Yesterday on my plane ride back from ye olde land of extremely extroverted relatives (Wow, they're a festive bunch! I'll say!), I read Cormac McCarthy's 2006 Pulitzer winner The Road pretty much in its entirety. It's a very short 287 pages long. And everyone I know LOVES this friggin' book.
But, I, alas, am left wondering, is the surface texture of a piece of writing enough to make it great?
Though it describes an utter burn-out of a post-apocalyptic wasteland (ash, ash, and more ash), it is lush and gorgeous. Of this, there can be no doubt. For those not quite in the know, the basic premise of the novel is that a man and his young son set out on a journey across what was once the North American continent, but is now primarily de-peopled and scorched due to some grave, unmentionable and unmentioned catastrophe. I say "primarily de-peopled" because, it seems, a few cannibalistic asswipes manage to survive and produce adequate menace throughout.
But the thing about this novel that makes me wonder for what purpose was it written is that it takes nary a turn that I didn't predict long before I got there. Of course the father has to kill a man in front of the kid. Of course the two come dangerously close to starving to death before happening upon a heretofore untapped cache of canned goods and blankets. Of course they make it to the coast and of course the coast is only more of the same ashy deathscapes. Of course the father dies a pitiful tubercular death (oops, spoiler-- but then, the whole premise is basically a spoiler, so, I'm not going to lose sleep. Sorry.).
So, then, what's left? A beautiful rendering? A few pithy truisms ("Where men can't live gods fare no better," to pilfer just one)? Is it enough to take a cliched cultural anxiety, pepper it with cliched plot points, top it off with a tentatively optimistic denouement, color all of the above in every shade of the lexical rainbow, smack a Pulitzer-Committee-Approved sticker on the cover and call it a day?
So, yeah, I'm pleased that I paused my holiday festivities long enough to run those cadences and all that inventive syntax through my brain, but I can't help but feel like it's not much beyond an poeticized, emo version of Independence Day (sans tentacles, of course. Well, and sans, uh, that victory-over-the-super-scary-Other business, too. And with more father-son-bonding. OK, it's a lame comparison. So, eat me.)
Shit. Somebody or other is really gonna slap me around for this one.
1 comment:
i loved the book. i love his books. i think that had a lot to do with my experience of it. i think one of the more interesting aspects of it is that he wrote it at this point in his life. 74 years old. with a young son. i don't know, something unique and modern about that predicament, how desolate he thinks of his son's future. and that fact being so honest and terrifying.
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