MixedBook SlutThe first section of C devotes several pages to the verse pageant Serge later hears in the guns of war ... No one dies, or even gets bad news. So we read through these pages guessing at their point, finally to realize that McCarthy wants to illustrate that human communication was broken before machines got involved. I would have preferred a more profound dramatization of that concept, but I might not be completely sympathetic to the strictest modernist and postmodern notions ... Serge is what some would call a flat character ... McCarthy cannot employ this device and let us experience Serge\'s flatness without highlighting it repeatedly ... I dislike the bludgeoning aspect of McCarthy\'s approach, even if it is parody ... One aspect of C that intrigued me was that Serge\'s lack of depth is something of a narrative ruse. We see from his interactions with other people that our hero can be sarcastic, bluntly seductive, and guileful. He\'s less remote from people than the narrator\'s portrait of Serge\'s inner life suggests ... The gorgeous sentences woven into C bring to mind a term like lyrical postmodernism ... This brings us to the stranger possibility cited before, that C is a brilliant hoax ... This artist plays the role of overzealous postmodern novelist with insouciant accuracy. Why turn a once-revolutionary movement into an orthodoxy, other than to kill it?
