Dear Cormac McCarthy,
I have recently read your novel, The Road, and I must admit I was fairly disappointed. Aside from the Pulitzer Prize and other accolades your novel has achieved, I’d heard good things from friends. Contrary to their recommendations, I thought it was very much overrated. I will acknowledge that it was significantly more enjoyable than the movie based on it, but that is only because the book lacked everything that would allow for a good movie adaptation. Movies are very dependent upon character and plot development. Your novel was almost entirely devoid of both. I understand that the purpose is to convey complete bleakness and pointlessness in the post-apocalyptic world of the novel, but it just doesn’t make for good literature in my opinion. While it is possible, if unlikely, to get by on excessively elegant and lyrical prose, you did a poor job of this as well. While there are a few good examples of adept use of language, they are few and far apart and are in no way justification for your story’s lack of story. Also, just to make it clear, utter neglect for syntax is not a stylistic choice. A fragmented sentence is almost always simply incorrect, and while they do have a unique impact when used sparingly, your merciless use of them leaves the reader desensitized to that impact. I’m sorry you found quotation marks and apostrophes injurious to your creativity, but they do play important roles and any novelist that intends to have their work taken seriously should use them. I also found the formatting of dialogue and superfluous spacing between paragraphs strangely disingenuous, as if trying to conceal the actual brevity of what is actually probably a novella by some standards. However, that’s really not an important or very serious criticism, as I acknowledge that probably wasn’t your intention at all if you even played a role in the formatting. I hope you found my criticisms somewhat constructive despite my perhaps more malicious intentions in writing this letter.
Regards,
A reader
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