UNDER THE MICROSCOPE SPECIAL
Your writing critiqued
James McCreet analyses three short samples of literary excellence
James McCreet
1. Suttree by Cormac McCarthy
And along the little ways in the rain and lightning came a troupe of squalid merrymakers1 bearing a caged wyvern on shoulderpoles and other alchemical game, chimeras and cacodemons skewered up on boarspears and a pharmacopeia of hellish condiments adorning a trestle and toted by trolls with an eldern gnome for guidon who shouted foul oaths from his mouthhole and a piper who piped a pipe of ploverbone and wore on his hip a glass flasket of some smoking fuel that yawed within viscid as quicksilver. A menosaur followed above on a string like a fourlegged garfish heliumfilled.
2. V by Thomas Pynchon
While the sun was up, he and a crew of Syrian acrobats and a trio from Port Said (dulcimer, Nubian drum, reed pipe)9 performed in a cleared space by the Ismailiyeh Canal, out in the suburbs near the slaughterhouse of Abbasiyeh. A fair. There were swings and a fearsome steamdriven carousel for the children; serpent-charmers, and hawkers of all refreshment: toasted seeds of abdelawi, limes, fried treacle, water flavoured with licorice or orange blossom, meat puddings.
3. Humboldt’s Gift by Saul Bellow
And to be a poet is a school thing, a skirt thing, a church thing15 The weakness of the spiritual powers is proved in the childishness, madness, drunkenness, and despair of these martyrs. Orpheus moved stones and trees. But a poet can’t perform a hysterectomy or send a vehicle out of the solar system. Miracle and power no longer belong to him.