Wyatt Mason in The New York Times:
It’s the very smallest things in a work of art that draw us in and seize us, that stick in the memory, call us back, make us feel that this is a masterpiece, which is only a way of saying it’s a thing that we love beyond measure.
Most of my books are in the office where I teach, but I have a small bookcase at home where the books that mean the most to me live. On that little shelf, you’ll find Christina Stead’s “The Man Who Loved Children,” Bohumil Hrabal’s “All My Cats,” William Gaddis’s “The Recognitions.” The only time I struggled was when it came to Cormac McCarthy. There were too many choices. Eventually, I settled on his first novel, “The Orchard Keeper” (1965). Midway through, there’s a moment that couldn’t be more common — a young man walks toward a house — but the way McCarthy sees it is utterly uncommon:
The car pulled away trailing ropy plumes of smoke, the one red taillight bobbing. He turned toward the house, lightless and archaic among the crumbling oaks, crossed the frosted yard. His shadow swept upward to the lean-to roof, dangled from a limb, upward again, laced with branches, stood suddenly upon the roof. He slid downward over the eaves and disappeared in the black square of the gable window.
McCarthy makes so many simple, thrilling choices here: smoke, “ropy” in its twisting; a red taillight, “bobbing” like a head.
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