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 1996, NYU Physics Professor Alan Sokal submitted a paper for publication to several scientific journals. He made sure it was so complex and full of the latest jargon terms that the average person wouldn't be able to make heads or tails of it. He also wrote its conclusion so it 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 the people trusted to judge work for publication. 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). I don't imagine that McCarthy did this purposefully, like Sokal, but that he writes in the ostentatiously empty style which some judges of literature find safe and convenient to praise.Many have lauded McCarthy’s straightforward style, 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: "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."Simple? Yes. But precise and purposeful? Certainly not. Most of The Road is as elegant as a laundry list (if not as well punctuated). Compiling a long and redundant series of unnecessary actions and descriptions does not make a work straightforward, it makes it needlessly complicated.I know we're supposed to find this simplicity profound--that old postmodern game of defamiliarization, trying to make the old seem new, to show the importance of everyday events--but none of it ever manages to seem important, because McCarthy isn't actually changing the context, he's just restating. There is no personality in it, no revealing of the characters, and no relationship to the plot. Perhaps it is meant to show the weariness of the characters: that they cannot even muster enough energy to participate in their own lives, but is the best way to demonstrate a character’s boredom really 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: "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."There is no attempt to bridge the two styles, they are forced to cohabitate, without rhyme or reason to unite them. The metaphoric language is equally jarring, as in one 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 title of a bland cyberpunk anthology.Then we have this example: "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."Where 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".Many times, 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: ". . . 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. . . ."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 of robotics, since his work allows harm to come to humans.Sometimes, right in the middle of a detailed description of how a character is 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 in this book), 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 (this was years before the movie), but they had to assume it was one hilarious road, possibly with a busfull of nuns, and one a convict in disguise on the run from a bumbling southern sheriff and his deputy; a donkey is involved.Though I won't mention 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 everything up, neat and tight. Though it does bear out McCarthy's admission on Oprah that he "had no idea where it was going" when he wrote it. We can tell, Cormac; well, some of us, anyway.As you may have noticed from the quotes I have used, another notorious issue is the way the book is punctuated, which is to say, it isn't. The most complex mark is the comma, and it is pretty rarely used. It's not like McCarthy is only using simple, straightforward sentences, he uses plenty of 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 we have to 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 for a ridiculous scene.But it is 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: 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.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: Son: Why did (terrible thing) just happen?Father: (Stares off in silence)Son: Why did (terrible thing) just happen?Father: (More silence)And that’s it, the whole relationship; it never changes or grows. Nor does it seem to make much sense, based on the setting. 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. His constant screams punctuate every conflict in the book, like a bad horror film. But things aren’t scary just because the author makes a character react histrionically over and over again--it just becomes silly.Cannibals and dead infants are an okay place to start when it comes to unsettling the reader, but just having the characters point and scream does not build tension, especially when the characters are too flat to be sympathetic. 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 kid with an AK-47 realizes that 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 from post-traumatic stress, 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 up, 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 entirely black--it doesn't mater how many more black strokes he layers on top: they will not stand out because there is no difference, 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 on 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 to say 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 famously put it: "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"Of course, to readers of genre works, this book will have a familiar and unpleasant taste: that of the big name writer slumming. They pop into fantasy or sci fi with their lit fic credentials to show us little folk how it's really done, but knowing nothing about the genre or its history, just end up reinventing the wheel, creating a book that would have looked tired and dated thirty years ago. Luckily for such writers, none of the lit fic critics that read the book know anything about other genres, either--meaning that any sort of rehash is going to look fresh to them, as long as you have the name-recognition to get them to look.So, McCarthy gets two stars for a passable (if cliche) script for a sci fi adventure movie, minus one star for unconscionable denigration of humanity. I couldn't say if McCarthy's other books are any good; I will probably try another, just to see if any 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 has nothing of value to say. "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 Wallace
I finished this novel quite a few days ago. Normally, I would hop right up and start composing my little goodreads ramble, publish whatever nonsense came out, and go about my day. This novel, however, left me feeling like an incubus was on my chest, paralyzing my brain and limiting my mobility. I set it down and stared at the ceiling. I rolled around in bed feeling anxious and nostalgic and terrible and serene. I hid it in my backpack so I wouldn’t continue to be tortured by seeing the spine, and contemplating how it was defeating me. This loud-mouth, this rambler, this conversational ram-rodder had, in a rare instance of humbling, found herself with nothing to say. So many thoughts, and no words to frame them in. I finally placed the book back on the shelf, acknowledged that I had read it through the meager gesture of rating, and started with something else. After a few days had passed, I decided to try and pin down the numerous specimens that are my thoughts. I won’t wow you like the story does. I won’t offer any insight that isn’t present elsewhere on goodreads in the many, many fantastic reviews that have already conquered this territory to the extent that it is conquerable. I will get a bit self-indulgent and tell you embarrassing, private things that you may or may not care to read about concerning my life and my family, because this novel is largely about the preciousness of life and the preciousness of family, of the horror and the beauty and everything in between. It is a somber meditation on subtle, enormous things. I am predisposed toward loving post-apocalyptic novels. In many ways, I blame this on my obsession with the “Boxcar Children” books whenever I was a kid. Though these books are, of course, NOT post-apocalyptic tales, they do depict a world that is about as barren and frightening as a 9 year old lower-middle-class girl can wrap her mind around. The idea that you have no home, no parental figures, no reliable source of food or comfort, and basically nothing save your siblings, is a scary and fascinating thing to think about. With a home life as precarious as my own, it didn’t seem terribly far-fetched to some day find myself destitute, and I found deep comfort in the children’s will to survive. Unfortunately, I eventually did find myself in a comparable situation when, in the midst of my parents’ divorce, my 5 year old sister and I went to live with our father in this giant, shadowy house on a stretch of land in one of Oklahoma’s smaller towns, a place far from the protection of my mother, and far from all of the friends I had grown up around and came to trust and love. In a consuming fit of depression, my father basically isolated himself from the realm of the living, sleeping most hours, and silently and heavily self-medicating in a darkened den when “awake.” I was 11, and was forced to take on the domestic duties of a full-grown woman in order to care for my sister, ensure we both ate, walk her to school and back every day, maintain a moderately clean home, tiny, shoddy Christmas trees out of tree branches, etc etc etc. Though I realize this sounds like a sob story, let me assure you it was short-lived, and that when I finally abandoned my blind loyalty to my father and made with the truth, we were snatched up that very day, and the world was bright and rosy again from then on. Also, I am actually pretty glad that it happened. My brief experience in this alternate reality had some enormous character-building effects, and was actually sort of fun sometimes in this “I’m really living out this whole self-reliance thing that I’ve read so much about” sort of way. I mean, it got old quick. However, the most important effects that it had on me as a person (aside from making me feel capable of handling a whole lot of bullshit, weathering the storms of life, yadda yadda) were a) binding my sister and I in an unbreakable way and b) making me see seemingly obvious bits of the process of living (food, tiny little gifts, things like Christmas lights and Easter eggs and really warm gloves) as the precious objects that we so often forget that they are. But we are discussing The Road, here.The emphasis on precious little things composes much of the story. There is a lot of what some may call “filler” throughout the novel; descriptions of meals, the process of preparing the meals, of the characters disrobing layer by layer in order to clean themselves in the extremely rare warm bath they manage to take, washing every bit of themselves and every layer of clothing, stitching up a wound, wrapping up the wound, pulling a pant-leg over the wound. Though the form of each sentence, of the entire novel even, could arguably be considered curt, it is a conscious choice. Each sentence is presented like a precious object, a simple little thing which is, in its very simplicity, some exquisite testimonial to the process of living and loving. Even the dialogue is stripped bare, exhibiting the boundless love of the Man and the Boy in the simplest of exchanges more effectively than some sprawling monologue or melodramatic, Shakespearean dialogue would have been able to. They don’t even have to say “I Love You.” It simply is.It’s so rare to find a voice such as McCarthy’s that can say so much with so very little. I have spent a lot of time reading about Japanese culture, and one of the many immensely interesting things that I have come across is the lack of a direct translation of the phrase “I Love You.” There are, of course, ways to express affection, and adoration, and even obsession. Yet, the notion that we attach so much meaning to, the three words you may hear from a lover and feel anything from overwhelming, butterflies-in-the-brain-like joy to crap in your pants and the early symptoms of a heart attack, the three words that can make or break a human connection, these three words are not translatable in a literal sense. This fascinated me enough to approach one of my college professors from Japan and ask her to tell me why. Her response was to say that something so enormous just couldn’t be put so simply, should not be flattened down and thrown around in the way that this limited phrase allows, and that it is almost obscene to assume everything involved in deep love can be encompassed in such a stunted bit of words. Though Japanese culture has sort of “whipped up” some ways to express a similar sentiment, it is more often than not used to placate Western lovers, is still quite limiting as to how they really feel, and even then is rarely used. Expression of the emotions coded in “I Love You” is preferably accomplished through a culmination of millions of different actions, tiny little kindnesses that aren’t named as kindnesses, minuscule, stacking pieces of the “I Love You’ puzzle. Well, this novel feels distinctly Japanese in this, along with many other, ways. Bare-bones, humble respect for every cell of every mass of the life process. The simplest of gestures binding together to communicate giant feelings. Reverence for the smallest bits of life, as they are crucial elements of the whole. At the risk of contradicting everything I just said, I would argue that the sentence which most communicates the moral underpinning this wonderful story is this: "When one has nothing left make ceremonies out of the air and breathe upon them." Allow me to be a bit clearer: I strongly suggest that you read this book.
What do You think about The Road (2006)?
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?---------------------------------------------------------------------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.
—Ian
The Road is a literary mash up composed of equal parts William Faulkner, Raymond Carver, Samuel Beckett, and pulp sci-fi. This sounds great on paper but works only about 50% of the time. For the first 25-30 pages of The Road my BS detector rang like a fire alarm. It soon quieted down, but ultimately the things I disliked about the book—it’s egregiously overwritten in places and some of McCarthy’s more “experimental” techniques seem arbitrary --kept me from fully appreciating its virtues. It took James Woods’ definitive review in The New Republic to help me see what there is to like about it. Wood praises The Road for: the way the McCarthy taps into a post 9/11 fear of apocalypse; his combination of an ornate lyricism a’la William Faulkner with the deadpan minimalism of Raymond Carver; and for McCarthy's rigorous attempt to imagine what a post-apocalyptic world would look and feel like. The Road doesn't extrapolate a dystopian future from some present fear or potential calamity. Rather it plops its characters down in a world engulfed by some kind of nuclear winter (the cause of the catastrophe is never specified) and obsessively imagines what that world would look and feel like.Despite these virtues, there’s just something about the way The Road is executed that puts me off. Critics praise McCarthy for his linguistic inventiveness, and there are some beautiful passages in The Road, but the writing often struck me as showy rather than inventive. I mean, what’s so “inventive” about the arbitrary splicing together of two words? How much linguistic creativity does it take to call a cash register a cashregister, or a pump organ a pumporgan. Such devices occur frequently enough to annoy but not often enough to add much to the musicality of the prose. Then there’s the frequent use of antiquated words: gryke, discalced, scribing, laved, etc. There’s nothing wrong with this in principle—writers should make maximum use of the linguistic resources available to them. A generous interpretation of this tic would be that it adds to the sense of inhabiting a time that’s spiritually detached from the present, or makes the point that the future involves regression rather than progress. But it struck me as showy and gratuitous--a kind of screw you to 21st century sub-literates.The other thing that bugged me was the frequent dropping of profundity bombs—brief portentous statements tacked onto the end of a paragraph that hint at philosophical or religious themes. Two problems with these: First, they are almost always duds; they are never developed and rarely explode into meaning. Second, they often come wrapped in convoluted syntax that I suspect obscures their banality. So, in this case, is McCarthy tweaking the language to make the banal sound profound?Despite these misgivings I liked the book and found it hard to put down. When McCarthy stays in his minimalist register the writing is quite good. He definitely creates a mood, and many of the word-pictures he paints, especially when describing landscapes or the objects necessary to the two main characters’ survival, are quite beautiful. And I do have to give him props, as Wood notes, for advancing the post-apocalypse sub-genre by creating a remorselessly unedifying world in which our present concerns have almost completely faded from memory. Most of the dialogue in The Road is banal in the extreme, and the characters are almost completely without inner lives. But give McCarthy credit for credibly representing the psychological reality of a world in which the things that support inner lives—history, culture, community, an unacknowledged but ever present sense that humanity will extend into the indefinite future—have all but disappeared. McCarthy doesn’t tell us how to avoid the apocalypse, but he gives us a pretty good sense of how we’ll be spending our days when it comes.
—David
I’m trying to find solace in the fact that I’m probably not the only one to be humiliatingly hoodwinked into taking the time to read Cormac McCarthy’s much-celebrated yawn-fest “The Road”, although this hardly makes this bamboozling something to boast about. In spite of the fact approximately three-fourths of the world seemed to readily embrace this as worthy fare, I managed to keep my distance for some time, mainly through ignorance of the general plot of the book and my usual stubborn reluctance to blindly jump off a bridge with the masses. I should have obeyed my gut instinct and remained one of the few spared the tedium of “The Road”, but then I had to go and actually examine a copy from a carefully-arranged pile resembling some kaleidoscopic, symmetrical form that some unfortunate, underpaid bookslut had to labor over for hours to create, and noticed that not only did this win the Pulitzer Prize, but happened to be a post-apocalyptic tale, and nothing stirs my loins nearly as vigorously. I’d even had it suggested by one of my fellow goodreaders, and after brief contemplation as to whether to waste my money on this alleged masterpiece or another box of nitrous cartridges, I decided that it was time to see what all the fuss was about (regarding “The Road”, I think I can understand the allure of the EZ Whip cream chargers, especially when you’ve got one of those bigass punch-ball balloons). tI sat in a numbed stupor while I read this, completely baffled as to how the hell this managed not only to win awards of great prestige, but, more importantly, just how it managed to be a commercial success with the ordinary reader. I’m almost interested to hear why someone might have actually enjoyed “The Road”, in which McCarthy somehow managed to make boring the concept of post-apocalyptic America. While I usually happen to be a fan of the genre, I found this to be everything which I don’t desire within that intriguing realm. At this point, I’m obviously begging for someone to come along and tell me that I ‘didn’t get it’, and probably point out that I’m a moron for good measure. I’m not denying that these are certainly valid arguments, but convincing me that I didn’t like this book is going to be impossible, my cheeky little friend. tSo, what did I get from “The Road”, which stupefies me with its status as a #1 bestseller and Pulitzer-winning tour de force? Several things, all of them sucky; a whole lot of repetitive and boring conversation and redundant let’s-trek-towards-the-coast plodding, a lot of stupidass and harebrained compoundwords, and an insipid amalgam of fiftyword paragraphs that seldom accomplished anything as far as entertaining me as a reader. tHere’s the story in a nutshell, for anyone who might be inexplicably reading this without having read the book; probably because they were wise enough to invest in the EZ Whip instead, and are now dicking around with their iTunes trying to find the song that best complements that flanging sound in their head. Some sort of catastrophe has befallen planet Earth, and I have to admit I was pretty interested to find out the nature of this calamity, but McCarthy decides to keep that a secret for some reason beyond my grasp, maybe as the highlight of “The Road 2: Thoroughfare”. Ok, I can dig it, whatever it was, I know that it had no trouble fucking up Earth’s weak and fragile little blue ass. Score; Unexplained Devastating Event 1, Earth 0. Does it really matter what might have happened, seeing as all it resulted in was the end of almost all life as we know it? Actually, yeah, the lack of any sort of input regarding the origin of this chain of events does suck, and badly. Score: Utter Buffoonishness 1, Cormac McCarthy 0. tIn the wake of, well, whatever cataclysmic shit happened, we’ve got a father and son struggling to survive in the resulting aftermath, and things aren’t very promising for this enterprising duo, as whatever wiped out the inhabitants of planet earth also eradicated not only all plant and animal life, but in a shocking display of sheer spite also managed to do away with quotation marks, colons, semicolons, and most hyphens. Survivors of this worldwide holocaust are few and far between: scattered bands of humans that have largely resorted to thuggishness and cannibalism for lack of other hobbies or nutrition, a few mushrooms, and question marks, periods, and a wily subset of apostrophes have managed to escape extermination. The father and son have managed to eke out a regrettable existence for an unknown number of years, and the approaching winter promises to be outrageously cold, so they make way for an unnamed southern coastline, where I can only presume they're expecting to encounter something more accommodating. tTheir journey is perhaps the most ridiculously boring shit I’ve ever read. They push a shopping cart along with their scant supplies while alternately stomping through ash and sleeping in ditches. Once in a while they encounter another survivor, each meeting completely preposterous and without substance. They ransack homes and forage for food, they abandon the weak and feeble, they ramble incessantly, engaging in snippets of pointless conversation, usually about how they cannot give up, as they are ‘carrying the fire’. I’m assuming that ‘the fire’ is the inextinguishable hope for mankind, a barely flickering light personified in the child, or maybe the fact that any chance of repopulating may depend on their ash-coated and unwashed swinging schlongs, who the hell knows, the ‘fire’ could be their undiminished belief in god which they’ll impart on the cannibal savages running unchecked when not feasting on fetus. tThat’s it. Seriously, that’s the story, and I’ve long since abandoned any attempt to discover what all the hype surrounding this supposed ‘story’ is. tDespite my generally low opinion of our collective taste as a species, I found myself shocked that “The Road” was deemed favorable by so many. But what I really can’t wrap my head around is the critical acclaim, which applauds this for reasons I’ll never understand, and sincerely hope the critics don’t either. I found the storytelling utterly regrettable and lacking in all possible aspects, once in a while McCarthy bizarrely waxed poetic, and he also made the completely unforgivable mistake of mentioning how the ‘sun went around the earth’, which, if intended to be literal, at least offers an explanation as to why the planet is becoming so inhospitable. Otherwise, all Cormac has to offer is a bunch of really short, uninteresting sentences, banal murmurings between father and son, and a whole lot of tedium. I might almost be impressed that on several occasions McCarthy busted out some word which I’ve previously never seen before in my life (woad and siwash come to mind, both forever burnt in my brain as examples of meaningless gibberish), but when the use of these words is considered next to the rest of the prose, composed of rudimentary language, all it called to mind was the disheartening suspicion that McCarthy stumbled across these relics from some Word-Of-The-Day vocabulary-enhancing calendar, making them seem improbably forced into the story: tJune 14th: WOAD: n, some absurd, obscure shit. t“Hmmmm,” Cormac ponders this treasure, “I may have to have the protagonists come across a load of woad.” He chuckles idiotically. “A load. Heh. Of woad. Heh heh.”tWhile the Woad Incident was bad enough, McCarthy also uses ‘wonky’. Christ, the last time I heard wonky used was in Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, coming from Master Blaster. This made for a pretty fitting connection between the two, both being pieces of post-apocalyptic poodle piddle. After getting an unsavory sampling of the author’s propensity for rarely-seen words, I was half expecting to see rampike, which would have actually worked in the context of the story on countless occasions, but apparently that one was included in Roget’s Word-Of-The-Day and our man McCarthy was given the Merriam-Webster last Christmas.tNow I’m just nit-picking, for lack of anything else to comment on, since this was so devoid of action, intrigue, or anything remotely thought-provoking.
—Chris
