A few months ago I appeared on KCRW's Bookworm, with Michael Silverblatt. You can listen to it here. Towards the end of the interview, he took me to task for being too coy, basically, trying to point the reader in the right direction when he would rather be taken by the hand and led there. This is something I've been thinking about a lot ever since. I kind of have a problem when writers make their points in too heavy-handed a manner, though maybe fear of doing that myself causes me to tend too much toward the overly subtle.
As an example of something that I think of as too heavy-handed for my tastes, take BLOOD MERIDIAN, by Cormac McCarthy. There's much that I admire about this book, though overall I find it a mixed bag. The diction is often great: the "tang" of a gun, for instance, or a door "awap" on its hinges, but then he'll use a word like "pyrolatrous," which I can't imagine fitting the voice of either any character or the hypothetical narrator. There are some wonderfully tense scenes, but there are also lots of scenes about nothing more than riding past scrub oaks or acacias or dwarf cedars or some other type of shrubbery. But what I want to talk about here are the tense shifts. The voice of the book is mostly past tense, but it begins in the present and is prone to alternating between the two with no warning.
For instance, there's a scene near the middle of the book in which Glanton's band are sitting around a fire during a break in their usual savagery. The Judge (the "villain" of the novel) is sitting there, sketching in his book:
"In his lap he held the leather ledgerbook and he took up each piece, flint or potsherd or tool of bone, and deftly sketched it into the book. He sketched with a practiced ease and there was no wrinkling of that bald brow or pursing of those oddly childish lips. His fingers traced the impression of old willow wicker on a piece of pottery clay and he put this into his book with nice shadings, an economy of pencil strokes."
This is a fine, quiet scene. But then suddenly, mid-paragraph, the tense shifts from past into present to inform the reader that the Judge "is a draftsman as he is other things, well sufficient to the task. He looks up from time to time at the fire or at his companions in arms or at the night beyond." And then back to past tense. The shift serves a purpose. You can't help but read those lines as more important than the lines on either side. But isn't it too much? I mean, I get it; he's not just devilish, he's the devil, and the fire is the fire of Hell and his companions in arms are the demons of Hell, and the night beyond is outer darkness. But emphasizing it so directly pulls me right out of the moment. It would have been much stronger, in my opinion, to keep it in the past tense, subtler, let the attentive reader catch the Satanic undertones without turning the amps up to 11. Which is also my problem with the last proper chapter of the book, in which, [SPOILER] the Judge emerges naked from an outhouse to kill the Kid, and then he dances naked in the tavern while someone plays the fiddle. It strikes me as too much. Kind of like this moment in Dr. Seuss's FOX IN SOCKS, which happens right around the 7:00 minute mark:
But I did!
I don't know, though. Maybe there's something to be said for being direct: something admirable about just unabashedly putting it all out there. As Morrissey says:
Cormac McCarthy may be shy, but he definitely isn't coy.
