Cormac McCarthy loves a good diner

I decided to read Suttree, an excellent novel, after reading an essay by Roger Ebert [0]. The essay is about his losing his ability to eat, taste, and speak due to cancer, and how it has expanded his writing experience, and how he's ultimately content. He writes:

At first when I could not speak, I could not read easily, because sedation had undermined my attention span. I was depressed. I could turn on the TV, but why? My wife brought a wonderful DVD player to my hospital room, but I could not make myself watch movies. My life was stale and profitless. I would spend hours in a murky stupor. Knowing I had always been reading a book, my concerned wife began reading to me: Jane Austen, Charles Dickens.

Curiously, my love of reading finally returned after I picked up Cormac McCarthy's Suttree, a book I had already read not long before my first surgery. Now I read it two more times. I was not "reading the same book." I was reentering the same experience, the same occult and visionary prose, the life of Suttree so urgently evoked. As rarely before, a book became tactile to me. When Suttree on his houseboat pulled a cord and brought up a bottle of orange soda pop from the cool river, I savored it. I could no longer taste. I tasted it more sharply than any soda I've ever really had. When Suttree stopped at the bus station for a grilled cheese, I ate it, and the pickle, and drank the black coffee. I began to live through this desperate man's sad life.

[0]: https://www.rogerebert.com/roger-ebert/i-think-im-musing-my-...

The author mentioned that McCarthy had placed a character at Mosca's. I grew up down the road from Mosca's and to this day have never eaten there. Growing up, everyone used to talk about the mobsters (Carlos Marcello and associates) who would show up to eat at the establishment. It was only open on the weekends, and you can definitely drive right past the place without even noticing that it's there. A little white building capable of holding maybe 2 dozen patrons at its best, but supposedly some of the best Italian food you can find anywhere in the US.

It's funny that the author mentions that Mosca's didn't serve clams. Growing up, clams to people in the area were garbage food and not worth messing with because of all the other seafood options. Not because of any pretense, mind you. It's just that when families wanted to have unpaved driveways and road construction crews wanted to use a filler of sorts to make for temporary roadways, down there we used dredged clam shells. I know that at some point, it went out of practice... my grandparents' drive was covered in clam shells... and I distinctly remember bailing on my bike one day while attempting to ride down to the crevasse pond and getting a clam shell stuck in my knee. Had to dig that out with a pocket knife and some pliers. I still went on my way to fish after that, and to this day am amazed by my good fortune of not catching an infection because I still have the scar.

I'm a big fan of his Yelp reviews[1].

[1] https://yelpingwithcormac.tumblr.com/post/12634112681/the-ta...

I’ve noticed this too about David Lynch. McCarthy and Lynch write about very different topics and for different mediums but both writer’s works resonate with me in similar ways.

Diners to me feel like Toll Houses or waystations between worlds or along passages between worlds. There is something that feels pivotal about them even though they are like stasis chambers of archived milieus.

“There’s a man who likes eggs with his pepper.”

I think of this line any time I put pepper on my eggs.

see also The Philosophy and Physics of Cormac McCarthy with Patrick O'Connor

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/hermitix/id1437997652?...

This prompted me to seek out and find blog posts and Reddit screeds by other readers who, like myself, picked up All the Pretty Horses, thought it was awful, and have been reliably confused by the Cormac MaCarthy's fame and success ever since.

Refreshingly, I'm not alone!