pretty Horses, but what I’m doing here is called close reading, an approach to examining a text that involves digging into it word by word, line by line. Good books hold up under a close analysis, and even offer more for the attentive reader willing to dig in.