How’s this for imagery:
"They crossed a pasture where grackles blue and metallic in the sun were turning up dried cowpats for the worms beneath and they went on past the back side of a junklot with the sun wearing hard upon them and upon the tarpaper roof of the parts shack and upon the endless fenders and lids of wrecked cars that lay curing paintlorn in the hot and weedy reeks."
Now "they" is Suttree and Reese–a family man who talked Suttree into following him downriver with promises of great wealth from mussel pearls, which didn’t quite pan out–and they are making their way back home early on a Sunday morning after a Saturday night filled with booze and whorin’.
Can’t you just feel their achin’ heads and wayward walkin’?
One of McCarthy’s techniques, as I see it, is to set the pace of an event and give it its import and meaning by sentence length and punctuation–or lack thereof. The above is truly a run-on sentence (and I love McCarthy for it!) unbroken by commas and yet the mouthful is still just enough to read without becoming tiresome. The necessary breaths of the reader are limited to the reader–McCarthy doesn’t tell us to stop before each "and" unless we need to. And, if we don’t need to, the pace we keep is exactly the same as that of Suttree and Reese as they weave their way home.
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology