The Road (Oprah's Book Club)
by Cormac McCarthy
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Book Reviews of The Road (Oprah's Book Club)
Book Review: Pulitzer for the wrong book
Summary: 3 Stars
First, I will say that The Road is worth reading; it is a good book. However, it is not the masterpiece so many are proclaiming it to be; and, too, it is not Mr. McCarthy's best novel (that would be Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West).
I've always admired Mr. McCarthy for his minimalist prose, intriguing characters, and stunning insights into the more darker side of the human condition. It's rare for novelists to mine such seemingly malefic territory and draw from it some kind of beauty or understanding. (Joyce Carol Oates is another of those rare novelists that springs instantly to mind; she, like Mr. McCarthy, is not afraid to shine a raw light onto aspects of human nature most other novelists would just as soon leave in the dark.)
While I've not read all of Mr. McCarthy's novels, I've read enough to know that I admire much of his work. For years, he has been regarded as one of America's greatest writers; indeed, the heir apparent to Faulkner and Hemingway. Anyone who has read Child of God, The Orchard Keeper, Blood Meridian, Outer Dark, or Suttree would, I think, be hard pressed to deny such a mantle to Mr. McCarthy.
Whenever a new novel written by Mr. McCarthy is released, I purchase it on its sale date. I had read some early reviews of The Road and was eagerly anticipating its release. And though it is a novel that one may read quickly, I chose instead to take my time, lingering over the prose. I found myself moved by the novel; however, as it went on, I became somewhat disheartened. It became sadly repetitive and its dialogue so vague as to be almost banal. Not something I'd encountered in Mr. McCarthy's work before. What I felt I was reading was in fact not a novel, but rather the notes for a novel or a screenplay that had yet to actually be written.
The plot has been covered numerous times in other reviews; therefore, I will not repeat it here. What I will say is this: In a world that has grown so savage, and so many of its surviving humans so vicious, it seemed odd to me that the main characters ("the good guys," as they describe themselves) maneuvered through the dangerous landscape as easily as they did. For the first time, I felt as if Mr. McCarthy were playing "the manipulative writer" rather than "the chronicler of specific lives."
In other words, the seams showed; there was no moment when I truly feared for the man and the boy, for Mr. McCarthy never relented in letting them get away from "the bad guys." Like the narrative description, this element persisted to a point in which I was more or less certain that I would not find myself surprised by a change of course. And it just didn't wash. To create such an ugly, dangerous, desperate world and then to let the main characters make it through that world more or less unscathed by the external evils -- it seemed more gimmick than story.
The novel's saving grace, however, is to be found in the closing pages. Mr. McCarthy comes alive here -- a little too late -- and the manner in which he chooses to end the novel is quite moving. The problem, of course, is that one has to slog through quite a bit of ash and mundane repetition to reach said point.
When I finished the novel, I wondered if perhaps I'd missed something. It's not a book I wouldn't recommend (Mr. McCarthy is a stunning writer, whether one reads his better works or his lesser ones), but it is one for which I felt bewilderment when I learned that it had won the Pulitzer Prize. Perhaps the board bent and decided to give Mr. McCarthy the award after years of ignoring his other -- better and more deserving -- novels (see Blood Meridian). It rather cheapened the awards for me, especially considering the other novels released last year that were better than The Road (The Echo Maker, Richard Powers; Everyman, Philip Roth; The Lay of the Land, Richard Ford -- to name a few).
Of the Pulitzer finalists, however, Richard Powers's The Echo Maker was definitely the more deserving of said literary accolade. Like many great novels (Beloved, Gravity's Rainbow, Gilead, The Known World, The Color Purple), it teaches one how to read it. Its characters are fully human; its narrative gripping and gorgeously rendered; its themes stunning in both their beauty and complexity; and its investigation of American life -- in the new millenium and post-911 -- so sharp and clarified that I often had to set aside the book and regard my own similar feelings to such a dark and turbulent time. It's what the best novels do: remind us who we are, from what we come, and perhaps offer us a glimpse of where we may be headed.
I might well have said the same about The Road, but it never struck me as being so fully realized as to stir such thoughts. It didn't tell me anything new that other post-apocalyptic fiction hadn't already touched and investigated. It seemed more like poetry crossed with the classic conventions of the road novel and sprinkled here and there with cryptic doses of George A. Romero.
A good book, but not one deserving of the Pulitzer Prize. Sadly, in the future, Mr. McCarthy will be regarded as "the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer of The Road," when rather the accolade would better and more honestly read: "the Pulitzer Prize-Winning author of Blood Meridian."
Somewhere, in stripping down his prose as to make it skeletally spartan, Mr. McCarthy forgot -- as he didn't in other novels -- how to tell a full story about real human beings caught in the grip of real and extraordinary circumstances.
I was moved, but I was not convinced. And that saddens me, for Mr. McCarthy has been a writer whom I've admired and respected for a good many years.
Were he to win literature's highest accolade, it would have been better that he won for a novel worthy of the prize.
It rather reminds me of this year's Academy Awards, during which one of America's greatest filmmakers won awards for a film that, while good, was certainly not his best -- and perhaps because the voting membership, in trying to assuage past failures, felt that a consolation prize was better than no prize at all.
So, if one wishes to read and see the best of last year, then pick up Richard Powers's The Echo Maker, then walk over to the DVD section and pick out Alfonso Cuaron's Children of Men (a film whose themes and milieu seem similar to those presented in Mr. McCarthy's The Road, only more fully and honestly).
Book Review: Cheating the Reader
Summary: 2 Stars
Like many people, I read "The Road" because it won the Pulitzer. I was already aware of Oprah's endorsement of the book, but when I heard it was about an apocalyptic world I felt I didn't need to read a book that would depress me. When the Pulitzer was given to it, I decided to reconsider.
I was disappointed. Is the book artistic? Yes. Is it entertaining? Only slightly.
Ultimately, there are two elements that make a good novel. Plot and character development. At least one of these has to exist in a book to make it entertaining and meaningful. Neither exist in "The Road."
Plot: First of all, there is no plot. The father and son are walking on a road, heading South because it will be warmer there during the winter. I have a problem with this from the start. Personally, living in Upper Michigan where the windchill can reach 40 below zero in winter, I can understand concern about the cold. Would I walk south, however, if there were a nuclear war? Perhaps to find people, but never to escape the cold. I would be better served chopping down trees and building fires than wandering the countryside with nothing. People lived for thousands of years without electricity or natural gas or coal to heat their homes. It's not the end of the world if the power goes out.
Second, the father and son seem to be searching for "the good guys" but they avoid everyone they meet. It is hard to believe they even think they will find good guys. They'd be better off staying in one place and letting the good guys find them, and if the bad guys find them first, killing them.
Third, the author never tells us what happened to the world. The father at one point says he doesn't know. Most readers think there was a nuclear war before the story begins. However, if this were the case, and say China nuked the U.S., wouldn't somebody know this? Wouldn't the government warn the public of this on the television giving people at least a few minutes or even a few hours before the nuclear weapons hit. Wouldn't the father have met at least one person who could tell him what had happened? If it were a comet that hit, wouldn't some scientist have seen it coming and warned the human race. Not knowing what happened just makes no sense at all to me.
Fourth, there is no purpose. Not only is the search for the good guys fruitless, but the father has absolutely no idea of what to teach his son or what the future might be. He keeps telling his son not to think about the world that existed, as if it will make his son sad, and he tells his son to keep the fire burning, but he gives him no tools to do this. He does not in anyway teach his son the history of the human race, the great stories of courage, the epics, or poetry or anything to inspire his son, to preserve the culture and civilization. Perhaps civilization has resulted in disaster, but if that were the case, I would think the father would want his son to know the good things about human history so they are carried on and rebuilt.
Character Development: There isn't any really. The father and son are not even given names. Perhaps McCarthy wants them to be "everyman" figures to show they could be any one of us if such an event happened although I can't imagine acting much like the father, who is so unwilling to communicate with his son. I think McCarthy purposely leaves the characters' thoughts and motivations vague to create Everyman type characters, but what this unnatural character depiction does is alienate the reader. The father's thoughts, especially, are unnaturally restricted. Granted, we don't really know how long since the world fell into such a state and perhaps all that traipsing around the country makes the father too tired to have coherent thoughts anymore, but we only get pieces of his thoughts--we never get clear memories. We know nothing about who he was before the crisis occurred. What were his dreams and goals? Who was his family? How has the loss of his family and friends affected him? At one point when his son asks, he just says he misses his friends. I can understand his not wanting to burden the child with his emotions, but the reader should be allowed to see into his mind and understand the pain and sorrow he must feel. I didn't have any great emotional connection with the characters and found myself not really caring if someone did kill and eat them because I was cheated out of their thoughts, and consequently, I never got to know them.
Final Score: I would probably give this book 3 stars, saying it was okay, except I also want to take issue with the style. Many of the other reviews have said the book is well-written, but that is a vague statement. The prose flows smoothly and I did not find it difficult to follow. But I am giving the book two stars because the punctuation was very irritating. There are no quotations around the dialogue and rarely any dialogue tags of "he said" so that in some of the conversations I lost track of who was speaking. Furthermore, if McCarthy wants to avoid using punctuation, that's one thing, but he should at least be consistent about it. He repeatedly leaves out the apostrophes in contractions that include "not" - "isn't" becomes "isnt" - but he doesn't leave out the apostrophes for most other contractions. I don't understand this lack of consistency. I don't know why a publisher would put up with it. I can only assume, since this is the only McCarthy novel I have read, that his earlier books were greater and therefore, he has clout with the publisher.
Ultimately, "The Road" does have a couple moments of suspense, but its lack of plot and character development made it a severe disappointment for me. If you want to be moved, you will find a stronger emotional connection to the horse in "Black Beauty." If you want a good apocalyptic novel, even Stephen King--whom I do not usually recommend--did better in "The Stand." A lot of reviewers have argued about whether "The Road" is a work of science-fiction. I would recommend they compare it to Mary Shelley's "The Last Man" - the first apocalyptic novel written, and one far more moving and meaningful, as well as one of the first science fiction novels, written in 1826, and by the author of "Frankenstein."
- Tyler R. Tichelaar, Ph.D. in literature, for MQT Reviews, author of "Iron Pioneers"
Book Review: Death, destruction and annihilation at the end of the road.
Summary: 5 Stars
It's probably fair to call The Road a perfect novel. It goes to the very edge of the precipice: death, destruction, annihilation. The two characters who populate the story are at the very end of the road. The title suggests some kind of Kerouacian journey to fun loving beatnik enlightenment, but nothing could be further from the truth. The Road is neither fun loving, nor beatnik. There is possibly enlightenment, but the tiny candle of hope the book holds out is dim indeed. McCarthy goes as far as it is possible to go in literature - stripping the characters' world bare until there's nothing left but metaphor. The result is as beautiful as it is painful.
It takes about ten pages to reveal, in patches of bleak discovery for the reader, that the landscape that the two characters of this novel inhabit is a post-apocalyptic one. Everything is burnt, ash covered, with corpses everywhere. The two main characters of this novel, a father and his son, are on the run, hiding from gangs of vicious `bloodcult' cannibals looking to capture, enslave and eat anyone left alive. They are also in search of something, but it's never quite clear what: someplace to stay; some group which is overtly good and safe. They follow a broken "tattered oilcompany roadmap" towards the southern ocean. But the landscape is unforgiving. Starvation is always at hand. Their lives are only safe in the temporary serendipity of what they might happen upon with their wrecked shopping trolley, protected by no more than a single bullet. There are overtones of Mad Max--the black humour of wild, comically dressed road gangs--but the relationship between the nameless father and son is so tender, so sad, and so full of the longing of the world that no longer exists, that every word of the book is wrought. And at no point does the reader laugh. Even looking away from the continual horror is difficult.
In this environment, McCarthy allows himself no spare words, but what he does use is a testimony to his craftsmanship. The novel is as sparse and clean as anything Hemingway or Carver has produced, and yet, in the pristine bone cracking cold of its prose is so much linguistic lushness. Every word is heavy with poetic richness. The book is full of metaphor, and the metaphors are used wonderfully, but so perfectly integrated is the language with plot and characterisation, that it's possible to read this and not notice the metaphors. Instead the reader gets straight to the heart of what the metaphor is conveying.
Throughout the novel, the work takes its momentum from the pain of encroaching nothingness and hope simultaneously pressing against each other. The man loves the boy, but knows his own death is coming as he spits blood onto the ashy snow. The father and son spend the entire book seeking the good, and safe, struggling for life, with death and extinction everywhere. And yet it's almost unbearably beautiful, almost intensely rich and the reader absorbs the desperate love between the boy and his father, or the boys own desperation to be one of the "good guys." This is a book that hits the reader between the eyebrows with the ache of an ice cream headache.
Although the story centres myopically on the father and his son, there are other characters in the periphery. There is the mother, who isn't in this story--having already coldly committed suicide before the story opens - but who populates the story through the father's memory. She is part of the life and world he can only dream about, but can't construct, in words for his son, or in reality. The boy was born in the early days of the tragedy, and therefore has no memory of his mother, and yet he is the embodiment of her - of a place his father once inhabited. There are also characters they meet on the road; brief glimpses of an almost extinct species (and most others are already extinct), reduced to survival instinct. There is the old nameless man they meet and help on the road. There is the baby they don't save who later might be the same one they find on a spit. There is the little boy's face the boy sees in a window, who later might be the same one he joins up with: "Goodness will find the little boy. It always has. It will again." (300). There are the chained people in a house they run from. There is the man they kill, and the one they may as well have killed.
The dialogue between the man and his son is sharp in its contrast to the long sentences which seem to originate in the man's head. These two sentences for example, comma-less and metaphor rich draw the reader away from the action into the biblical intensity of the landscape.
Then the story pulls the reader out of reverie into the stark survival dialogue of the pair as they struggle for food, for warmth, and to move towards a place - an ocean no longer blue -- where the man's consumption won't kill him.
The tenderness between the father and son is a masterly example of showing rather than telling. The father's desperation not to die or allow his son to be taken by the "bloodcults" is something that McCarthy makes clear without spelling it out. He never tells us that the man is dying, but we watch his decline as his cough worsens, along with the boys progression as he stops playing with the broken toys and items he finds, and becomes ever more skeletal: "Knobby spine bones. The razorous shoulder blades sawing under the pale skin." (233) But never for a moment, however bleak, and this is possibly the bleakest book ever written, does the book descend into nihilism or become maudlin. The father and son do indeed "carry the flame", and it's this Pater styled "hard gem-like flame" that underpins the novel, leaving us with the "uncanny taste of a peach from some phantom orchard" (17). Though McCarthy resists the urge to give the reader too much hope--things can never be made right again--the memories of the boy, of trout that smell of moss in your hand; the "vermiculate patterns" of a world that once was, of the enduring conversations between a boy and his father, remain beautiful. And for his readers, these are things we still have now.
Magdalena Ball is the author of Sleep Before Evening
"There is so much beautiful writing here, soaring passages."
Book Review: The Death of Civilization
Summary: 2 Stars
If future anthropologists are one day sorting through ancient literature trying to find some insight into today's modern Western culture, they would do well to read this book. Not because it's all that good, but because to understand a culture it's often very useful to look at its worst fears. In this sense, THE ROAD is a perfect artifact, a precise and unself-conscious portrayal of consumer culture's unique nightmare: the end of consumer culture.
As a novel, THE ROAD is rather dull, repetitive and sometimes annoyingly confusing in its basic grammar (for instance, with two main characters, both male and neither named, the masculine third-person pronoun runs rampant, often to the detriment of clarity). There is no real character development per se, and the ending is predictable and sentimental, so that the entire plot feels like what it describes: a slow march towards an inescapable and pointless end. Luckily, unlike the characters in the book, the reader does have a choice, and could easily just put the book down and walk away, to do something better with her time.
If, instead, the reader decides to stick with it, what she will find unfolding before her is not the development of interesting characters or intriguing plot, but the characterization of a worldview. Modern consumer culture's worldview, to be precise. In this worldview, nature, ecology, even time itself are irrelevant; the only thing that matters is man's modern conception of civilization. If there is one sentence that could encapsulate the basic mythology at the heart of THE ROAD, it's this: civilization is God. Without civilization, man has no moral center, no sense of self, and is reduced to pure savagery. Because our culture defines man's role as that of a consumer of readily-available products (rather than as cultivator or creator), the apocalypse is the story of man reduced to a scavenger, picking off the remains of civilization's rotting, rusting corpse, moving inanely from one place to another looking for those last few items still left to consume.
Community is beyond the scope of imagination (consumer culture's anxiety-driven individualism deteriorates into simple xenophobia and paranoia), and family bonds are poor shadows of their former ideals, composed of necessity and mere sentimentality. The novel's protagonist lives for his son, not for the son's sake, but because of what the son represents. He refers to his son as a god and as "the son of God"--but what does this mean, other than that he is the son of civilization. The "fire" that the "good guys" carry is merely the vain hope that somehow civilization itself can be rekindled and rebuilt, that the rules of civilized people can be reinstated, that the world can be rendered safe and familiar again. But in the end, basic biology and common sense overtake good guys and bad guys alike. In the end--an end consumer culture has always struggled to reject, avoid and deny--in the end, everybody dies.
All of this, if conceived intentionally by the author, might have made for a fascinating and insightful look into the mythology of our modern culture, an exploration of obsessive consumption and the conclusion to which its basic premises inevitably lead. Unfortunately, it seems quite clear that McCarthy is steeped in this worldview up to his eyeballs, with neither the awareness nor the perspective with which to criticize it. The ubiquitous, unexplained ash that pervades the book and kills off everything except, remarkably, man himself might as well be a symbol for the author's ignorance about ecology and the cycles of the natural world. Because civilization is God, and man is assumed to be the only vehicle of progress and change, when civilization is destroyed, the world itself ceases to turn. Time becomes irrelevant--seasons change, but somehow this entails only a change in temperature, not its consequences; rain falls and winds blow, but these natural processes fail to cause any erosion, even after a decade.
Instead, everything is eerily preserved, an open-air museum of concrete and plastic and mummified corpses, the remnants of the dead civilization morbidly displayed in their uselessness. THE ROAD is the nightmarish landscape of man's presumed untouchability. Even with the end of civilization, the anthropocentrism of consumer culture persists, and its products are portrayed as effectively eternal and largely beyond the influence of the natural world. Indeed, the natural world extends only so far as domesticated dogs and cattle, which of course (the protagonist tells us) perished without man's intervention and stewardship. No crows, rats or cockroaches--not even microorganisms--speed the decomposition of the dead, no weeds or weather can break up the roads' unflinching macadam.
The world of McCarthy's novel is an unreal one, and therefore an unmoving and even irrelevant one. It is a world built upon the fears of our particular culture, one that cannot see beyond itself or imagine a world that survives its own destruction. It plays by the imaginary rules of a culture unable to recognize man as a part of nature, one that instead sees him as exempt from nature even unto his own demise. A wholly ridiculous notion, and a nightmare that can be laughed at once the sleeper has awakened. The world will not end with humanity, and humanity itself is not trapped in the suicidal and pointless obsession of consumption. But the reader who sympathizes too strongly or thrills too easily at the ghost story of THE ROAD is likely to busy herself with the frantic preservation of this current self-deluded way of life, rather than risk what today's culture insists is the only nightmarish alternative.
Book Review: Can humanity be regenerated only by the death of the father?
Summary: 4 Stars
An amazing story, beyond the final destruction of the world. We don't know how it happened, but everything is ashes, has been carbonized. An enormous fire that filled the sky with darkness and cut off all sunlight, thus leading to a new glaciation. The two characters are going south through a constantly snowy, icy and cold country. The earth is a living organism and it produced its own solution to protect its balance and existence. The world has a survival instinct. If it gets too hot a good old fire will clean it up all and cause a new ice-age. This approach states that human beings are nothing, control nothing and cannot in any way stop or prevent what the cosmos will decide. The forces at stake in the universe are by far too strong and powerful for our little vanity to prevent them from commanding, dominating, governing and forcing us to be humble. Yet even in such dire straits human beings will not be humble. Humility is our basic lacking quality. The two characters are a father and his son, a young child about ten. It explores very convincingly theit mutually narcissistic relation in this situation where fear and survival are the only two active dimensions of their vision of life. I find it a little untrue though. The father is constantly manipulating the child and telling him lies to make him do what he wants him to do and then of course the lies reveals themselves. It is easier in the short run to tell a lie and get what you want, but in such a situation it isn't realistic. The child should have resisted a lot more when he discovered he had been told lies. In fact the relation between this father and this son does not seem real, feasible. The child appears to be dependent, to the point of being slightly retarded and that is not acceptable. The crisis was sudden, for sure. He was traumatized. He is not able to get over this trauma and subsequently develops a need to submit to his father's will and decisions, even if they are obviously wrong and based on lies. The child has no autonomy and no sense of his own responsibility. Well advanced in the novel, the child will be entrusted with the gun and he will drop it and forget it in the sand of the beach. Absurd. A child who feels that menaced will certainly not let go of the gun and forget about it. He will in fact develop a fetishistic attachment to the gun as the supreme power that could solve all problems. Losing it reveals the desire of the child to cause his father's death and his own. The drawback here is a lot wider. The child does not seem to grow. He is blocked in an infantile position and it is not possible. All along their way they only find dangerous and aggressive people, never the slightest friendly person. And yet at the end the first man who comes by is friendly and recuperates the child after the death of his father. I can't believe. I am sure they should have come across other positive people before and that was absolutely un-human from the father to believe that everyone they met was dangerous, that they had to hide away from everyone because no one could be friendly. The father is absolutely paranoid and maybe slightly schizophrenic. I don't deem that possible. A standard human being would look for company, for other survivors to survive together because that is the basic principle of the human species, the only reason why humanity has survived all the negative events that have assailed human beings for ever since homo sapiens came out of his genetic womb. Moreover though it is not explained, the man and the boy are surviving together and there is a vague mention of a woman twice in the novel, a woman connected to men in both cases, apart from the private recollection of a woman in the man's mind, unshared, unexplained, un-dramatic in the plot. The third woman is the one at the end who gives the child a hug when he arrives in the "commune" that has recuperated him from his mourning. This world is a sexist projection of a very particular real world that is not realistic at all. A normal male individual mammal, a human in this case, would be looking for a female to both relieve his own needs and to assure the survival of the species, an absolutely and only genetic survival instinct. But the most surprising element is the very final paragraph of the novel. No vision, no opening, no closing, just an element from a distant biological past that means nothing in the catastrophic present. Life is dead. How can a trout be still alive, if not in the survivor's - the child's - memory? But if the whole humanity was destroyed, if all animal and vegetal life was destroyed, how come there are survivors? What enabled them to survive? A beautiful novel in many ways but it does not compare with the work other writers did when envisaging the final death of humanity, like H.G. Wells or Frank Herbert, Stephen King or Arthur C. Clarke. It looks too much like Samuel Becket's "Happy Days" also based on a couple, but locked up in some kind of refuge and a more natural heterosexual couple. This book pretends to keep up humanity in these fire-carrying survivors, and at the same time everything is inhuman in their environment till the very last page, after the father died. This sudden come-back of humanity is in many ways unbelievable, just like the survival of any human life when all other life has been destroyed.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris Dauphine, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne & University Versailles Saint Quentin en Yvelines