Just stumbled across this conversation between the two and found this part of the interview interesting since Cormac McCarthy is my favorite living American author, Blood Meridian is my favorite book of his, and Wallace is quickly becoming one of my favorite modern writers.
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GVS: Who are some of your favorite writers?
DFW: You're really wielding the old baton on this aren't you? To be honest... my faves?
GVS: Yeah.
DFW: Ones that people don't know all that well? Oh, that's right this is a British magazine so they won't have heard of a lot of these. Cormac McCarthy, have you read "Blood Meridian"? It's literally the western to end all westerns. Probably the most horrifying book of this century, at least fiction. But it is also, this guy, I can't figure out he gets away with it, he basically writes King James English, I mean, he practically uses Old English thou's and thine's and it comes off absolutely beautifully and unmannered and ungratuitous. He's got another one called "Suttree," God that one, God that would make a fantastic movie.
GVS: (perks up) What's it called?
DFW: It's called "Suttree."
GVS: How do you spell that?
DFW: S-u-t-t-r-e-e. It came out, oh golly, mid 70s. But it's about a down and out college educated man named Cornelius Suttree who has kind of abandoned everything to live in a houseboat in Knoxville, Tennessee in the late 40s and early 50s and all of his friends in his entire world are derelicts and retards and twisted people. It's about four hundred pages of the most dense lapidary prose you can imagine about characters who are at the level of functional idiots and are drinking rot-gut. "Suttree" is the book that got him a MacArthur grant and he used the MacArthur to go to Mexico and do the research for "Blood Meridian."
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