Cormac McCarthy is best known for No Country for Old Men (made into a film that can genuinely terrify the audience) and The Road, a bleak tale of perseverance in post-apocalyptic America. I simply wish to draw attention to one feature of McCarthy’s writing: his minimalism and cut-down, cut-back style. It is a poetics akin to Lincoln in the Gettysburg Address. It is as if he is a sculptor of words, excising excess to give a bare-bones text that is the more powerful for being spare. As I finished reading The Road, that story of a journey across a greyed-out…