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Patrick
read and liked
Keely's
review of The Road:
"The text of the book is jumbled and without any lingering style. 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 pa...more
The text of the book is jumbled and without any lingering style. 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 and jolted to half-life by McCarthy's hollywood popularity.
Much of the book is written in apparent simplicity, but since the author concentrates on pointless tedium without building plot, mood, or character, the whole text is needlessly complicated by distracting details:
"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."
McCarthy often ends his laundry lists of detail with overly complicated metaphors, aping first Hemingway and then Joyce, and not bothering to connect the two styles in any way:
"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."
or "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."
McCarthy will even pile them one atop the other, in what we must assume is an attempt at graceful or poetic language, but which never ceases to feel forced and unoriginal. Take my next example, which McCarthy apparently stole from some goth kid's poetry book:
"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."
You've got to love how he prefaces that last passage 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, in that his writing often brought harm to at least one reader.
McCarthy will often feel the need to describe in detail how a character might scrape paint with a screwdriver, but will then add a complex jargon term with no explanation, nor any indication that it stems from character knowledge. I'd suggest he move his thesaurus either closer to, or further from his desk.
The metaphoric language is equally jarring, as in one sentence, when 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'.
The main characters are as simplistic and uninteresting as the scenery. Their conversations follow an invariable pattern of the father giving orders, the son saying he's scared, the father repeating the orders, the son asking if they are going to die, the father saying no, the son repeating the question, and the father repeating the answer. This is invariably followed by a 'father/son' moment where they come to an understanding by the son asking difficult questions and the father staring off in stoic silence, refusing to answer.
Now, I won't suggest this to be a particularly unlikely or odd relationship in general, but McCarthy does little to support how it would have psychologically developed between them, especially considering their current situation.
The boy constantly acts surprised and afraid of the world he has grown up in. If a suburban child were thrust into this situation, the constant questions and crying would make sense, but anyone who has seen a Rwandan child with an AK-47 knows that the child would have adapted to the bleak environment far better than his father.
There is also a lack of trust or understanding between them, despite the fact that they spend all of their time together, night and day. Again, a suburban child who rarely sees their parents thanks to work and school might have this sort of mistrust and lack of empathy, but being in another person's company every waking moment is not likely to produce this sort of disconnect.
The entire book seems to assume 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. I might suggest that McCarthy has achieved a feat in making a world so bleak and pointless that no matter how bad things get, it never feels like it actually gets any worse, but it also seems a complete betrayal of human nature.
The work is simply tragedy porn, as cliche, overplayed, and melodramatic as a romance novel. The entire point seems to be to get jaded suburbanites to cry. Why some people consider this more artistically valid than making them horny, I'm not sure.
In any case, the sorrow does not exist as an exploration of human character, but purely to exploit and provoke the audience. His characters are no more realistic than Fabio riding a Friesian stallion en route to a chest wax.
In the real world, people always find little hopes and joys, especially in difficult and harrowing conditions. The type of depression McCarthy represents fits in more with an apathetic teen than with survivors of wars or natural disasters.
The entire tone of the book is roughly that of a whiny goth teen. McCarthy's work is devoid of levity, and it seems we are meant to take the book quite seriously even as it ambles from meticulously described tent packing to sudden, convoluted metaphors.
Many readers, when faced with a scattered, confused text with no ideas will come to believe that the author is a remarkable genius for creating something so remote and inexplicable. There are great works that are difficult to access, but this is not what makes them great. Cormac has also come to the conclusion that as long as he is meandering and confusing, he must be a great author.
I found that whenever he made attempts at becoming more dire or poignant, the effect was so forced that it became a source of unintentional humor. It was not difficult to imagine McCarthy in black lipstick posting this story on his myspace in response to his mother not letting him go to the mall until he finished his math homework.
McCarthy painted a picture entirely in black paint, and then expected that covering it in more black paint would somehow make it more profound. Hitchcock once said that you cannot tell a story by constant escalation, but must break and build, break and build. McCarthy has ignored this rule, though I am not sure if it is because it is without any sense of build, or if it is all ludicrously piled without rhyme or reason.
He fails to realize how to draw fear and unease from the reader. Pain and inhumanity are not in and of themselves the causes of fear. What we fear is the unknown and the surprising. We fear a revelation that there is something inside us, inside those we love, and inside the world that we cannot defeat, cannot comprehend, and cannot stop. Cannibalism and dead infants are unpleasant things, but Cormac seems to think that simply putting them there and pointing at them will somehow shock us. He has now reached the literary precipice occupied by the average gore-splattered slasher film.
Instead of producing something inherently unsettling, Cormac instead makes his characters react with histrionic terror. The boy usually takes on the role of scream queen, but since his psychology is so undeveloped, with no hope or joy, he does not even seem human, let alone sympathetic. Cormac doesn't use this forced technique sparingly, either: he makes it the leitmotif of every conflict in the entire book.
He also ignores a wealth of stimulating visual imagery and emotional content in favor of his completely unrelated metaphors. He first tries to ensconce you in a world of endless, bleak fear, but not only does he distract from his own mood with asides, lists of actions, and jargon terms, but he fails to create any character with enough emotional depth to ever lose anything, fear, or to suffer pain.
I simply cannot see how McCarthy can expect to engage anyone with what, in the end, is a world completely sterilized of emotion or possibility. Human beings always create a possibility, a way out, even when there is none.
One might bring up the scene representing excitement at finding food, or of 'the fire', which is the father's cryptic word for why they keep going on and on. However, one may neatly replace 'the fire' with 'the plot' and see the effect McCarthy achieves. McCarthy's sense of human psychology is so dim that he could not even give us a plausible reason why human beings would want to survive, except that the author needs them to.
To a starving man, which jar is more empty, the one with crumbs of food, or the one who has never held food at all? I could perhaps appreciate a completely empty world as a writing exercise, but McCarthy is constantly trying to provoke emotional reactions, so he cannot have been going for utter bleakness of emotion.
His entreaties are shallow and scattered, and so the book never builds to anything more than the sum of its parts. This would be less problematic if those parts were more than long, tedious bleakness occasionally interrupted by grotesquely self-satisfied attempts at figurative language.
Though some have lauded McCarthy's prose as straightforward and simplified, I found it both cluttered and needlessly complex; an effect only strengthened by his gross syntactical and grammatical incompetence. Of course, many are quick to praise any complexity in a work, meaningful or banal.
I'm afraid I can't agree: combining redundant detail with distracting metaphors and then removing grammatical aids creates an effect on the reader like removing the stoplights from a busy intersection. Except for that metaphor to be apt, The Road would have to have been exciting and scary.
I suppose I should also mention the notorious ending of this unfocused, self-devouring opus. McCarthy never decides what he wants to do in this book. None of it fits together, and it isn't because he is a master of 'disconnected prose'. McCarthy tacks on a meaningless ending which denies any of the arguments that I have seen which might have made this book worthwhile. There is no plot progression, no character progression, and no philosophical progression of ideals, so there can be no good ending to this book.
It leads up to nothing, but then McCarthy tries to tack on some moralizing point of hope in his jumble of nothingness, assuring us that he is completely ineffective as an author.
I didn't give the book one star, because it's as good as many other throwaway pulp sci fi novels. The only difference is that the author thinks he's doing something besides writing cheesy pulp sci fi. Maybe his other books are good. I don't know. This book shows that if they are, it was blind luck on McCarthy's part, since he never achieves any sense of purpose or self-awareness here.
*Insert cheesy 'winding road to nowhere' title reference here*(less)
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"I've already learned a few things, but is 2005 too dated?"
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