The Road
I have been able to read more since the semester ended and finished Cormac McCarthy’s The Road a couple of days ago. I wanted to read the book before I went to see the movie, but now I doubt I will go see the movie—not because it won’t be good, but because I want to preserve my own experience of the book.
It was remarkable. The first time I read McCarthy was All the Pretty Horses, and my response to a colleague is “I have no business writing fiction after reading that book.” My, he can write. He reaches a level of writing that is literary without being pretentious or inaccessible. There is plot and character and theme and setting and emotion and involvement for the reader, something I don’t always experience in literary fiction, along with an elegant yet sometimes jolting prose style.
The Road has been summarized and analyzed and reviewed plenty already; good grief, it won a Pulitzer, so I guess enough has been said about it. All I know is its effect on me. If I dream about parts of a book after I read it, I know it’s good. I dreamed about James Joyce’s The Dead, after I read it, another masterpiece. I never dream about Sue Grafton after I read one of her alphabet mysteries, as much as I like them (though they are trashy). My point is not that my dreaming about the book validates its quality, only that its quality seeps deep into my subconscious and lodges there, and it comes out in dreams.
Of course, as I read it my husband and I were driving through north Georgia and upstate South Carolina on a very dreary December day. Without snow and without blue sky, and in the aftermath of a recession that has caused so many factories and warehouses to be closed, I couldn’t help feel that I was on The Road as well. I’m pretty sure that McCarthy’s man and boy are walking through East Tennessee and north Georgia on the way to Charleston and Savannah, anyway. Why? The mountains, the resort town, the seacoast cities, the Rock City sign (the only humor in the book—anybody from around here would appreciate that a See Rock City billboard would survive nuclear winter, or whatever it is that has happened in the book).
Of course the book is chilling—cannibalism has to be the lowest depth to which people can go—but I found it oddly spiritual and hopeful in the end, if one overlooks the premise, that this is a post-apocalyptic landscape. But whoever causes a nuclear holocaust, it will surely be a small minority in the long run. The father’s love, the “fire” they are carrying, and the “good guys” at the end, and the last paragraph, heartened me.
It was remarkable. The first time I read McCarthy was All the Pretty Horses, and my response to a colleague is “I have no business writing fiction after reading that book.” My, he can write. He reaches a level of writing that is literary without being pretentious or inaccessible. There is plot and character and theme and setting and emotion and involvement for the reader, something I don’t always experience in literary fiction, along with an elegant yet sometimes jolting prose style.
The Road has been summarized and analyzed and reviewed plenty already; good grief, it won a Pulitzer, so I guess enough has been said about it. All I know is its effect on me. If I dream about parts of a book after I read it, I know it’s good. I dreamed about James Joyce’s The Dead, after I read it, another masterpiece. I never dream about Sue Grafton after I read one of her alphabet mysteries, as much as I like them (though they are trashy). My point is not that my dreaming about the book validates its quality, only that its quality seeps deep into my subconscious and lodges there, and it comes out in dreams.
Of course, as I read it my husband and I were driving through north Georgia and upstate South Carolina on a very dreary December day. Without snow and without blue sky, and in the aftermath of a recession that has caused so many factories and warehouses to be closed, I couldn’t help feel that I was on The Road as well. I’m pretty sure that McCarthy’s man and boy are walking through East Tennessee and north Georgia on the way to Charleston and Savannah, anyway. Why? The mountains, the resort town, the seacoast cities, the Rock City sign (the only humor in the book—anybody from around here would appreciate that a See Rock City billboard would survive nuclear winter, or whatever it is that has happened in the book).
Of course the book is chilling—cannibalism has to be the lowest depth to which people can go—but I found it oddly spiritual and hopeful in the end, if one overlooks the premise, that this is a post-apocalyptic landscape. But whoever causes a nuclear holocaust, it will surely be a small minority in the long run. The father’s love, the “fire” they are carrying, and the “good guys” at the end, and the last paragraph, heartened me.
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