Cormac McCarthy’s The Crossing is an uneven story of a young man drifting from human contact into an abstracted, shadowy world. The writing can be riveting: East and to the south there was water on the flats and two sandhill cranes stood tethered to their reflections out there in the last of the day’s light like statues of such birds in some waste of a garden where calamity had swept all else away. (171)However the prose get bogged down by McCarthy’s repetitive tendencies: His pale hair looked white. He looked fourteen going on some age that never was. He looked as if he’d been sitting there and God had made the trees and rocks around him. He looked like his own reincarnation and then his own again. Above all else he looked to be filled with a terrible sadness. (177)