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Wordful Wednesday: The Road

I kept seeing The Road, by Cormac McCarthy, show up on lists of Great American Fiction and knew I should probably read it.  Then I saw that a book reviewer I often read found it an arduous book.  And I thought, “If he had a hard time with it, how’s a lightweight like me going to find it?”

Well, I thought it was terrific.  It’s definitely bleak, which is the most common term I’ve seen applied to it.  But I found it really hard to put down.

(It won the Pulitzer for Fiction in 2007.)

The story is excruciatingly simple, and I think it’s why the book works so well.  A man and his son, referred to only as “the man” and “the boy” throughout, are making their way south, toward warmer weather.  The world has gone to Hell in a hand basket, courtesy some unnamed and unrevealed disaster or war.  (I’ll save you the trouble, if you read it, of wondering whether they ever find out what happened.  They don’t.)  Animals are mostly gone, and people are mighty scarce, too.

Food, of course, is also scarce, and the man and the boy are constantly on the edge of starving, all the while being very, very cold.

There are encounters with people, but some of them are Bad Guys, who make use of a food source most of us like to think we’d never consider, that being other Bad Guys and Good Guys.  One particular encounter leads to the revelation of the man’s driving motivation:

You wanted to know what the bad guys looked like.  Now you know.  It may happen again.  My job is to take care of you.  I was appointed to do that by God.  I will kill anyone who touches you.  Do you understand?

This motivation had a great visceral resonance for me, as I kept imagining myself and the Pancake-Eating Son in the story.  And the heart of the novel is in the interaction between the two characters. 

The style of the prose is perfectly fitting, though I wonder if I would’ve had to adjust to it had I not already read Blindness.  Because, you see, there are no chapter divisions.  Instead, there are short passages, followed by offsetting spaces, and occasionally a (*  *  *).  There are also no quotation marks in dialogue passages.  (And sometimes even apostrophes are missing from contractions, but not all the time.)

(Recall that Blindness had extremely lengthy paragraphs, sometimes not breaking but once every few pages, had no quotation marks, no offsetting of dialogue, and no marking of which character was speaking.  The Road merely leaves out the quotation marks.  It doesn’t interfere with the readability of it.)

Here’s an example of how a typical passage goes:

They lay in the leaves and the ash with their hearts pounding.  He was going to start coughing.  He’d have put his hand over his mouth but the boy was holding on to it and would not let go and in the other hand he was holding the pistol.  He had to concentrate to stifle the cough and at the same time he was trying to listen.  He swung his chin through the leaves, trying to see.  Keep your head down, he whispered.
   Are they coming?
   No.

I read, in other reviews, that some folks weren’t happy with the ending.  I found it to be exactly what I was looking for, and it was actually set up nicely throughout the narrative. 

One thing I think I agree with most reviewers on is that I don’t think I’ll see the movie adaptation, because there are certain scenes I didn’t mind reading so much, but I was glad I didn’t see them.

And so ends my first book review of the year.  And that’s one down for my TBR list.  Sweet.  Not sure what I’ll finish next, but I do have a Theology Thursday Book Review done for tomorrow, so tune in if you’re interested.