Cormac McCarthy, in an interview by the Wall Street Journal, denounces short fiction as too easy for writers and modern readers as too fickle for epics:
“I’m not interested in writing short stories. Anything that doesn’t take years of your life and drive you to suicide hardly seems worth doing.”
And,
“If you think you’re going to write something like “The Brothers Karamazov” or “Moby-Dick,” go ahead. Nobody will read it. I don’t care how good it is, or how smart the readers are. Their intentions, their brains are different.”
What, though, could McCarthy say to Le Clézio’s painstaking “The Boy Who Had Never Seen the Sea” (oh, it’s so outstanding) or the transcendent popularity of Bolaño’s sprawling 2666? And I’m not being creative–that’s just what pops to mind.
5 Comments
November 16, 2009 at 6:41 pm
Hey makes Philip Roth look like a cranky old Jewish man. Oh wait…
November 16, 2009 at 7:41 pm
What a dildo.
November 16, 2009 at 8:31 pm
I’ve attempted his books, and they always come up short.
November 17, 2009 at 5:31 am
[...] she just did it really fucking well. And Auster upholds it with his writerly charm, eclipsing the recent unpleasing flavor left atop my literary taste buds by Cormac [...]
November 17, 2009 at 7:20 am
Has he written his moby dick yet?