The Road by Cormac McCarthy is a Post-Apocalyptic Fiction Story and a Modern Classic!

The setting, an unidentified location in what was once known as the United States, is now part of a post-apocalyptic world. A nameless disaster has turned the landscape into a charred wasteland. It's ashen and cold, a coldness that goes straight through you.

All wildlife has disappeared, what remains is a threatening wildness roaming through the land. It's a tangible shift in morality as society continues to disintegrate.

The man with his young son are constantly on the move and his focus is on their daily survival, at all costs. It's a constant struggle to find food, warmth, and safeness. The son doesn't understand how survival has altered the lines between right and wrong and he has many questions for the man in a quest for reassurance...

The Road is a Post-Apocalyptic Fiction story written by Cormac McCarthy that received the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction in 2007. After listening to the audiobook narrated by Tom Stechschulte, there is no question in my mind why this book is worthy of this award and recognized as a Modern Classic within the Post-Apocalyptic Fiction genre.

McCarthy's writing is simple, the sentences are brief, and the dialogue clipped. It's a writing style that makes the emotions feel intentionally reserved and it sets the tone of the story. The man and the boy are the two main characters with few secondary characters seen or heard from along their arduous journey on the road to the coast. Often without food for days, chronically exhausted, they travel side-by-side without much conversation, yet their connection is undeniably palpable.

How does a story of hopelessness and darkness keep the reader as enthralled as I was? My thoughts go to the author's minimally descriptive prose, poetic writing, and storytelling. This is a story of a father's love for his son as much as it is one about post-apocalyptic survival. The quiet, endearing, and raw emotions of this story are what pulls this reader into the story, like a magnet.

The Road is a Post-Apocalyptic Fiction story I will remember as one that is as minimal and stark as it is powerful and thought-provoking. This beautifully written story will immediately take a place of honor on my "favorites" shelf and I highly recommend it to everyone who reads this review!

5⭐

Cormac McCarthy died yesterday, and I just heard the wonderful John Banville reminiscing about his famously private friend. He said McCarthy had no small talk, didn't like book talk, and "You did not have many laughs with Cormac. He did not see the world as a comic place, as I do". What most struck me, especially as it's so relevant to this novel, is what conversation was like:
"There were long, long silences. But they were interesting silences."


Review, 2009

Phew. This is a brilliant, bleak, beautiful book, but an emotionally harrowing one, albeit with uplifting aspects (they always cling to a sliver of hope, however tenuous).

Plot

There isn't much. But that's fine by me. In the near future, a man and his son traipse south, across a cold, barren, ash-ridden and abandoned land, pushing all their worldly goods in a wonky shopping trolley. They scavenge to survive and are ever-fearful of attack, especially as some of the few survivors have resorted to cannibalism.

Much of the time almost nothing happens, yet that makes it all the more compelling.

The boy is very imaginative, empathetic, moral and scared - a difficult combination in the circumstances. There is a deep love and care between man and boy, each projecting their own survival instinct on to the other. In their anxiety, aspects of their relationship take on a ritualistic tone, and some of their conversations are almost liturgical, invariably ending with an assurance that they're the "good guys" and things will be "okay", yet without becoming banal.

Sometimes they are more wary of being seen than others, and at one point I wondered how much was "real" and how much might be imagined or paranoia, but that doubt passed. Whatever disaster caused the destruction (it is never explained) was some years before and the father realises that despite their closeness, in some ways "to the boy he was himself an alien. A being from a planet that no longer existed."


Image: "The snow fell nor did it cease to fall" (Source)

Writing style

Very distinctive and controversial. It is written in a sparse, somewhat poetic style ("cold autistic dark"), often detached (the characters are never named) and fragmented, to match the setting of the book. Even quotation marks and apostrophes are almost absent (used only where their absence might create ambiguity, e.g. we're and were).

Initially, I found this pared down language and especially punctuation distracting and infuriating, but when I let go of that, treated it as more of a poem, the minimalism became integral to my appreciation. In fact, it somehow enhances the impact of the story, rather than distracting from it.

If it were typset as a prose poem, it might raise fewer hackles. In fact I think I think one reason some people don't "get" this book is that they read it as a novel that hasn't been proofread, rather than immersing themselves in it as a prose poem.

Much has been made of the intriguingly odd phrase "The snow fell nor did it cease to fall", which leapt off the page at me and is also discussed on Language Log: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/....

More McCarthy?

A film is coming out in the autumn. It could be excellent, but if they try to make it too cheerful, it would lose its purpose.
UPDATE: I saw the film, and was impressed (and surprised), but still prefer the book.

Having enjoyed this, I had high hopes for Outer Dark, but unfortunately I really didn't like that. See my review HERE.

I was unsure whether to read more Cormac McCarthy after that, but in 2022 I read the first of The Border Trilogy, All The Pretty Horses There was much to admire, but I didn't love it and won't read the rest. See my review HERE.

Banville hailed Blood Meridian, or, the Evening Redness in the West as worthy of being hailed as McCarthy's best, but he also strongly recommended the short and lesser-known early work, Child of God. I've had mixed experience of McCarthy, but I love Banville, so maybe, just maybe...

NON C’È NESSUN DIO E NOI SIAMO I SUOI PROFETI


”The Road” dell’australiano John Hillcoat, con il magnifico australiano Viggo Mortensen, e la splendida sudafricana Charlize Theron, la canadese Molly Parker, l’australiano d’adozione Guy Pearce, e Robert Duvall. 2009

In un mondo desaturato trionfo del grigio, pieno di cenere polvere e fumo, che costringe i pochi rimasti a vestire mascherine, in un mondo con più castigo che delitto e i giorni contati, dove sopravvivere è meno auspicabile della morte, dove alzarsi la mattina è un autentico atto di coraggio, dove si prova invidia per i morti, dove 'la strada' non indica viaggio, avventura ricerca scoperta, ma fuga, paura, minaccia (infatti è meglio tenersi fuori dalla strada per evitare brutti incontri), in un mondo così, Cormac McCarthy il biblico, qui diventato apocalittico (o post-apocalittico), mette in scena una meravigliosa storia d'amore, straziante totale viscerale tra un padre (l'uomo) e suo figlio (il bambino).



È la grande invenzione di questo romanzo, considerato il suo capolavoro (a torto, secondo me: il suo libro migliore è da cercare tra i meridiani di sangue e la trilogia della frontiera), adattato per lo schermo in un film molto bello che ho visto due volte, e che paga pegno al testo da cui è tratto esclusivamente per il finale, questo sì, superiore sulla pagina.
Per un padre chioccia quale io sono, si è trattato di un viaggio lungo poco più di duecento pagine attraverso delizia e atrocità per approdare a un finale che non posso raccontare e quindi nemmeno commentare.



Non ero abituato a un Mccarthy così dedito al dialogo, nei suoi libri i personaggi mi sono sempre sembrati tutto meno che loquaci: invece, qui, la chiacchiera abbonda e non è la parte migliore del libro.


Quando ce ne saremo andati tutti qui resterà solo la morte, e anche lei avrà i giorni contati.

Il bambino ci provava a parlare con Dio, ma la cosa migliore era parlare con il padre, e infatti ci parlava e non lo dimenticava mai.

I really feel compelled to write up a review of McCarthy's The Road as this book really worked for me (for those of you who haven't read it, there are no real spoilers below, only random quotes and thematic commentary). I read it last night in one sitting. Hours of almost nonstop reading. I found it to be an excellent book on so many levels that I am at a loss as to where to begin. It was at once gripping, terrifying, utterly heart-wrenching, and completely beautiful. I have read most of McCarthy's other books and am already a big fan, but this one is different, perhaps his best in terms of lean, masterful prose, plot presentation, and flat-out brilliant storytelling.

Take this passage for example: "The blackness he woke to on those nights was sightless and impenetrable. A blackness to hurt your ears with listening. Often he had to get up. No sound but the wind in the bare blackened trees. He rose and stood tottering in that cold autistic dark with his arms outheld for balance while the vestibular calculations in his skull cranked out their reckonings. An old chronicle." Happy times! The word choice and imagery is classic McCarthy yet is leaner and more honed, tighter and in turn more intense. The whole book follows this pattern. No word, not a single one, is extraneous. This is perhaps my favorite single sentence in the book: "By day the banished sun circles the earth like a grieving mother with a lamp." I just love that.

Clearly this book struck a chord with me due to the two protagonists and their predicament, a father and his young son struggling in a post-apocalyptic world. To say I could identify with their interactions would be a huge understatement. McCarthy absolutely nails their dialog, making me marvel at how well he has mastered presenting on a page the way we communicate (it isn't exactly how we talk, of course, it just seems that way. Through some sort of magic, he writes dialog that comes across more realistically than actual dialog. Witchcraft for sure.). The young son was especially well done and was most certainly the most complicated character in the book. McCarthy presents him as a sort of supernatural being (Christ figure?), of only the best sort, full of goodness, a thing not of the world in which he finds himself. He is effortlessly drawn down the path of the righteous throughout the book, as if he is God's right hand man. The reward appears, at least superficially, to be key moments of luck.

It almost wouldn't work from a literary standpoint if it didn't serve so well as a vehicle to reinforce the central theme of the book: the undeniable power of love over all else. The theme of love, mostly presented through the bond of the father and son, is so well done as to evoke strong emotions, even now, as I consider how to present its keen development throughout the novel. To be so desperate, in every way and at all times, and yet to survive and at times thrive, to persevere through terrible events of unbelievable horror (think Steven King's The Stand on steroids) would strike feelings of great, sad compassion in even the most tempered soul. But it is much more than that of course. Consider this passage, a speaking passage from father to son, spoken during one of the most tense and horrifying scenes in the book: "You wanted to know what the bad guys looked like. Now you know. It may happen again. My job is to take care of you. I was appointed to do that by God. I will kill anyone who touches you. Do you understand?" In this one passage, McCarthy shows the great contradiction in this theme of love, the idea that violence and beauty can spring fourth from the same well, can come from the same fountainhead. Interestingly, the father often resorts to violence in his role as a servant of love (he sees it as his duty, in a religious sense, as stated in the quote). Yet the boy never does and appears better for it, in so many ways, even in that terrible place. He is the embodiment of pure goodness, and sets up the other, better side of love, the side that is unsullied by the world, that never resorts to baseness and violence, that finds beauty in even to most unlikely of places. Like seeing a picture better when you hold it up to the light, the contrasts between these two sides is masterfully provided, page after page, in only the most well written and considered prose.

The often repeated promethean phrase "carrying the fire," agreed upon by the two protagonists as pretty much the whole point of their continuing, embodies this central theme. The boy is carrying the fire for us all, and is perhaps the most important survivor in that shattered world, bearing the torch of love for humanity to share when it is again ready. Not to belabor the point, but the way McCarthy handles this, all the way until the end, is nothing short of genius. Can you tell I liked the book yet? I am amazed that I missed this book for so long, me being a huge McCarthy fan and placing him squarely at the top of the "big four" (with DeLillo, Roth, and Pynchon). The book is so "it's own" that as soon as I felt myself feeling an influence (for example, I swore I smelled Hemmingway's Old Man and the Sea in terms of prose/theme, and the more terrifyingly cruel parts at times rang so much like Kosinski's The Painted Bird ), McCarthy would insert the perfect McCarthyism, solidly planting the flag (so to speak) of a phrase or sentence into the passage to claim it forever for himself, like a prosaic explorer figuratively pushing out into the unknown through deft assemblages of words and phases impossible to all but him (ok, that metaphor was way too much….time to wrap it up). Of course I have more to say but am beginning to risk (actually have already thoroughly risked) repeating myself and sounding like some deranged, McCarthy stalker-type. Check this one out. It is superior literature.

I just read some guy's review of The Road that contained the following:

"In the three hours that I read this book I found myself crying, laughing, shouting, and most of the time my lip was trembling. ... As soon as I finished it, I sat there feeling numb, but not in a bad way, actually sort of like I was high."

Wow, dude. I mean, really? Your lip was trembling? And you felt high? And your lip was trembling? Pherphuxake, what do you even say to someone like that?
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The Road by Cormac McCarthy is an awful, awful book. I have to consciously restrain myself from judging those of you who believe the book has merit. Don’t worry, the fact that I’m part of a very small minority in this regard (only the smartest 3% of my fellow Goodreads bibliophiles also gave The Road a one-star review) has not escaped me. I am nevertheless convinced of the objective correctness of my position—notwithstanding the inherent subjective nature of any literary discussion—and I will maintain with my dying breath that The Road should have been named The Rod because it represents nothing more than Cormac McCarthy’s attempt to proclaim to the world that he has a big literary dick.

I have constructed a list of factors that increase a book’s suck quotient and I fear The Road exhibits most of them. Let’s check my list and see which things appear in The Road:

• A plot that lacks clear beginning or ending (check)
• Important characters who don't grow or learn from their experiences (check)
• Important characters whose actions lack clear motivation (check)
• Scenes and dialogue that are repetitive or unoriginal (check)
• Violence and gore included for shock value (check)
• Locations and settings that are ambiguous (check)
• History and backstory that are ambiguous (check)
• Grammar and punctuation used in a pretentious or self-indulgent manner (check)
• Pronouns and punctuation used in an ambiguous manner (check)
• Metaphors and analogies that appear contrived, forced and disjointed (check)

Okay, to be fair The Road doesn’t exhibit most of the suck-quotient factors; it exhibits all of them. It's as though McCarthy deliberately designed his book to be the antithesis of what I think makes for quality reading.

Now before I get any further, let’s get a couple of things out of the way. Much is made of McCarthy’s failure to use quotation marks and other punctuation, with some finding it brilliant and some finding it pretentious and self-indulgent. I make my home in the pretensions-and-self-indulgent camp. In fact I find McCarthy’s treatment of punctuation nauseating; it is his way of saying:

“My words are so beautiful, perfect, and complete that they stand on their own. I require no punctuation to convey my meaning. Indeed my message is too powerful to be contained by the same convention that restricts the middling novelist, too important to suffer the vandalism of punctuation.”

Thus, leaving out punctuation can be not only confusing for the reader, but also revoltingly self-indulgent and arrogant. However, that being said, I don’t believe The Road sucks merely because it lacks quotation marks. I’m okay with such a tool if it’s used for a purpose that adds to the message being conveyed, à la Blindness. So punctuation is not the only suck-quotient factor here. Instead, I believe The Road sucks because it sucks every possible way a book can suck. The purposeless lack of quotation marks and other punctuation is merely one symptom of the enormity of the book’s suckitude.

It’s important to understand that this is not just a matter me disliking The Road. I have an almost vehement reaction to The Road and to the rather large group of slobbering, screaming, panties-throwing admirers. In the interest of intellectual honesty, I challenged myself to figure out why this is. Why can’t I just abhor The Road while letting other people have their moronic fun? Why must I look down on people who love The Road with a feeling of disgusted superiority? Why do I care if others enjoy the mental equivalent of dipping bread into horse diarrhea and pretending it’s award-winning fondue?

It took some soul-searching to learn the answer: I react vehemently to The Road because fans and critics of literature love to stroke McCarthy’s Rod, while works of science fiction—my favorite genre—are dismissed regardless of their merit. Critics praise The Road but glibly waive off sci-fi as a genre for people who never grew out of their childlike amusement for light sabers or their adolescent fascination with space battles. Sci-fi is relegated to its own awards and events, left out of consideration for broader literary honors, leaving me with the impression that the literary world does not perceive sci-fi to be real, legitimate literature. But from my point of view The Road is the adolescent work. By the standards under which I would judge a quality sci-fi novel (or any quality novel), The Road is shallow and simple, along with unoriginal and obvious. The Road is to my favorite sci-fi as a toddler’s splashing pool is to Lake Tahoe. It is beyond me how The Road can be the guest of honor while much deeper books with beautiful language and original, thought-provoking ideas are not even invited to the party because they happen to be sci-fi.

Of course the other 97% disagree with my assessment of The Road as shallow and unoriginal. They believe that I just didn't get it, that I couldn’t see past McCarthy’s prose and unconventional punctuation. They tell me The Road is rich and deep. They tell me to forget the quotation marks and the nameless characters and look at what McCarthy is trying to tell us. The Road tells us this, and it talks about that, and speaks to this other thing.

Then the 38% who gave The Road five stars lose themselves in their collective self-amplified group hysteria. “The Road is so so so great!” they yell in unison. “Please take my panties, Mr. McCarthy!” they yell at some imaginary stage. “Here, Mr. McCarthy please sign my boobs!” And that’s where I have to walk away.

The thing is, though, I didn’t have a difficult time seeing what The Road tells us and talks about and speaks to; I just didn't find any of it to be especially deep, enlightening, or insightful. The book was easy to read and simple to comprehend. It didn’t make me think. Everything was right there on the surface, served with a spoon, and what we were served had no flavor, no spice, no originality. So it’s not that The Road lacks all substance. If it weren’t for the nonstop nauseating self-indulgence I would have given it two stars and might recommend it to people who are new to the reading scene. My problem is that, for something so beloved and critically acclaimed, for something written by a writer with such talent, The Road fails utterly, a shell without substance that collapses in upon itself in a heap of triteness and unoriginality. To put it yet another way, The Road was just so goddamn boring.

I want a book that makes me pay attention and use my noggin. I want to work at peeling back layers and making connections. When I find them, I want the author's ideas and insights to be original, edifying, and thought-provoking. I want artful prose, relatable characters, realistic motivations, and poetic plot points. And guess what, I find no shortage of books on the sci-fi shelves that meet those criteria.

Now let’s see if we can tie things together. There are plenty of truly excellent books of contemporary literature; I have read and enjoyed several, including one or two that have touched me deeply. Likewise there are plenty of truly excellent books on the sci-fi genre. For some reason one genre is invited to the party and the other isn’t. I don’t know why that is, beyond an apparent assumption made by haughty critics and readers that sci-fi is for kids. Now, I’m not trying to say that all sci-fi is wonderful. There’s plenty of crappy sci-fi out there, just like there’s plenty of crap in any genre. My point is simply that, despite the dismissive attitude of many literary critics, the sci-fi shelves contain books that are as good as anything out there: books as rich and complex, as insightful and layered, as edifying and beautiful as anything in contemporary literature. So when something like The Road is hailed as a masterpiece while some truly brilliant works of sci-fi—works that could mop the floor with The Road in every facet— are acknowledged only by a roll of the eyes ... well, I think you see why I can’t be happy just to dislike The Road and let everyone else have their fun.

The Road, Cormac McCarthy

The Road is a 2006 post-apocalyptic novel by American writer Cormac McCarthy.

A father and his young son journey across post-apocalyptic America some years after an extinction event. Their names are never revealed in the story; they are simply called “the man” and “the boy.” The land is covered with ash and devoid of life.

The boy's mother, pregnant with him at the time of the disaster, is revealed to have committed suicide at some point before the story begins.

Realizing they cannot survive the winter, the man takes the boy south along empty roads towards the sea, carrying their meager possessions in their knapsacks and a supermarket cart.

The man is suffering from a serious cough and knows he is dying. He assures his son that they are “good guys” who are “carrying the fire”.

The pair have a revolver, but only two rounds. The father has taught the boy to use the gun on himself if necessary, to avoid falling into the hands of cannibals.

The father and son evade a traveling group of marauders. The father uses one of the rounds to kill a marauder who discovers them, disturbing the boy.

They flee the marauder's companions, abandoning most of their possessions. When they search a house for supplies, they discover a locked cellar containing captives whom cannibal gangs have been eating limb by limb, and flee into the woods.

As they near starvation, the pair discovers a concealed bunker filled with food, clothes, and other supplies. They stay there for several days, regaining their strength, and then move on, taking lots of supplies from the bunker with them in a new cart.

They encounter an elderly man with whom the boy insists they share food. Further along the road, they evade a group whose members include a pregnant woman, and soon after they discover an abandoned campsite with a newborn infant roasted on a spit. They soon run out of supplies again and begin to starve before finding a house containing more food to carry in their cart, but the man's condition worsens. ...

تاریخ نخستین خوانش: هفدهم نوامبر سال2010میلادی

عنوان: جاده؛ نویسنده: کورمک مککارتی؛ مترجم ایرج مثال آذر؛ ویراستار زهرا مردانی؛ کرج، در دانش بهمن، سال1387؛ در261ص؛ شابک9789641740476؛ موضوع: داستانهای نویسندگان ایالات متحده آمریکا - سده 21م

عنوان: جاده؛ نویسنده: کورمک مککارتی؛ مترجم حسین نوش آذر؛ تهران، مروارید، سال1388؛ در273ص؛ شابک9789648838831؛ چاپ سوم سال1392؛

عنوان: جاده؛ نویسنده: کورمک مککارتی؛ مترجم زهرا طباطبائی؛ تهران، نشرگستر، سال1389؛ در273ص؛ شابک9786005883077؛

عنوان: جاده؛ نویسنده: کورمک مککارتی؛ مترجم: صنوبر رضاخانی؛ تهران، نشر هنوز، نشر قطره، سال1389؛ در251ص؛ شابک9786009140046؛ چاپ دیگر: تهران، نشر قطره، سال1390، در252ص؛ شابک9786001193361؛

عنوان: جاده؛ نویسنده: کورمک مککارتی؛ مترجم میترا گنگانی و دیگران؛ تبریز، تسنیم نگار، سال1390؛ در190ص؛ شابک9786009174816؛

جاده، روایتی از آخرالزمان است؛ شرح سفر پدر و پسری، در جهان ویران پس از یک انفجار اتمی ا­ست؛ با اینکه سال­ها از انفجار اتمی بگذشته، اما هیچ نشانه ­ای، از شکل­گیری دوباره ­ی حیات، بر روی زمین، به ­چشم نمی­آید؛ پدر و پسر، در طول سفر، با آدم­ها که روبرو می­شوند، از آن­ها می­گریزند، یا آنها را می­کشند؛ جز سفر، خوانشگر در رمان، با هیچ طرح روایی دیگر، مواجه نیست؛ تنها یک زمان و مکان وجود دارد؛ قلمرو روایت، مثل هاله ی سبزرنگ دوربین­های خبری، در اطراف پدر و پسر است؛ و از آن فراتر نمی­رود؛ روایت، سرگرم ارائه ی گزارش جزیی و دقیق، از رفتار آن دو است؛ چشم انداز طبیعت «تهی»، «ویران» و خرابه؛ با گزاره ­های قطعی، و ساده، اما با حوصله، گزارش می­شود؛ هیچ چیزی، شبیه چیز دیگر نیست، زیرا احتمالاً آن دومی، دیگر وجود ندارد؛ با آرزوی صلح، بین انسانها، تا این بهشت زمین نیز، هرگزی انسان را، به بیرون از خویش، پرتاب نکند؛

نقل از متن: (از میان گل و لای گذشتند، و به جاده برگشتند؛ بوی خاک و خاکستر نمناک، توی باران شناور بود؛ آب سیاه، توی گودال کنار جاده، جریان داشت؛ آبی که از درون آب گذری فلزی، به داخل یک گودال، مکیده‌ می‌شود؛ گوزنی پلاستیکی، وسط یک حیاط افتاده بود؛ اواخر روز بعد، وارد شهر کوچکی شدند؛ سه مرد از پشت کامیونی بیرون آمدند، و توی جاده، مقابل‌شان ایستادند؛ مردانی لاغر، که لباس‌هایی مندرس، به تن داشتند، و لوله ‌ای در دست، از آن‌ها پرسیدند: توی چرخ چی دارین؟ مرد تپانچه ‌اش را، به سوی آن‌ها گرفت؛ ایستادند؛ پسرک گوشه ‌ی کتش را چسبید؛ هیچکس حرفی نزد؛ چرخ ‌دستی را جلو انداخت، و با هم کنار جاده رفتند؛ چرخ را دست پسرک داد؛ عقب عقب می‌رفت، و تپانچه را، همچنان به سمت مردان، نگاه داشته بود؛ می‌کوشید هم‌چون قاتلی حرفه ‌ای، به نظر برسد، اما قلبش، به شدت می‌تپید، و می‌دانست، که سرفه ‌اش خواهد گرفت؛ دوباره، وسط جاده آمدند، و ایستادند، و آن‌ها را نظاره ‌کردند؛ مرد تپانچه را، توی کمرش گذاشت، و برگشت و چرخ‌دستی را گرفت؛ بالای بلندی که رسیدند، مرد برگشت و دید، که آن‌ها هنوز همانجا ایستاده ‌اند؛ از پسرک خواست، تا چرخ را هل بدهد؛ از حیاطی گذشت، و از مکانی مسلط به جاده، پایین را پایید؛ مردان رفته بودند؛ پسرک به شدت ترسیده بود؛ مرد تپانچه را روی برزنت روی چرخ گذاشت، و چرخ ‌دستی را گرفت، و به راه‌شان ادامه دادند؛ توی دشتی، روی زمین دراز کشیدند، و جاده را پاییدند، تا تاریک شد؛ اما کسی نیامد؛ هوا بسیار سرد بود؛ وقتی هوا کاملا تاریک شد، طوری که دیگر نمی‌شد جایی را دید، افتان و خیزان، به جاده برگشتند؛ مرد پتوها را بیرون آورد؛ خودشان را خوب پیچیدند، و دوباره، به راه افتادند؛ آسفالت را زیر پای‌شان دنبال می‌کردند؛ یکی از چرخ‌های چرخ ‌دستی، هر چند وقت یک‌بار، به جیرجیر می‌افتاد؛ اما کاری نمی‌شد کرد...؛ باز هم پیش رفتند؛ وقتی رعد و برق دیگری، ساحل را، روشن کرد، پسرک را دید، که خم شده بود، و با خودش زمزمه می‌کرد؛ کوشید، رد پاهایشان را دوباره ببیند، اما نتوانست؛ سرعت باد بیش‌تر شده بود؛ مرد منتظر اولین قطره‌ های باران بود؛ اگر توی ساحل، وسط باد و باران، گرفتار می‌شدند، حسابی به زحمت می‌افتادند)؛ پایان نقل

تاریخ بهنگام رسانی 28/11/1399هجری خورشیدی؛ 12/08/1400هجری خورشیدی؛ ا. شربیانی

n  "He walked out in the gray light and stood and he saw for a brief moment the absolute truth of the world. The cold relentless circling of the intestate earth. Darkness implacable. The blind dogs of the sun in their running. The crushing black vacuum of the universe. And somewhere two hunted animals trembling like ground-foxes in their cover. Borrowed time and borrowed world and borrowed eyes with which to sorrow it."n

n  Initial Thoughtsn

I needed to read a Pulitzer prize winning novel as part of a reading challenge and decided on Cormac McCarthy's highly regarded post apocalyptic survival novel...The Road. I had pretty big reservations going into this one after hearing this author shuns punctuation and has, at times, poetic style with his descriptions. Not normally my cup of tea. But I felt like I still needed to give it a try.

What's the worst that could happen? I normally love post apocalyptic fiction. My two favourite novels are Swan Song by Robert R McCammon and the Stand by Stephen King. Two absolutely epic novels that will take some beating. Surely the Road could not compare to these masterpieces.

n  The Storyn

This story is about a man and his son walking down...you guessed it ...a road. But this is where the jokes end. The world has been subject to a catastrophe and the landscape is ravaged, burned and desolate.
The pair are in search of a better life or something resembling it. It's as bleak as it gets but there is the smallest shred of hope buried amongst the ruins of what was.



The destination of the pair is the coast but we never get to find out exactly where this is. It's a slow trudge as the pair push a shopping trolly containing their limited possessions, following a battered map and attempting to avoid murderous gangs of 'bloodcult' cannibals. This is a world filled with darkness, starvation is always a possibility, and the father faces a constant battle to keep his son alive.

n  The Writingn

I could do a full review simply on McCarthy's style. He has one that's distinctly his own. The guy uses hardly any punctuation and block paragraphs of relentless text with no chapters. He also describes things in a way that verges on the poetic. I genuinely thought I was going to hate it, but this author is so good I couldn't help but fall in love with it.

n  "The world soon to be largely populated by men who would eat your children in front of your eyes and the cities themselves held by cores of blackened looters who tunneled among the ruins and crawled from the rubble white of tooth and eye carrying charred and anonymous tins of food in nylon nets like shoppers in the commissaries of hell."n

Not a single word is wasted and his efficient use of vocabulary perfectly suits the narrative that left a harrowing imprint on my mind. In three hundred pages he achieves more than other authors do in a thousand. It really is something you need to experience for yourself.

There are no speech marks and you would think this would be really confusing. But the way he manages the dialogue is so good you know exactly when characters are speaking and who's doing it. Whereas the prose are often powerful and visceral the speech is minimal and repetitive. But the way it's done generates such unexpected emotion it is beyond masterful. McCarthy is an absolute genius.

n  The charactersn

There is a very small cast of characters in this one, for obvious reasons, and the narrative revolves around the father and son who remain nameless throughout. McCarthy only uses labels such as "the man" or "the boy.". The relationship between them represents the only shred of hope and goodness left in this blighted world and I defy any reader who thinks they won't develop an emotional attachment to these two. As a father myself, I found that I naturally put myself in the place of the father and questioned what I would do to keep my child alive. You can almost taste the sense of fear and dread.



The father remembers the world before, and there's a faint recollection of once what was. The son however, was born into this world and the dark ash covered nightmare is all he has ever known. Yet he consistently yearns to be one of the good guys. In doing so he is the moral compass for the father in this story. That glimmer of light in the endless dark.

n   "But he knew that if he were a good father still it might well be as she had said. That the boy was all that stood between him and death." n

n  Final Thoughtsn

Sometimes you but a book down, with a sense of euphoria, and think that was brilliance. Rare indeed. But after finishing the Road that was definitely one of those times. A book that I thought I wouldn't like. Just goes to show you should always give things a try before you decide.

Don't get me wrong, its certainly not a fun read. It is, in fact, heart-breaking, relentlessly bleak and at times soul destroying. But art is about making you feel emotion, positive and negative, and McCarthy certainly does that.

n   "He'd had this feeling before, beyond the numbness and the dull despair. The world shrinking down about a raw core of parsible entities. The names of things slowly following those things into oblivion. Colors. The names of birds. Things to eat. Finally the names of things one believed to be true. More fragile than he would have thought. How much was gone already?" n

The Road is the profoundly moving story and, without a shred of doubt, a masterpiece. One of the best, if not the best, post-apocalyptic fiction novels. Considering my taste in novels I do not say that lightly. An absolute must read. Cheers!


Cormac McCarthy

Gray, dark, cold. Ash. Make yourself comfortable with these words. This fact is what remains of our world in "The Road," Cormac McCarthy's post-apocalyptic vision set in the not-so-inconceivable future. The reader might feel McCarthy's constant reiteration on earth laid waste, the grey clouds and the blackened dead trees, and the abandoned homes scavenged bare, is monotonous. But that's the point.
This one is not a pocket of America. The destruction is complete. Civilizations and order are but a memory, a distant memory.
Surviving the scene is a father and son traveling south to escape another winter. They follow a tattered map and stick to a road where the charred and melted dead litter the streets, and roadside bandits await to kill and eat. (If the world is dangerous now, McCarthy is hell on earth.) What makes the nameless father and son remarkable is not their ability to scavenge for food and avoid murderers and thieves in a ground pillaged bare. Instead, they are committed to goodness, where goodness is nowhere to be seen.
In this case, the son, a young boy, holds firm to the belief his father ingrained in his mind as the father says, "carrying the fire" in a world darker than dark. The boy is the father's conscience and ours, and he pleads the case for morality in a place where, it can be argued, the character no longer has residency. Is he merely naïve? No. Is he affected by this? Yes, he weeps for the world, but he's also impervious to the world's selfish corruption.
McCarthy's prose is, once again, poetic and beautifully written. However, he keeps true to the story and ends on a sad and hopefully uplifting note.
"The Road" is a compelling tale of survival. That's a survival of the noble qualities in human nature: benevolence, forgiveness, and love. It reminds us that though evil may flourish and, ultimately, destroy, goodness will find a way to carry on.

The main point I want to deal with is how I managed to walk away from this book with a trenchant sense of gratitude at the forefront of my mind. I certainly won’t mislead and paint this story as one that directly radiates things to be happy about, but I do think it does so indirectly (and the term "happy" is far too facile for my purposes here).

This is an extremely dark tale of a world passed through a proverbial dissolvent. A world stripped of its major ecological systems. Small pockets of homo sapiens remain and virtually all other animal and vegetative life has vanished. For the Father and the Boy—the core characters of the novel who are holding onto to their existence by the most tenuous of threads—for them nearly every moment consists of terror and misery. Food is extremely scarce. Fellow humans are often very likely to kill and eat them. There’s an utter lack of good prospects on the horizon. And when terror seems less immediate and they have a moment to become lost in the luxuries of long-term memory, the thoughts tend to be ones of painful regret and helplessness and are just as bleak as the immediate surroundings and circumstances. A REALLY, REALLY SAD AND SCARY TALE. Okay.

It’s fitting—albeit in a superficial, mundane coincidence type of fashion—that I’m reading The Road for the first time as soon as the temperatures in my cartographic slice of things have just plummeted to single-digit degrees. The slow death of autumn has given way to the inescapable, temporary halt of much organic hustle and bustle. The skies often tend to merge with the washed out grays and whites of the landscape. As almost goes without saying, the world of McCarthy’s unexplained apocalypse is one in which each day is more gray than the last. So there seems to be some veneer of kinship between this world and my current surroundings, but what’s more important—far, far more important—are the manifold differences. Compared to the bleak world of the book that sits to my left, the nonfictional winter of the Chicago tri-state area is a veritable paradise. Colors are still abundant, if you choose to notice them. The buildings, cars and clothes we encase ourselves in—in sum—still display a wide range of colors, patterns, novelties, and so on, which to an eye accustomed to and expectant of tattered gray wastelands would appear as an orgiastic celebration of beauty and eyesight like none other. Though sunlight is less abundant now than in other seasons we are still, often enough, visited by a warmth and illumination that comes from that distant, worship-worthy star above, as opposed to a random explosion from some chunk of flammable infrastructure releasing its dying breath, or from a meager fire knelt over and struggled to bring to life.

In full disclosure, I can’t say that anyone has ever accused me of being an optimist. I’ve held the deed to boatloads—jam-packed harbors of them—of cynicism, despair, and all the other synonyms for negative emotional states and psychological dispositions. But I also feel that the struggle against nihilism, apathetic numbness, and ascetic ideology of all stripes is The Great Foundational Struggle for myself, and for my fellow strange hairless primates to take up and take up with vigor. To be able to look uncertainty, intuitive pessimism, our own impending demise, and even the gaping void of eternity squarely in its facelessness and still wrest away something profoundly good and meaningful.

I’ve also been no stranger to the wishful-yearning to abandon my human cognitive faculties, our apparently unique ability to look forward, to anticipate, to construct possibilities, outcomes, goals, to direct wonder and desire at and upon the world around and within us, and to reflect upon these very things and the reflection itself, the reflection itself, the reflection itself... These useful evolutionary adaptations (and their attendant byproducts) often feel like a burden to those who also have the aforementioned boatloads somehow connected to their person. The burden is simply in the fact that where one can see ahead they can see ahead to miserable outcomes.

I used to mentally nod in agreement when Craig Schwartz, in Being John Malkovich, remarks to his wife’s pet chimpanzee that "Consciousness is a curse." I used to quasi-proudly cite the Samuel Johnson quote at the beginning of Fear & Loathing In Las Vegas that "He who makes a beast out of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man." And one dramatic evening the man singing the song [which has been removed from the top of the review now] literally slapped me and metaphorically awoke me from this nihilistic slumber by pointing to the words "pain of being man" which were scrawled, in my hand, upon a miniature American flag and screamed something to the effect of "This is something you can't ever fully get rid of!" What is basically an obvious truth hit me like a ton of bricks, the way that certain obvious yet somehow elusive truths are want to do. It was a moment that, say, Nietzsche would’ve been proud of, as he was brilliant at and adamant in his fight against nihilism and opposed to treating pain as something merely to be avoided rather than faced and even, in some ways, embraced.

In sum, wishing away our nature, our circumstance, our humanity—this is no better and no less cowardly than blissfully strolling along as if everything’s coming up roses when the world crumbles around you. It’s a rejection of the present world--a sigh of resignation, signed, sealed, delivered. We have to learn to do something with our terror and woe. Pronouncing it terminal and sitting back to watch the world turn to cinders and dust is no longer an option, and precisely because of how dire many of our situations truly are.

There’s a tremendously powerful scene in which the Father and the Boy discover an underground bunker filled with food and various supplies. The joy and relief they feel in that bunker is the metaphorical core of where gratitude lies in terrible situations. My bunker, our bunker, is generally much more vast in the present nonfictional world of circumstances--both the circumstances that we share and the ones that are enclosed within. And yet somehow this gratitude is not really any easier to find and possess in a lasting way than the literal bunker that briefly acts as a protective womb for the central characters of this dark and harrowing tale.

This is all to say that there is something very important about finding real silver linings and that in rejecting so many false ones we may accidentally toss out the genuine ones. Genuine goodness gets caught so easily in our blind spots.

"What a wonderful thing to be alive and given to hungering."
—Death Rattle Orchestra, "The Hand's Mouth"

Books like this that contain such magnificently terrible visions of a doomed planet, also contain the impetus to appreciate things once taken for granted and to cherish and protect these things with every fibre of one’s being. They also contain a pulse of something that is purely beautiful such as the relationship between the Father and the Boy. Clearly, they represent some sort of triumph of perseverance, but not at all in the glib, mindless language of motivational posters, but in a hard-nosed, realistic manner that taps into deep and serious feelings and verifiable realities, rather than delusional slogans recited to keep general unpleasantness at bay. The story doesn’t end happily ever after, not by a long shot, but there are real triumphs all along the way and these don’t vanish simply because we aren’t served up every fulfilled desire on a silver platter. Such is life. The world is not drained of meaning simply because it is finite and partially composed of fallibility, uncertainty, and things generally that fall short of our yearned-for ideals. The triumphs are real.

n  He held the boy by the hand and they went along the rows of stenciled cartons. Chile, corn, stew, soup, spaghetti sauce. This richness of the vanished world. Why is this here? the boy said. Is it real?
Oh yes. It's real.n

Anything that can shake a person to their core and set off a chain of thoughts that leads to the desire to live better than before, perhaps ethically, or to allow them to feel things more profoundly—such as gratitude and amazement at the very fact of anything existing at all—deserves all the praise it can get. As far as I’m concerned Cormac McCarthy’s writing is now praise-worthy in this way.

RIP, Cormac McCarthy, 6/12/23

“What would you do if I died?
If you died I would want to die too.
So you could be with me?
Yes. So I could be with you.
Okay”--McCarthy

4/25/21 Had easily our most intense family viewing of a film ever in watching the film adaptation of this book and because I am a teacher I pulled it off the shelf and share passages from the book with those interested, and I left it out to see if anyone would read it--nope, too soon after the viewing, they thought--and so I went through it again fairly quickly, as it bears rereading, especially since it is McCarthy's masterpiece, or one of them, and one of my favorite books ever, as devastating as it is.

4/6/18 Re-reading this for my spring 2o18 Climate Change class, and even knowing how it ends, I am wrecked, just demolished by this book, so horrific and so beautiful and moving. Sobbing as I do at the most intimate of losses, but feeling the intensity of any great passionate beauty, too. The beauty of a great book that helps you see what matters. A portrait of terrible desolation and human evil, but at the core of it are these great human possibilities. The love of a father and his son.

9/1/14 Original review, edited a bit in the light of my most recent reading.

An amazing book. So powerful, understated, majestic, moving. Just blew me away. Some one said this was a "dictionary" book, meaning that they had to look up words a lot, and yes, it is a book that loves language, some of it ancient and forgotten, maybe befitting the subject of loss, but McCarthy is always this blend of Faulknerian epic-loss-language and Hemingway's power-through-simplicity-language. Some of the cadences are Biblical, as in King James elevated language, as in The Grapes of Wrath and Cry, The Beloved Country. A book of sweeping tragedy, obviously. And the simple, devastating power we also see in Of Mice and Men and The Old Man and the Sea. Books of allegorical significance and moral power.

In a way, this tale, set years after nuclear holocaust and environmental devastation, is a kind of guide for the apocalypse--any apocalypse, the Big One, your own or a loved one's death, the end of anything--with principle, with character, dignity and love; in this case, it is a father and son facing oblivion, moving forward, Pilgrim's Progress, "carrying the fire" against all odds, never giving up, and it is heartbreaking and anguishing. You wonder, like them, whether you could or can go on. This simple, bleak tale has a kind of echo in it of Dylan Thomas's "Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night," where Thomas urges his own father to fight death and not just acquiesce to it, or give into it.

The man in this story teaches his son to fight to stay alive and be one of the "good guys" (or, ethical) with any means available at their disposal. In this simple, bleak dystopian story, we are very possibly at the end of time, in an ash, Beckettian landscape, waiting for Godot, people reduced to their most animal selves. And yet, there are relationships that remain, with simple pleasures, enjoyed by fathers and sons. They read a book. They find a can of Coke, they eat a can of peaches, they tell each stories, they draw pictures, they play a primitive flute they have made, the arts comforting and sustaining them when they need it.

Recently, we had the suicide of Robin Williams, someone we had come to believe we knew well through movies where he played characters urging us to laugh and seize the day, every day. But he was playing characters in movies, and we began, as we do, I suspect, to make the mistake of believing that the convincingly hopeful characters he played were internalized in his own soul. And maybe they were, for a time. Camus said, post-Hiroshima, post-Holocaust, that suicide was the only important philosophical question that remained, and McCarthy, aging as we all are, helps us contemplate this question, too, as we face or imagine facing illness, or death, that nuclear winter.

Throughout the book the man speaks to or reflects on his wife, years gone, who made another choice than he has, and given what they faced, she faced, a reasonable one, and one the man teaches his son to passionately resist, though in his quietest moments, he longs for it himself. When they encounter an old man, a kind of dark seer, on the road, they speak of luck and what it can mean in such a time, and neither are sure what it even means anymore: Is it luckier to live or die in the face of the very end? The man has no hope, though:

“People were always getting ready for tomorrow. I didn't believe in that. Tomorrow wasn't getting ready for them. It didn't even know they were there.”

The old man says to the man, “There is no God and we are his prophets.”

But the boy believes in and is shaped by his belief in God. He and his father are committed to being the good guys who draw the line at barbarity, even when it makes some sense to succumb to it.

Recently, in the Chicago area, I wept to read of another suicide, one of an 82 year old man whose wife was in hospice and living with his two aging children, developmentally disabled; the man first murdered the family everyone knew he had deeply loved, then killed himself. (I know, sorry, this is bleak). But no one in their neighborhood or family questioned his love for his family or even his choice. Who can blame this man, facing an inevitably harder end, his friends seemed to say. Not me, the father of two sons, one with severe autism and the other also now diagnosed autistic. I'm 61. What will happen to them when I am gone? Sam, 18, autistic, living during the week in a group home, comes here to my house every other weekend, and so many of the minimum wage folks he works with are caring and loving, but 3-4 years ago we took a young man to trial for pushing him down a flight of stairs, where he was knocked out and his arm badly broken. He can't speak to defend himself. What future does he have, and what future especially without a loving parent to help defend and speak for him? What does his "road" hold for him? Sometimes, in my worst moments, and thankfully they are few, I think we are Liam Neeson, in The Grey, facing the wolves of destruction in the Arctic (as Neeson himself did in a sense when he lost his wife to a skiing accident, facing his own emotional holocaust and nuclear winter), knife in hand, to the end. But I can't give up, I have to and heartily agree be his father, of course, even the older father that I am.

I have heard this is McCarthy's most personal novel, and since he is a father, and dedicates the book to his own son John Francis McCarthy, I can guess this maybe this is true. I can imagine it as a letter to him, or to all fathers and sons, to help them face down their own terrible moments with grace and resourcefulness. In this book, the man is handy, he is always problem-solving, fixing what he has with the tools available to him, scavenging, finding food and water, reading and telling stories to his son with lessons he sometimes barely believes himself anymore. Whatever he does, McCarthy tells us the son watches his father, and learns. Without his son, there is only death, and he must to the end teach his son how to be handy, to be resourceful, to go on, to live, the best he can.

My own father, the weekend before he died on the operating table for his second bypass surgery, at 76, dropped down to slide under the chassis of my aging Chevy and check out my fading brakes, to the end urging me to care about my stuff, to do the right thing, mentoring me in the right way to live. That night he held one of his last great grandchildren in his arms; less than 48 hours later he was dead, which was still the most devastating moment of my life. Reading the father-son relationship that is at the heart of this book through my own loss makes it tender, gives it depth and rich sentiment. I mean, it is harsh, and bleak, this world the father and son live in, but the story is fundamentally sweet and moving. It's about what matters, as the best of books always are.

McCarthy urges me and us to go on, to be resourceful, to care for each other, and to care for the Earth we were given. There are images so terrible in this book that the man tries to shelter from his son, though the son sees them anyway, and we see them, too. Are they useful to see? I surely don't want some of them in my memory, but there they are, reminding me of past genocides and tragedies and prefiguring the ones surely yet to come on personal and global levels. Maybe it's useful to remind me of the "bad guys" who the man and boy meet on the road, who make the immoral, the wrong choices. What evil is humanly possible? But also, what good? What do we need to do to save the planet? Do we really want to? How long can we keep our heads in the sand, as humans with the power still to (maybe) reverse the environmental end? McCarthy teaches us how to live, and why it is so important: Because of love, and family, and the beauty of the planet. Because we are alive.

“Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery”--McCarthy

Camus suggests that we humans, post WWII--the Holocaust and Hiroshima, and Stalin, all of it-- should just keep pushing that Myth of Sisyphus-boulder up that hill without any assurance of meaning beyond the doing of it. I can't go on; I'll go on, Samuel Becket has his narrator say at the end of The Unnameable, and that's what the man does and teaches the boy to do, and perhaps it is what we all should do in the worst of circumstances. McCarthy know his Beckett, but finally, McCarthy is not Beckett, as much as this tale owes to McCarthy's master; McCarthy gives us just a little more dignity and hope than Beckett, I think.

I think, too, in my darkest moments that I understand Robin Williams, facing Parkinson's disease, and that 82 year old man, seeing the bleak future for him and his wife and children. I am not and have never yet been suicidal, but I understand their choices. I understand Camus and Beckett on these important subjects. I may have to reread this tale again and again to keep me on the road the man took instead of the one his wife chose. After all, I have sons (and a daughter) to care for. Maybe I'm gonna hug my kids a little bit harder tonight.

So here it is, the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction 2007 juggernaut that is The Road, by Cormac McCarthy. Dystopian tales abound in fiction but very few, if any, tap into the desolate emptiness of McCarthy's post-apocalyptic America where virtually everything has been wiped out... bar some of the roads. The Man, and his son The Boy, have been surviving for an unspecified amount of time when we join them on their journey on The Road to the coast.

McCarthy matches the destructiveness of mankind with the flame of love that maintains the heart and soul of The Man and The Boy. Stark short paragraphs and conversations abound underlining the carnage and hopelessness of it all, yet also showing the love between father and son, and how that love and their bond sustains them. I'm not sure if it's worth a Pulitzer, but it is one damn fine book, that once read, can't really ever be forgotten. 9.5 out of 12.

2020 read; 2009 read

The Road is unsteady and repetitive--now aping Melville, now Hemingway--but it is less a seamless blend than a reanimated corpse: sewn together from dead parts into a lumbering, incongruous whole, then jolted to ignoble half-life by McCarthy’s grand reputation with Hollywood Filmmakers and incestuous award committees.

In '96, NYU Professor Alan Sokal submitted a paper for publication to several scientific journals. He made it so complex and full of jargon the average person wouldn't be able to make heads or tails of it. He wrote a conclusion that would deliberately flatter the preconceptions of the journals he submitted it to. As he predicted, it was accepted and published, despite the fact that it was all complete nonsense.

The Sokal Affair showed the utter incompetence of these trusted judges. They were unable to recognize good (or bad) arguments and were mostly motivated by politics. The accolades showered upon works like The Road have convinced me that the judges of literature are just as incompetent (and I’m not the only one who thinks so). Unlike Sokol, McCarthy didn't do it purposefully, he just writes in an ostentatiously empty style which is safe and convenient to praise.

Many have lauded his straightforward prose, and though I am not the most devoted fan of Hemingway, I can admire the precision and economy of a deliberate, economical use of words. Yet that was not what I got from The Road:

n  "He took out the plastic bottle of water and unscrewed the cap and held it out and the boy came and took it and stood drinking. He lowered the bottle and got his breath and he sat in the road and crossed his legs and drank again. Then he handed the bottle back and the man drank and screwed the cap back on and rummaged through the pack. The ate a can of white beans, passing it between them, and he threw the empty tin into the woods.

Then they set out down the road again."n

Simple? Yes. Precise and purposeful? Hrdlt. The Road is as elegant as a laundry list (if not as well punctuated). Compiling a long and redundant series of unnecessary descriptions is not straightforward, but needlessly complicated.

We're supposed to find this simplicity profound--that old postmodern game of defamiliarization, making the old seem new, showing the importance of everyday events--but McCarthy isn't actually changing the context, he's just restating. There is no personality in it, no relationship to the plot, no revealing of the characters.

Perhaps it is meant to show their weariness: they cannot even muster enough energy to participate in their own lives, but is the best way to demonstrate boredom to write paragraphs that bore the reader? A good writer can make the mundane seem remarkable, but The Road is too bare to be beautiful, and too pointless to be poignant.

Once we have been lulled by long redundancy, McCarthy abruptly switches gears, moving from the plainness of Hemingway to the florid, overwrought figurative language of Melville:

n  "The man thought he seemed some sad and solitary changeling child announcing the arrival of a traveling spectacle in shire and village who does not know that behind him the players have all been carried off by wolves."n

There is no attempt to bridge the two styles, they are forced to cohabitate, without rhyme or reason to unite them. In another sentence he describes 'dead ivy', 'dead grass' and 'dead trees' with unerring monotony, and then as if adding a punchline, declares them 'shrouded in a carbon fog'--which sounds like the world's blandest cyberpunk anthology.

Another example:

n  "It's snowing, the boy said. A single gray flake sifting down. He caught it in his hand and watched it expire like the last host of christendom."n

McCarthy seems to be trying to reproduce the morbid religious symbolism of Melville when he plays the tattered prophet in Moby Dick. But while Melville's theology is terribly sublime and pervasive, McCarthy's is ostentatious and diminutive, like a carved molding in an otherwise unadorned room. Nowhere does he produce the staggeringly surreal otherworldliness Melville achieves in a line like "There stand his trees, each with a hollow trunk, as if a hermit and a crucifix were within".

Often, McCarthy's gilded metaphors are piled, one atop the other, in what must be an attempt to develop an original voice, but which usually sounds more like the contents of a ‘Team Edward’ notebook, left behind after poetry class:

n  ". . . Query: How does the never to be differ from what never was?

Dark of the invisible moon. The nights now only slightly less black. By day the banished sun circles the earth like a grieving mother with a lamp.

People sitting on the sidewalk in the dawn half immolate and smoking in their clothes. Like failed sectarian suicides. . . ."n

I love how he prefaces that like an Asimov robot. Sardonic Observation: I'd almost believe he was one, since he has no understanding of beauty or human emotion. Biting Quip: However, he violates Asimov's first law, since his awkward prose harms human ears.

Sometimes, smack in the middle of a detailed description of scraping paint with a screwdriver, we suddenly get a complex jargon term which few readers would understand. These terms are neither part of the world, nor are they aspects of specialized character knowledge, so I cannot assign them any meaning in the text.

One of the basic lessons for any beginning writer is 'don't just add big words because you can', it's self-indulgent and doesn't really help the story. It would be one thing if it were a part of some stylistic structure instead of bits of out-of-place jargon that conflict with the overall style of the book--more textual flotsam for us to wade through.

The longer I read, the more mirthlessly dire it became, and the less I found I could take it seriously. Every little cluster of sentences left on its own as a standalone chapter, every little two-word incomplete sentence trying to demand importance because it actually had punctuation (a rare commodity), every undifferentiated monosyllabic piece of non-dialogue like a hobo talking to himself--it all made the book overblown and nonsensical.

It just stared me down, like a huge drunk guy in a bar daring me to laugh at his misspelled tattoo. And I did. I don't know if my coworkers or the people on the bus knew what 'The Road' was about (it was years before the movie), but they had to assume it was one hilarious road, with a busfull of nuns hiding a convict in disguise on the run from a bumbling southern sheriff and his deputy; a donkey is involved.

Without mentioning specifics, I will say the notorious ending of the book is completely tacked on, in no way fits with or concludes any of the emotional build of the book, but instead wraps up, neat and tight. It certainly bears out McCarthy's admission on Oprah that he "had no idea where it was going" when he wrote it. We can tell, Cormac.

As you may have noticed from the quotes, another notorious issue is the way the book is punctuated, which is to say, it isn't. The most complex mark is the a rare comma. It's not like McCarthy is only using simple, straightforward sentences, either---he fills up on conjoined clauses and partial sentence fragments, he just doesn't bother to mark any of them.

He also doesn't use any quotes in the books, and rarely attributes statements to characters, so we must first try to figure out if someone is talking, or if it's just another snatch of 'poetic license', and then determine who is talking. Sure, Melville did away with quotes in one chapter in Moby Dick, but he did it in stylistic reference to Shakespeare, and he also seemed to be aware that it was a silly affectation best suited to a ridiculous scene.

It's not only the structure, grammar, figurative language, and basic descriptions which are so absurdly lacking: the characters are likewise flat, dull, and repetitive. Almost every conversation between the father and son is the same:

n  Father: Do it now.
Son: I'm scared.
Father: Just do it.
Son: Are we going to die?
Father: No.
Son: Are you sure?
Father: Yes.n

Remember, you won't get little tags so you know who's speaking, it'll all just be strung out in a line without differentiation. Then they wander around for a bit or run from crazy people, and we finally get the cap to the conversation:

n  Son: Why did (terrible thing) just happen?
Father: (Stares off in silence)
Son: Why did (terrible thing) just happen?
Father: (More silence)n

And that’s it, the whole relationship; it never changes or grows. Nor does it seem to make much sense. The characters are always together, each the other's sole companion: father and son, and yet they are constantly distant and at odds, like a suburban parent and child who rarely see each other and have little in common. McCarthy never demonstrates how such a disconnect arose between two people who are constantly intimate and reliant on one another.

But then, McCarthy confided to Oprah that the is book about his relationship with his own son, so it makes sense why the emotional content is completely at odds with the setting. Perhaps he just sat down one say and thought “I’m an award-winning author and screenwriter who has a somewhat distant relationship with my son. You know what that’s like? That’s like the unendurable physical suffering of people in the third world who are trying to find food and escape crazed, murderous mobs.” So then he wrote a book equating the two, which is about the most callous, egotistical act of privileged self-pity a writer can indulge in.

At least now I know why the characters and their reactions don’t make much sense. The boy is constantly terrified, and his chief role involves pointing at things and screaming, punctuating every conflict in the book, like a bad horror film. Cannibals and dead infants are an okay (if cliche) place to start when it comes to unsettling the reader, but just having the characters react histrionically does not build tension, especially when the characters are too flat to be sympathetic in the first place. Another Creative Writing 101 lesson: if you have to resort to over-the-top character reactions to let the audience know how they are supposed to feel, then your 'emotional moment' isn't working. It's the literary equivalent of a laugh track.

You know what’s more unsettling than a child screaming when he finds a dead infant? A child not screaming when he finds a dead infant. And really, that’s the more likely outcome. The young boy has never known another world--his world is death and horror. Anyone who has seen a picture of a Rwandan boy with an AK can see how children adapt to what’s around them. And you know what would make a great book? A father who remembers the old world trying to prevent his son from becoming a callous monster because of the new one.

But no, we get a child who inexplicably reacts as if he’s used to the good life in suburbia and all this death and killing is completely new to him, even though we’ve watched him go through it half a dozen times already. The characters never grow numb to it, they never seem to suffer PTSD, their reactions are more akin to angst.

Every time there is a problem, the characters just fold in on themselves and give up. People really only do that when they have the luxury of sitting about and ruminating on what troubles them. When there is a sudden danger before us, we might run, or freeze, but there’s hardly time to feel sorry for ourselves.

There is no joy or hope in this book--not even the fleeting, false kind. Everything is constantly bleak. Yet human beings in stressful, dangerous situations always find ways to carry on: small victories, justifications, or even lies and delusions. The closest this book gets is ‘The Fire’, which is the father’s term for why they must carry on through all these difficulties. But replace ‘The Fire’ with ‘The Plot’ and you’ll see what effect is achieved: it’s not character psychology, but authorial convenience. Apparently, McCarthy cannot even think of a plausible reason why human beings would want to survive.

There is nothing engaging about a world sterilized of all possibility. People always create a way out, even when there is none. What is tragic is not a lack of hope, but misplaced hope. I could perhaps appreciate a completely empty world as a writing exercise, but as McCarthy is constantly trying to provoke emotional reactions, he cannot have been going for utter bleakness.

The Road is a canvas painted black, so it doesn't mater how many more black strokes he layers on top: they will not stand out because there is no contrast, there is no depth, no breaking or building of tension, just a constant addition of featureless details to a featureless whole. Some people seem to think that an emotionally manipulative book that makes people cry is better than one that makes people horny--but at least people don’t get self-righteous about what turns them on.

This is tragedy porn. Suburban malaise is equated with the most remote and terrible examples of human pain. So, dull housewives can read it and think ‘yes, my ennui is just like a child who stumbles across a corpse’, and perhaps she will cry, and feel justified in doing so. Or a man might read it and think ‘yes, my father was distant, and it makes me feel like I live alone in a hostile world I don’t care to understand’; he will not cry, but he will say that he did.

And so the privileged can read about how their pain is the same as the pain of those starving children they mute during commercial breaks. In the perversity of modern, invisible colonialism--where a slave does not wash your clothes, but builds the machine that washes them--these self-absorbed people who have never starved or had their lives imperiled can think of themselves as worldly, as ‘one with humanity’, as good, caring people.

They recycle. They turn the water off when they brush their teeth. They buy organic. They even thought about joining the Peace Corps. Their guilt is assuaged. They are free to bask in their own radiant anguish.

And it all depresses me--which makes me a shit, because I’m no more entitled to it than any other well-fed, educated winner of the genetic lottery. So when I read this book, I couldn’t sympathize with that angst and think it justified, just like I couldn’t with Holden’s. I know my little existential crisis isn’t comparable to someone who has really lost control of their life, who might actually lose life.

But this kind of egotistical detachment has become typical of American thought, and of American authors, whose little, personal, insular explorations don't even pretend to look at the larger world. Indeed, there is a self-satisfied notion that trying to look at the world sullies the pure artist.

And that 'emotionally pure, isolated author' is what we get from the Oprah interview. Sure, she's asking asinine questions, but McCarthy shows no capacity to discuss either craft or ideas, refusing to take open-ended questions and discuss writing, he instead laughs condescendingly and shrugs. Then again, he may honestly not have much insight on the topic.

Looked at in this way, it's not surprising he won the Pulitzer. Awards committees run on politics, and choosing McCarthy is a political decision--an attempt to declare that insular, American arrogance is somehow still relevant. But the world seems content to move ahead without America and its literature, which is why no one expects McCarthy--or any American author--to win a Nobel any time soon.

This book is a paean to the obliviousness of American self-importance in our increasingly global, undifferentiated world. One way or the other, it will stand as a testament to the last gasp of a dying philosophy: either we will collapse under our own in-fighting and short-sightedness, or we will be forced to evolve into something new and competitive--a bloated reputation will carry you only so far.

But then, the Pulitzer committee is renowned for picking unadventurous winners--usually an unremarkable late entry by an author past their prime. As William Gass put it:

n  "the prize is simply not given to work of the first rank, rarely even to the second; and if you believed yourself to be a writer of that eminence, you are now assured of being over the hill"n

To any genre reader, this book will have a familiar and unpleasant taste, the same one LeGuin has often lamented: that of the big name author slumming. They pop into fantasy or sci fi with their lit fic credentials to show us little folk 'how it's really done'--but know nothing about the genre or its history, and just end up reinventing the wheel, producing a book that would have been tired and dated thirty years ago. Luckily for such writers, none of their lit fic critics know anything about other genres--any sort of bland rehash will feel fresh to them, as long as you have the name-recognition to get them to look in the first place.

So, McCarthy gets two stars for a passable (if cliche) script for a sci fi adventure movie, minus one star for unconscionable denigration of human suffering. I couldn't say if McCarthy's other books are any good; I will probably try another, just to see if any part of his reputation is deserved, but this one certainly didn't help. All I see is another author who got too big for his editors and, finding himself free to write whatever he wanted--only proved that he no longer has anything worth saying.

n  "Look, if the contemporary condition is hopelessly shitty, insipid, materialistic, emotionally retarded, sadomasochistic, and stupid, then I (or any writer) can get away with slapping together stories with characters who are stupid, vapid, emotionally retarded, which is easy, because these sorts of characters require no development. With descriptions that are merely lists ... Where stupid people say insipid stuff to each other. If what's always distinguished bad writing--flat characters, a narrative world that's ... not recognizably human, etc.--is also a description of today's world, then bad writing becomes an ingenious mimesis of a bad world ... most of us agree that these are dark times, and stupid ones, but do we need fiction that does nothing but dramatize how dark and stupid everything is?"

-David Foster Wallacen  

n