It s like a lot of things, said the smith. He was sorting through handles standing in a barrel. Do what, said Ballard. Many of McCarthy s sentences are like little poems. They appear to be cut, machined, tempered for toughness.
Many sentences astonish with a turn, a word choice, and then appear to be inevitable.
McCarthy can move quickly from the epigrammatic and compact, to an elevated and polyrythmic prose. Here are three sentences from near the end of Child of God . He watched an empty wagon come up the valley below him, distant clatter of it, the mule pausing in the ford and the clatter of the immobile wagon rolling on regardless as if the sound authored the substance, until it had all reached his ears. Squatting there he let his head drop between his knees and he began to cry. He had resolved himself to ride on for he could not turn back and the world that day was as lovely as any day that ever was and he was riding to his death.