Dan Krzyzkowski's Blog - Posts Tagged "post-apocalyptic"
"The Road" - A Review
Depressing books can sometimes make you feel good because they encourage you to be thankful for what you have. In the case of Cormac McCarthy's 2006 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel "The Road," those things are the basic necessities--food, shelter, clothing. This post-apocalyptic tale focuses on a father and son walking across destroyed America. Ash covers the world, the sun never shines, and the air is bitingly cold. Animals and birds are extinct. The few surviving humans are not to be trusted, as many have resorted to cannibalism.
The story holds out little hope for humanity. In many respects, "The Road" is not so much a story at all; it is a piece of Impressionist artwork. Mr. McCarthy uses short strings of words in lieu of gray, slurry brushstrokes to create a canvas ever bleak. In this, he succeeds fantastically. As a story, the novel stumbles plot-lessly forward. Wake up. Walk another ten miles. Man and boy are starving and destitute. They sleep in the woods. Get up the next day and walk some more. Still starving. Their destination is the coast, although they don't know why. The book is broken up into brief sub-chapters, some only several sentences long. Admittedly, I had some trouble establishing "reader momentum," owing to the fact that there were so few sustained scenes. The author, inexplicably, uses no quotation marks to delineate character dialogue, an aspect I found both alienating and annoying. In more than one instance, I was unable to differentiate prose from dialogue. In several cases, I lost track of who was saying what. The author does not use apostrophes in his contractions and seems hellbent on making compound words out of words that are not compound words. Does a seasoned reader have a right to mistake a seemingly endless flow of sentence fragments for literary laziness? To each his own.
Mr. McCarthy can clearly write well, but seems, at times, not to want to. Consider this brilliant description of brook trout on p. 287:
"On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming."
Contrast that with this utterly baffling passage from p. 18:
"He dreamt of walking in a flowering wood where birds flew before them he and the child and the sky was aching blue but he was learning how to wake himself from just such siren worlds."
We never learn the names of the characters. The father is 'the man' and his son is 'the boy.' If "The Road" has any point at all, it is of the boy struggling to hold fast to his belief in goodness. The reader wants to believe in goodness, too, but Mr. McCarthy challenges us on this accord. He begs us to ask if human kindness can really exist when the basic needs for food, shelter, and clothing aren't met. What is goodness when one decides he/she must roast a gutted human infant over a fire in order to survive? In this regard, Mr. McCarthy goes a step further by inquiring of us: what good, really, is goodness if it ends up getting you dead? The father trusts no one, but the boy wants to trust others. The man is reluctant to help others because he knows resources are limited, but the boy wants to share what little food they have. Will the boy's innocence be his undoing? Both may not survive to see the end of the road. But then, the road really never ends.
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The story holds out little hope for humanity. In many respects, "The Road" is not so much a story at all; it is a piece of Impressionist artwork. Mr. McCarthy uses short strings of words in lieu of gray, slurry brushstrokes to create a canvas ever bleak. In this, he succeeds fantastically. As a story, the novel stumbles plot-lessly forward. Wake up. Walk another ten miles. Man and boy are starving and destitute. They sleep in the woods. Get up the next day and walk some more. Still starving. Their destination is the coast, although they don't know why. The book is broken up into brief sub-chapters, some only several sentences long. Admittedly, I had some trouble establishing "reader momentum," owing to the fact that there were so few sustained scenes. The author, inexplicably, uses no quotation marks to delineate character dialogue, an aspect I found both alienating and annoying. In more than one instance, I was unable to differentiate prose from dialogue. In several cases, I lost track of who was saying what. The author does not use apostrophes in his contractions and seems hellbent on making compound words out of words that are not compound words. Does a seasoned reader have a right to mistake a seemingly endless flow of sentence fragments for literary laziness? To each his own.
Mr. McCarthy can clearly write well, but seems, at times, not to want to. Consider this brilliant description of brook trout on p. 287:
"On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming."
Contrast that with this utterly baffling passage from p. 18:
"He dreamt of walking in a flowering wood where birds flew before them he and the child and the sky was aching blue but he was learning how to wake himself from just such siren worlds."
We never learn the names of the characters. The father is 'the man' and his son is 'the boy.' If "The Road" has any point at all, it is of the boy struggling to hold fast to his belief in goodness. The reader wants to believe in goodness, too, but Mr. McCarthy challenges us on this accord. He begs us to ask if human kindness can really exist when the basic needs for food, shelter, and clothing aren't met. What is goodness when one decides he/she must roast a gutted human infant over a fire in order to survive? In this regard, Mr. McCarthy goes a step further by inquiring of us: what good, really, is goodness if it ends up getting you dead? The father trusts no one, but the boy wants to trust others. The man is reluctant to help others because he knows resources are limited, but the boy wants to share what little food they have. Will the boy's innocence be his undoing? Both may not survive to see the end of the road. But then, the road really never ends.
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