A lot of blurbers compare McLean to Cormac McCarthy (because they both write about the West in a particular way) so I appreciate Coetzee going back to Faulkner (because McCarthy is so clearly indebted to Faulkner.) Prose style is a particularly tough thing to pin down, especially if we add on the qualifier of "bristling" - to whose skin? I think Coetzee is pointing towards McLean's angular sentences and thoughts and her high-modernist sensibility, her privileging of language over pure comprehensibility. I think Gass in Omensetter's Luck is pretty close to the Faulknerian 'bristling', and the prose of Pynchon, DeLillo, Morrison, O'Connor, Lucia Berlin, Lydia Davis, Denis Johnson, and Joy Williams all have their own particularities, but maybe none quite so "bristling" as McLean's (though I think a lot of Dennis Johnson gets there.)
Thanks - adding it to my reading list! However, the fulsome JM Coetzee cover blurb seems a stretch.
An awful lot of life and particularity has bristled in American prose since Faulkner. Your thoughts...?
A lot of blurbers compare McLean to Cormac McCarthy (because they both write about the West in a particular way) so I appreciate Coetzee going back to Faulkner (because McCarthy is so clearly indebted to Faulkner.) Prose style is a particularly tough thing to pin down, especially if we add on the qualifier of "bristling" - to whose skin? I think Coetzee is pointing towards McLean's angular sentences and thoughts and her high-modernist sensibility, her privileging of language over pure comprehensibility. I think Gass in Omensetter's Luck is pretty close to the Faulknerian 'bristling', and the prose of Pynchon, DeLillo, Morrison, O'Connor, Lucia Berlin, Lydia Davis, Denis Johnson, and Joy Williams all have their own particularities, but maybe none quite so "bristling" as McLean's (though I think a lot of Dennis Johnson gets there.)
"Angular sentences," "high-modernist sensibility," "privileging of language over pure comprehensibility"... I love it when you talk dirty. Thanks! xo
Ew
Put a copy aside for me!