Simpler is Better

Relative to my post above, is “good” writing really simple writing? My Mighty Brain objects, “No way! I’m too smart to write simple prose!” But, maybe simpler is better.

To wit:

Recently, I’ve been reading Cormac McCarthy – at the suggestion of a writing buddy. I read The Road and No Country For Old Men  and loved them both. The writing was, well, simple – and satisfying. Now, one of my rules is that when I find a new author (new to me, at least), try to consume three of his/her works before passing judgment on the quality of the writing. Well, the third McCarthy book I picked up was All The Pretty Horses. I hated it! In fact, I put it down after about 10 pages (and you should know that one of my other rules is that I never stop reading a book I’ve started). I did more than put it down. I put it in the garbage. No joke. So . . . I thought: I wonder how All the Pretty Horses scores on my readability stats listed in the post above. Here’s a section from All the Pretty Horses:

In the evening he saddled his horse and rode out west from the house. The wind was much abated and it was very cold and the sun sat blood red and elliptic under the reefs of bloodred cloud before him. He rode where he would always choose to ride, out where the western fork of the old Comanche road coming down out of the Kiowa country to the north passed through the westernmost section of the ranch and you could see the faint trace of it bearing south over the low prairie that lay between the north and middle forks of the Concho River. At the hour he’d always choose when the shadows were long and the ancient road was shaped before him in the rose and canted light like a dream of the past where the painted ponies and the riders of that lost nation came down out of the north with their faces chalked and their long hair plaited and each armed for war which was their life and the women and children and women with children at their breasts all of them pledged in blood and redeemable in blood only. When the wind was in the north you could hear them, the horses and the breath of the horses and the horses’ hooves that were shod in rawhide and the rattle of lances and the constant drag of the travois poles in the sand like the passing of some enormous serpent and the young boys  naked on wild horses jaunty as circus riders and hazing wild horses before them and the dogs trotting with their tongues aloll and footslaves following half naked and sorely burdened and above all the low chant of their traveling song which the riders sang as they rode, nation and ghost of nation passing in a soft chorale across that mineral waste to darkness bearing lost to all history and all remembrance like a grail in the sum of their secular and transitory and violent lives.

Here are the scores for this section:

Flesch Reading Ease Score:  30.5

Percentage of passive sentences: 25%

Grade-level: 25.5

Now, I don’t even think there is a 25^th grade. Well, maybe for my brother-in-law the liver transplant surgeon. That guy was in school until he was about 35. Anyway, All the Pretty Horses won the National Book Award, so what do I know? I know what I like, and it’s simple writing.