Cormac McCarthy

Charlize Theron might have to draw on some of her previous Aeon Flux talents to fight the cannibals with Viggo Mortensen in the bigscreen adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's bestselling novel The Road. Her part is small and mostly played in flashback, but Ms. Theron is apparently a big fan of the book and wanted to work with producer Nick Wechsler on the project. They were paired in 2000 for The Yard.  read more »

Meet George Jetson; Jane, his wife.    read more »

It looks like Cormac McCarthy is wasting away.  read more »

No Country for Old Men, by Cormac McCarthy. Alfred A. Knopf, 309 pages, $24.95.    read more »

No Country for Old Men, by Cormac McCarthy. Alfred A.  read more »

Reviewing Cormac McCarthy's No Country for Old Men in today's New York Times, reviewer Michiko Kakutani laments that the novel's "lugubrious passages...gain ascendency as the book progresses."

And Kakutani knows from ascendant lugubriousness. Six days earlier, the Pulitzer-winning critic labeled John Irving's latest work, Until I Find You, "bloated and lugubrious." Media Mob reader Peter Van Allen writes in to point out the recurring pattern: Besides McCarthy and Irving, Kakutani has applied the "lugubrious" label to Graham Swift, Don DeLillo, Mark Helprin, J.M. Coetzee and many more.

"Who will point out to Kakutani that she's overused 'lugubrious'?" Van Allen writes.

Consider it done. A quick search turns up 41 instances of "lugubrious," "lugubriously," or "lugubriousness" in Kakutani's work--about two a year, on average. At her peak, in 1998, she was using it approximately every two months. Other targets of the term have included Philip Roth, A.S. Byatt, Zola and John Kerry.

Her favorite victim appears to be Tim O'Brien. In 1994, criticizing his Lake of the Woods, Kakutani declared that it "it devolves into a painful collection of portentous clichés reminiscent of his lugubrious 1985 novel, The Nuclear Age." Four years later, she declared that the narrator of O'Brien's Tomcat in Love was "reminiscent of the tedious, long-winded hero of Mr. O'Brien's lugubrious 1985 novel The Nuclear Age." Four more years, and it was Mr. O'Brien's July, July claiming its own "lugubrious."

It's not Kakutani's only lexical rut--nor even her first in the L's. In a widely read 2002 New York magazine piece, Matt Gross noted her overreliance on "limn."  read more »

Kakutani also describes those "lugubrious" McCarthy passages as "reminiscent of the most pretentious sections of earlier McCarthy novels." That's the third time she's called something "pretentious" since June 14.

--Gabriel Sherman

A Reader's Manifesto: An Attack on the Growing Pretentiousness in AmericanLiterary Prose , by B. R.  read more »

Increasingly, it seems, New Yorkers try to get out of throwing a New Year's Eve party-yet still rece  read more »

Cities of the Plain , by Cormac McCarthy. Alfred A.  read more »

For a little over a week now, the most coveted invitation in the Manhattan magazine world has been f  read more »

For a little over a week now, the most coveted invitation in the Manhattan magazine world has been f  read more »