Matt Damon plays John Grady Cole?

I just finished (yes on Sunday night) the first 30 pages of All the Pretty Horses. Cormac McCarthy has definitely succeeded in confusing me, at least to the point of making me read every other passage twice. The sentences just flow together, as it always seems like the novel goes from describing the color of the sky to the smell of the candles…all within the same punctuation mark. Also, when the dialogue, or McCarthy’s version of dialogue, gets going it can get difficult to tell which character is actually saying the lines. The identifiers are few and far between and the somewhat excessive use of pronouns leads me to frustration. So far, however, the description of the country setting has been thoughtful. And the protagonist, John Grady Cole, has been characterized deeply and colorfully. Despite the long and sometimes confusing passages and truncated dialogue between characters, the novel has been an easy read thus far. (If the mark was 150 words I hit it before this afterthought.)