The Road (Oprah's Book Club)
by Cormac McCarthy
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Book Summary Information
Author: Cormac McCarthyEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2007-03-28
ISBN: 0307387895
Number of pages: 287
Publisher: Vintage Books
Book Reviews of The Road (Oprah's Book Club)
Book Review: A Critical Review: Bad Times and Good Words on The Road
Summary: 5 Stars
Memories of a times past, images of houses and trees, and a baby atop a spit--all covered in a gray, lifeless, consuming ash generated from the waning beauty of the world. This is the beauty of The Road, released in 2006 and winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 2007. But wait, who wants to read almost 300 pages of gloom? Is a new demographic of literary masochists emerging? Quite the contrary. Cormac McCarthy, authoring his tenth novel and as soft-hearted as he is sadistic in his approach, cuts through the thick veil of darkness that is his subject matter to grab the reader's mind as much as their heart. He does so not with a foreshadowed light or concluding happiness which brings meaning to all that precedes it (there's none here), but by displaying language in its bare-bones, nearly intuitive meaning (if that's at all possible) throughout.
That doesn't mean The Road is not a challenging, at times purposefully torturous read. Wordsmiths have a dictionary on hand, close readers get ready to travel back and forth between a set of periods numerous times, and upbeat folks admit to yourself Nietzsche wasn't far from the truth in saying, "when you look long into the abyss, the abyss also looks into you." Those prerequisites listed, each narrative choice whether related to plot, description, or dialogue in The Road is an integral part of Cormac's method to show and not just tell the reader either about the surprises, devastating lows, drawn out limbos, or occasional highs of a world after the apocalypse. The desire to turn the page comes not from discovering how the apocalypse came about but what it "uncovers", the Greek root of the word, about human interaction reduced to its essence: love and the void of it.
The Road has a fair amount of action as the boy and his vigilant father travel south to escape the weather, bleak to the point that trees spontaneously keel over, long ridden of birds, because of "days more gray each one that had gone before"; but the overall frequency of, and pacing during the action make it a second consideration to narrative description and dialogue. A fight doesn't lurk around every bend, but an undeniable anticipation sits in the back of the reader's mind. As the man walks out into open fields, the boy lies shivering in one place too long or with a fire built by his father, aware it is too close to the road, we feel someone watching. But most often it proves only to be us, reading a narrative in 3rd person.
Just as 40 or 50 pages have past since the last skirmish, escaped by ducking out, another pops up to keep the possibility alive; and just as the youth enters another house, in search of food with his father, his once correct instinct that danger awaits is an over-reaction. How believable is it for a man and his son to fight off hordes of marauders with only two bullets, plastic bags wrapped around their feet, and a bulbous shopping cart in tow? In the case that they did, the marauders might as well be zombies. Survival means avoidance when at all possible, and, in keeping with a realistic approach, we witness it much more often. Moving away from action, the plot is so simple that you already understand it at this point in the review.
Even if the reader is not fond of the elaborate, articulately described landscapes, anything but beautiful themselves, with recurring images of "gray", "dark", and "ash", he or she realizes or should be aware that repetition is a tool perhaps stronger than novelty. McCarthy wrote The Road in 3rd person, with a privileged narrator oftentimes accessing the thoughts and inhabiting the perspective of the man. Unlike his son, the man knew the world before its devastation. In this sense, we share his experience. Repetition of bleak imagery, stated differently because of changing scenery serves to detail the unique contours of the land, as a removed narrator might, while still capturing the feeling of utter hopelessness that pervades it based on a pre-apocalyptic understanding of the world. With a son to feed, shelter, and keep out of harms way as best as possible, day-dreams inspired by a photograph of his dead wife, and nightmares of both the people he loves abandoning the world at their own hands or another's it's easy to understand why every new landscape is not so pretty. It's as difficult and droning at times to read the novel as it is for the man to survey the land before him; that's the point. The lack of any chapters or substantial breaks only adds to readers dragging their feet alongside the boy and man.
Bringing the question of what it means to exist down to a smaller unit, McCarthy has a way of writing sentences that do just that, simply. Take, for example, page six where the narrator states, "Below in the little valley the still gray serpentine of a river." That's it? That's a sentence? Slap a "flowed" in the middle or at the end and you have a sentence any author might write. But Cormac McCarthy isn't just any author. Serpentine is a verb but it functions intuitively and at the same time as an adjective because many of his other "sentences," such as "Along the shore a burden of dead reeds", have no verb at all. These sentences embody subjects with an agency, either inside or outside itself, left indeterminate. Like the river, the man can't quite touch or put words to why it is what he does, but survives to care for his son nonetheless.
Despite various, interspersed dialogues, McCarthy chooses to omit quotations as a way of unifying that which is said and that which is written giving each equal credence and in line with his minimalist style. It is in the boy's telling, short-winded debates with his father about whether to give a food handout to a nearly blind man or leave the clothes on a thief's back that readers learn he looks forward while the man, watching the cart's side view mirrors for "bad guys" or over his shoulder at his own demons, is obsessed with the past. This obsession, something the man might label as awareness, is what pushes him to inhumane acts but necessarily keeps his boy alive. The continuation stops there though. Like father, unlike son. There is hope for truly "good guys" on the horizon even in a generation that knows only the road.
In closing, to draw on a scene in The Road, Cormac McCarthy is the man and we are his son, washed of the grime that literature acutely adhering to forms, or bad literature, leaves on us all. He immerses us in refreshing, at times suffocating language that exists without context--in manifold meanings--as confusing and miraculous as the world that birthed it. You, the reader, tell him what it means as a boy discovering the world for the first time, unaware that something ravaged it at all if it weren't for survivors. At times it can seem a bit overwhelming, but if you're willing to be lifted up by an ineffable force, scared out of your wits from some false anticipations, and dragged along to the point that you feel beaten down get a copy of The Road. If you're not, keep reading Jodi Picoult and Twilight novels.
Summary of The Road (Oprah's Book Club)
NATIONAL BESTSELLERPULITZER PRIZE WINNERNational Book Critic's Circle Award FinalistA New York Times Notable BookOne of the Best Books of the YearThe Boston Globe, The Christian Science Monitor, The Denver Post, The Kansas City Star, Los Angeles Times, New York, People, Rocky Mountain News, Time, The Village Voice, The Washington PostThe searing, postapocalyptic novel destined to become Cormac McCarthy's masterpiece.A father and his son walk alone through burned America. Nothing moves in the ravaged landscape save the ash on the wind. It is cold enough to crack stones, and when the snow falls it is gray. The sky is dark. Their destination is the coast, although they don't know what, if anything, awaits them there. They have nothing; just a pistol to defend themselves against the lawless bands that stalk the road, the clothes they are wearing, a cart of scavenged food-?and each other.The Road is the profoundly moving story of a journey. It boldly imagines a future in which no hope remains, but in which the father and his son, "each the other's world entire," are sustained by love. Awesome in the totality of its vision, it is an unflinching meditation on the worst and the best that we are capable of: ultimate destructiveness, desperate tenacity, and the tenderness that keeps two people alive in the face of total devastation.Best known for his Border Trilogy, hailed in the San Francisco Chronicle as "an American classic to stand with the finest literary achievements of the century," Cormac McCarthy has written ten rich and often brutal novels, including the bestselling No Country for Old Men, and The Road. Profoundly dark, told in spare, searing prose, The Road is a post-apocalyptic masterpiece, one of the best books we've read this year, but in case you need a second (and expert) opinion, we asked Dennis Lehane, author of equally rich, occasionally bleak and brutal novels, to read it and give us his take. Read his glowing review below. --Daphne Durham
Guest Reviewer: Dennis Lehane
Dennis Lehane, master of the hard-boiled thriller, generated a cult following with his series about private investigators Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro, wowed readers with the intense and gut-wrenching Mystic River, blew fans all away with the mind-bending Shutter Island, and switches gears with Coronado, his new collection of gritty short stories (and one play). Cormac McCarthy sets his new novel, The Road, in a post-apocalyptic blight of gray skies that drizzle ash, a world in which all matter of wildlife is extinct, starvation is not only prevalent but nearly all-encompassing, and marauding bands of cannibals roam the environment with pieces of human flesh stuck between their teeth. If this sounds oppressive and dispiriting, it is. McCarthy may have just set to paper the definitive vision of the world after nuclear war, and in this recent age of relentless saber-rattling by the global powers, it's not much of a leap to feel his vision could be not far off the mark nor, sadly, right around the corner. Stealing across this horrific (and that's the only word for it) landscape are an unnamed man and his emaciated son, a boy probably around the age of ten. It is the love the father feels for his son, a love as deep and acute as his grief, that could surprise readers of McCarthy's previous work. McCarthy's Gnostic impressions of mankind have left very little place for love. In fact that greatest love affair in any of his novels, I would argue, occurs between the Billy Parham and the wolf in The Crossing. But here the love of a desperate father for his sickly son transcends all else. McCarthy has always written about the battle between light and darkness; the darkness usually comprises 99.9% of the world, while any illumination is the weak shaft thrown by a penlight running low on batteries. In The Road, those batteries are almost out--the entire world is, quite literally, dying--so the final affirmation of hope in the novel's closing pages is all the more shocking and maybe all the more enduring as the boy takes all of his father's (and McCarthy's) rage at the hopeless folly of man and lays it down, lifting up, in its place, the oddest of all things: faith. --Dennis Lehane
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