Get Me Rewrite

I just finished reading No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy. (I have heard there is a movie out with the same name, but I have not seen it).

On the cover appears a blurb from the WaPo, probably an excerpt from their review, reading in part: "The most accessible of all his works."

Given this book's abhorrence of apostrophes in contractions and sheer refusal to use quotation marks around passages of dialog, I can only assume this means McCarthy's previous books were printed in four-point type, using yellow ink.

It was a pretty entertaining yarn, especially if you like a bleak mood and a high body count, which I do, but the affectation of improper punctuation really distracted me. If I have to struggle to read a piece of fiction for a reason like this, all it does is prevent me from losing myself in the story. I feel like the author is standing over my shoulder, saying, "Look at me! I'm writing! Aren't I clever?"

It's one thing to make mistakes on purpose when writing in the first person, a la Flowers for Algernon; it's quite another to do so when writing in the third. The narrator has the God's eye view, right? You'd think God would know something about proper punctuation.