Keely's review

Ah, fuck me. Yer a right nut, ren fair.
Cormac is the greatest living American novelist, a writer of technical genius and a man of some wisdom. This review makes me want to vomit.

Just think Keely, in the time you wrote this McCarthy probably was able to pen a chapter of his next masterpiece.

Hi, Keely.
I have not read this book but I enjoyed your review very much, especially the sentence, "Many have pointed out where parts resemble one author or another, but the whole of the book is not a seamless blend as much as it is a reanimated corpse, sewn together from half dead parts to make a wobbling, incongruous whole."

Perhaps, if you and its other detractors are lucky, this book will eventually disappear into the darkness of a cold Arctic night.

P.S. Dobro vece, Donald and Robert. What's shakin'?

The ice in the glass of scotch I'm having to forget this fatuous review.

One man's fatuous is another woman's fabulous.

Keely: I may disagree about your philosophy of writing, but you're right about this book. It's way overrated. If this is representative of McCarthy (it's the only novel I've read by him), then he's way overrated too.

Another woman? Which other woman?

*sigh*
Do I really need to rephrase that, hon', or are you just being...uhh...you?

Hi, Bryan. How's my favorite lawyer-in-training?

Keely -

I really shouldn't have called your piece fatuous. I was feeling stroppy and got condescending at your expense. Anyone who puts as much time and thought into their writing as you obviously do - however much I like or dislike its content and tone - deserves a more reasoned and and respectful response.

No doubt I'll be my normal asshole self again tomorrow and have at you again soon, but for now - what the hell.

You are, of course, completely wrong in your assessment.
That much I'll say.

I felt that I needed to give the book a fair shake. I couldn't have written this review if I hadn't looked at it as a whole. It's easy to look at the repetetive prose, silly metaphors, and unrealistic bleakness and simply turn away, but I couldn't have really written a review without taking it all into account. I do have a number of books I have abandoned midway, but I make sure to mention this and my reviews cannot, by their nature, deal with a complex criticism of the text.

There is an old rule for those who wish to become wiser, and that is that you should always make sure to read something you don't like and are bound to disagree with once in a while to keep yourself fresh.

Not only might you find something new to make you rethink your old opinions, but you are also reminded of why you dislike certain things in the first place. As a writer, it is sometimes more important to know what mistakes to avoid than to know what positives to include.

Thanks everyone for once again telling me I'm wrong but giving no argument or reason. I don't care if you agree with me or not. I don't care if you like me or not. I care about books and ideas. I'd love for someone to point something out to make me reconsider this (or any other) book.

I always learn more from mistakes than from being right, and it's always my hope to find a mistake that will lead to an error in my entire process, such that it may be altered and improved. I don't begrudge anyone not wanting to put in the time to do so, but if you aren't, it seems rather pointless to disagree.

I tend to expect that for every opinion I hold, there will be an overwhelming majority who disagree with it. However, it doesn't really matter unless they can tell me why. Either that, or chase me to the mill with pitchforks.

This review and most of the comments here have restored my faith in my own judgement. Until now criticizing this this book was akin to saying the Bill of Rights sounded like a communist plot - you can tell my age and era by my figures of speech. I hated this book fore and aft for all the reasons so eloquently expressed here. Keely, I owe you big time.

Excellent review, excellent response, Keely.
However, I believe you have every right to take umbrage at the use of the word "wrong" in message #9. Is it "wrong" to dislike something someone else likes? Of course not. Thus, for you, your opinion is entirely "right."

By the way, based on this review (especially that godawful excerpt about the water), Ginnie's comment, and about three or four antagonistic, vitriol-filled threads attached to this same book, there's no way I will ever read it.

(Here's the first McCarthy throw-down I encountered on GR. One nice thing I gained from it is my friend Isaiah. He had me at "I'm a belligerent little fart." http://www.goodreads.com/revie... )

Bryan, a quick aside: The Road is completely unrepresentative of McCarthy's work, as is `No Country for old men'. I would try `All the Pretty Horses' first and then the other volumes in the Border trilogy. `Blood Meridian' is his best book.

Ginnie, are these your feelings about McCarthy in general or just `The Road'? I think his work is a whole is an excellent treasure-trove of American Classicism, a close, almost sacred, observation of nature and an intelligent meditation on what it means to be human in an age where all certainties have been ripped from us. One could argue that he is a tad nihilistic, something that I think you might not respond to, but there are passages in his book that are profoundly moving and beautiful and a love of creation can be found there, albeit a spartan one.

I stand by `The Road'. It is howl from the edge of the abyss, a cry out for what we can all lose if we allow ourselves to continue down the path we are heading as a civilazation. It is also a love story between father and son, one that is heart breaking from page one, because you know death will part them soon and there is no valley of Shang-ri-la where all their hurts will be salved.

The book is a classic; I have not a single, solitary doubt that it will be read a hundred years from now. Unless we refuse to follow the better angels of our natures and we continue on `The Road'into the abyss.

yeah, this review is way off. it seems, almost, as if its author actually chose a deliberately simplified response to the book. nonetheless, check it:

1) "The entire book seems to stem from the premise that under difficult situations, human beings simply fold in on themselves and give up. The book is mostly empty of any sense of hope, or joy, or anything but bare bleakness."

really? this is what you were left with? i truly have a hard time understanding this at all. fold in? give up? need i mention that the boy and his father did anything but give up? that the mother, who did give up, is dismissed in the opening pages of the book? that the entire book is predicated on the idea that man does not give up in the face of even the most horrible fate?

empty of hope? whaaaat? beyond the ending which many dismissed as even TOO hopeful, the book is about (and, really, i can't even imagine someone arguing this) how -- to reduce it to a cliche -- love and hope will prevail in the face of supposed absolute hopelessness. how one man will do anything in the hope that he will find salvation for his son and, by extension, perpetuate his bloodline, thus safeguarding existence for all men. empty of hope? were we reading the same book?

2) "The author ignores a possible wealth of stimulating visual imagery and emotional content in favor of unrelated metaphors."

uh, yeah... this is also why you objected so strongly to the 'laundry list' description of the water. just as bresson does with the cinema, mccarthy deliberately chose to leave out 'stimulating imagery and emotional content' so as to get at something different, something deeper and larger. i, for one, greatly appreciated the lack of high drama and creative visual imagery, which would serve merely to showcase the author's imagination rather than enrich character plot or theme. i suppose you'd suggest that bresson shoot his scenes to feature more spatial depth and emotional charge from the actors?

in the same vein, mccarthy's distant and detailed description of something as simple as unscrewing a water bottle takes on a significance that simply cannot be understood by anyone in our world. again, your complaint is similar to complaints levied against Bresson for showing, for several continuous minutes, scenes of a man doing something as simple as, say, tying a knot with his bedsheet. there's a reason, man. get with it.


3) "Unfortunately, since the boy's psychology is so simplistic, and since he has no hope or joy, he cannot seem human to us, let alone a sympathetic character. "

hmmm... well, lemme see... a young boy is born into a world marked by his mother's suicide and some kind of horrible unknown apocalypse. yeah, i'd expect him to be more hopeful. and joyful. that'd be the way to play it. bad choice mccarthy! over-psychologize a five year old in an effort to make him 'sympathetic' -- make him one of those precocious young kids that always seem too smart. hey! model him after the boy from Jerry Maguire. that's always a crowd pleaser.

and i'll tell you what NOT to do! don't indicate that beneath the boy's solemn veneer exists a hurting hoping yearning young boy. just tell us! don't create a scene in which the boy sees a child younger than himself, and obsessed throughout the book about what's going to happen to this child in an effort to show that the kid is aware and hopeful and compassionate. naw... that ain't the way to do it. even though the kid would probably have some kind of wildly stunted emotional growth as a result of well - THE END OF THE FUCKING WORLD! - it'd be better to really put it out there cormac. or at least to put us in his head and let us really know that he's a smart kid who experiences joy and hope. you really should know cormac that we require sympathetic characters and MUSTN'T have to work to get at the core of who someone is. we want to be told! we want to SYMPATHIZE! bad cormac! bad!

-- well, i keep a few copies of some faulkner and melville novels in which i've underlined some truly horrible passages. clumsy metaphors and dull, repetitive descriptions, etc... yes. even from the masters. i was gonna answer a few more of keely's wrongheaded attacks and then go on to list a few of herman and willy's most offensive passages to make the point that while, yes, mccarthy can certainly turn an awkward phrase, the listing of these non-contextual phrases -- particularly when the book contains so many gems -- seems somewhat unfair.

but i'm exhausted. so am gonna stop. the best i can say is that if anyone didn't get from this book what i did... i guess it sucks for them. donald says it best up above with his whole 'howl from the abyss' thing. it truly is. yes. a mad screaming demented hopeful compassionate howl.

*sigh*
There's that word "wrong" again, being used in a very bad way. Robert and Brian, you both know how fond I am of you, but telling Keely that he is wrong because he doesn't agree with you sounds so nastily, rigidly, self-righteously...wrong. It has also cast a shadow on an otherwise sunny Saturday so I am outta here.

Keely, good luck holding off the horde of pitchfork-wielding villagers.

Tracy,you know I love you, but you are just wrong wrong wrong!

I agree with you both, Donald and Brian. It may be best post-apocalypse book around. I liked that McCarthy reduced his usual linguistic exuberance for this one. It's pared down, just as the existence of the man and boy is pared down to the basics of survival.

But yeah, the ending was a little too hopeful.

>>The book is a classic; I have not a single, solitary doubt that it won't be read a hundred years from now.

There is absolutely no way to predict such things and besides, who cares if that comes to pass. Isn't it enough that it touched you and you got something out of it?

tracy! my love, my dear...

the only time i used 'wrong' was in the phrase 'wrongheaded attacks' -- not exactly the same thing.

but i get your point.

but, tracy, i do take issue with your complaint: we all proceed with the tacit understanding that what we all write in regard to books is our opinion. we try and bolster it with facts and other opinions and rebuts and refutals, etc... but ultimately we are writing what we 'think' and 'believe' to be the case. as painful as it is to most of us, writing and lit crit ain't a science.

it would get awfully clumsy to keep writing, "in my opinion" or "i disagree because..." or "i don't believe you are right because" or "i don't think that's the case because..."

keely's a big boy with some strong opinions -- in voicing those opinions, he's gotta assume some kinda 'rigidity' in return, no? furthermore, he - everyone - must know that when we write 'wrong' it translates to "i believe you are wrong".

right?

that said: he's mathematically and scientifically WRONG!

and if i may answer for donald:

on the one hand it is surely enough that something touches you and you alone.

on the other, it means something when a work touches not only the people in whose time the author lives, but when he/she is able to stretch his/her hand out from the grave, across the years decades even centuries, to touch a soul in another time... it is one of the truly magical, even mystical, qualities of books.

all donald was saying, i think, was that this book which keely so smugly dismissed will stand the test of time and will touch hearts and minds for many years to come. it'd be nice to say, "i loved this book! that's enough! fuck the world!" -- but it ain't really like that. it's exciting to know that others appreciate what means a lot to us, yeah? it's why we dig, say, watching horror movies in full theaters... the community experience is too often put down as 'commercial' or 'herd like'... and, coincidentally, it's one of the ideas and themes of The Road...

Pffft! Do not quibble semantics with me, Brian, my love, my dear. "Wrong" and "wrong-headed" are conjoined twins and you effing know it.

Good morning, Donald! Love you too!!

Now, I really AM leaving; I have a Target to hit. Geddit? Target to...Yeah, OK, that was bad. But not WRONG!

Bryan, as far as something standing the test of time I think I am on firm, but not unassailable ground. You need only look at McCarthy's current place in the Western Canon- beloved in America with some notable detractors- even more revered in Europe. I base this also on my own level of discernment, McCarthy's work doen't stink of momentary fad or obvious surrender to the marketplace or a transparent effort to capture the zeitgeist. When I `hope' for its(and all his works) survival as a cultural I do so because it is the sort of thing I would wish to survive. There is wisdom to be found here, high art, and an attempt to define what an ethical life would be at the end of all. Such things deserve to survive but I know damn well sometimes they don't.

I messaged Yulian in case she has no desire to return to this thread to find out, but fyi anyone who wants to retract a vote can do so by simply pressing the 'vote' button again. Needless to say, I have had people express this desire regarding my reviews before.

Brian, thanks for elucidating what it is you value about this book and the points you disagree on. I think what Tracy may be responding to is not your single use of 'wrong', but the general tone of your response in that it was rather flippant and tended towards ridicule and hyperbolous sarcasm.

As to your first point, there were times when McCarthy tried to put in elements of hopefulness, chiefly the ending, which is a bit convenient, and 'the fire', but I simply never got the impression that there was a sense of hope below these surface attempts by the author. The psychology did simply not seem to go that deep.

Though it's true that the character do continue on, day after day, their reaction to the world is marked not by a dogged resiliance and will to survive, but a resignation to simply keep on until they drop. There is never any end point expressed by the man, and he tends to dissuade the boy's attempts to create some 'better situation' which they might attain, even purely in the mind.

As to your second point, I wasn't critiquing the 'everyday' nature of the book. I love Chekhov and don't mind Hemingway, and they are exceedingly straightforward authors. What I am objecting to is that McCarthy ignores the wealth of symbols in the world in favor of using ungainly and awkward metaphors and the occasional Fancy College Word.

He is not sticking to the simplicity apparent in some passages, but waves wildly back and forth, not only between styles, but between internal and external authorial voices.

As to the simplistic passages themselves, they lacked the art to create further meaning. Melville managed to create mood and movement by the way he used his words, even as he was describing the amazingly mundane. I tend to maintain that it is less important what the book is about than how it is expressed. I haven't seen Bresson, but if he can frame and shoot his simple scenes in order to make them interesting, engaging, and meaningful, then I would certainly enjoy them.

It was not that I detested a 'lack of high drama', as much as I felt that Cormac was alternately trying to have a simplistic, straightforward story, and trying to create a high-drama, sympathetic work. One or the other would have been fine, but in conjunction they tore one another down.

As to your third point, I would certainly agree that the world is bleak enough and frightening enough for the boy, but that his constant fear and unknowning is not, in my experience, accurate. If he had come from the time before and been thrust into this, then he certainly would have behaved that way, but people born into difficulty do not come to resent and fear that difficulty because it is their everyday life.

People in cival war-torn third world countries are not, as a rule, depressed. They go through hardships, but take them as they come and try to move on. They are not always frightened or hopeless, but tend to attach themselves to other ideas, such as god or family, in order to do what needs to get done.

We get the impression that the boy has been crying and screaming in fear the entire handful of years he's lived. It is simply difficult for me to believe that these everyday occurences continue to frighten him so. As to when he finds the dead infant, I found it exceedingly odd that the boy would react so strongly. Cormac seems to forget that people have thrown babies in dumpsters, enjoyed attending executions, and held high society parties where beating to death a cat in a bag was the chief entertainment.

If death is what surrounds you, then death will become a mundane thing. One might argue that the father has somehow imparted to his son this sense of life value and this understanding of what is right and wrong, but if so, the boy would be learning this from the father's own interactions with the world. We see that the father's response to the boy is never to express a deeper thought, but always to use something simple and straightforward. He also rarely reacts to the things around him with horror, but remains calm and emotionless. Those two things being the case, we must wonder where the boy has learned to act any differently than his father.

I could see a lot of things McCarthy was attempting to do, such as to create this bleak world with people moving through it on desparate hope, trying to create some original figuritave language, trying to build a psychology and mood from a very basic textual representation, and trying to tell a different sort of story. I'm merely saying that these elements did not come together as they could have to create a better work, but rather sputtered and clashed against one another to create merely a picture of McCarthy's intention, and not his success in that.

Donald, I think you fell prey to a double negative- "I have not a single, solitary doubt that it won't be read a hundred years from now" would mean that you think it definitely will *not* be read in a century. I believe you meant to say you had no doubt "that it will be read 100 years from now." Unless, of course, you meant the reading public of the future will be filled with Phillistines, uninterested in (what you perceive to be) classic literature, which is completely possible.

Thank you, Ama. I've corrected it. This falls under the very large category of examples of me being not as smart as I think am.

A category that young Mr. Keely apparently hasn't bumped up against yet.