The Road (Oprah's Book Club)
by Cormac McCarthy
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Book Reviews of The Road (Oprah's Book Club)
Book Review: Carrying the Fire.
Summary: 4 Stars
I liked it, and I think it is not only a worthwhile and rewarding read, but an important one also. Important in the sense that it causes us to ponder things worth pondering. As all great literature ought to do, it strikes at what is best and worst about being human.
It is written in what my Reading Partner aptly called a "minimalist" fashion.
Short, choppy, often incomplete sentences. Sentences lacking a verb. Repetitive, one-word exchanges in dialogue. The Road must set some sort of world-record in the use of the word "okay" for instance... or the phrase "I know."
There is an elegance about it, though. A sophistication in the midst of its own structural economy. It reads quickly, but it is not simple. America is bleak, ruined, rotting and burnt-out. And it is as though McCarthy employed the most modest, un-Flaubertian means to tell us. Opening any of his other novels quickly reveals that he does not always write as sparingly as he did here.
Character-wise, we only get to know the nameless man and his nameless son. We meet no one else that we would want to know better, nor do they. [Until the very end, perhaps.] America, and presumably the entire world, has been destroyed, years ago. Although the cause is not explicitly given [it is hinted at], we suspect nuclear catastrophe on a massive scale, leaving barely any human survivors. And the great majority of these are murderous and cannabalistic, travelling in gangs, seeking their victims.
Everything is burnt, molten, and ashen. The snow falls grey.
Into this world the man and his son push their gear-laden shopping cart along The Road. They struggle to survive upon the chance finding of food, clothing, and shelter. Their [unexplained] immediate goal is to stay on a southern course, and reach the ocean. They meet with devastating hardship and horror, and any moments of respite are few and far between.
What binds them together is their profound love for each other, and their commitment to "being one of the good guys" and "carrying the fire." This becomes their sort of "code" for helping each other keep the inner spirt of goodness alive. The child seems better equipped to do this, than the man.
But McCarthy shows us that this is because, along with the adult commitment to survival comes the adult responsibility of protection. And this latter thing is motivated by perhaps the fiercest form of love, that being parental love.
In the hour of greatest need, it is this very form of love that will redeem the horror found in the barren world of The Road, and in a way that will reach beyond the novel's final pages.
I highly recommend The Road because it is horrible. In the sense of horrid. In the sense of possible.
But I also recommend it because it beautiful. In the sense of tender, and moving. And because it speaks ultimately to what is best, not worst, in us.
Anyone reading The Road will know that they would like to be "one of the good guys."
And given the current state of our real world, this may be a good thing to keep in mind!
Book Review: Parenting and post-apocalyptic survival
Summary: 5 Stars
This is one of the best post-holocaust and parenting books around, and despite the Pulitzer it is undeniably a science fiction novel. It is the story of a man and his son, trekking across the wasteland trying to find a place where they can survive for the winter. This disaster that destroyed the world is artfully left undermined as is the age of the child and the amount of time since the fall. The world is beautifully described in a unique voice and the story is a real page turner...I literally could not put it down and dreamt about it for days.
The world is vividly portrayed with numerous examples of survival and human cruelty. Once the world is established, the author never deviates from the `reality' of this world. The characters are engaging, yet their situation is desperately hopeless...and Cormac manages to keep up that hopelessness through the entire book, gradually making it worse and worse. How, you wonder, how could they survive? Yet each new development flows logically from the world and is believable and gripping. Page after page, the man and boy struggle against starvation, the elements, cannibals, and their own hopelessness.
The only downsides are the prose, the premise and the ending. This might sound bad, but the good qualities more than make for these weaknesses. Also, understand that this is intended to be a literary work, more about evoking an emotional state and asking philosophical questions than it is about exploring a science fiction premise. The prose is highly stylized, with sparse punctuation. I found annoying at first but it grows on you and after a couple chapters the style is transparent. The premise is kind of silly--after all what could end human civilization, kill off all plant and animal life, yet leave humans and human artifacts undamaged? Nothing. But like I said, this isn't science fiction so the setting is not intended to be realistic. That said, the extrapolation of how people might live in this condition is pretty good. Finally, there is the ending. The story is really about one thing: in this terrible and terrifying world, what is the point of living? For the father, it is the care of his son. But for the son... well that question is never answered. I found that to be the only true disappointment of the book... the question is asked a hundred times and the author offers us no answer.
Last, I consider this a book on parenting. As a relatively new parent, it made me rethink my values, my priorities and my relationship to my son. The man and the boy remain unnamed, they could be anyone. They are described in a manner that masks their age, ethnicity and background so they could be any man and his son. Their absolute devotion to each other is deeply touching, and as it is told through the man's point of view, we can see just how much he sacrifices just to give his son a chance at survival. While it won't tell you how to raise your kids, I think any father reading this will step back and realize just what a father's love really is.
Book Review: Spare, uncompromising look at the bleakest possible situation.
Summary: 5 Stars
Whew! THE ROAD is a draining, exhausting, bleak, gut-wrenching, bleak, fast-paced, bleak novel. Did I mention it was BLEAK?
The book is 279 pages and they fly by. I think I read the book in 4 hours...I could hardly make myself put it down. I wouldn't say I "enjoyed" reading it...but it was thoroughly gripping, as spare and uncompromising a novel as you would ever want to read.
It tells the story of a post-apocalyptic world, where the sun is never seen because the atmosphere is covered by ash. Ash that has painted the world gray, killed all plant life and probably all animals. More specifically, it is the story of a father and son ("the Man" and "the Boy") who are traveling on foot to the coast, pushing a shopping cart with their meager belongings. They move slowly, are almost always near starvation and must constantly be on the alert for cannibalistic bands of humans who will stop at NOTHING to stay alive.
The book is mostly a day-to-day depiction of the mundane yet important tasks they go through to stay alive. Filtering water. Finding clean blankets or new shoes. Eating seeds or long decayed apples. Never talking about the past.
The boy, whose age we don't know, but I would guess around 8...has never seen the world as it was. His father tries to blot out his memories and tries to come to grips with the fact that the world he is trying to survive in has no hope. The two talk often of how preferable death would be...yet they fight hard to stay alive.
It is the story of the love between the two...although the word "love" is never articulated. It is a survival story...but the while the plot hinges a great deal on foraging for food, the heft of the story comes from their scrambling towards a psychological / mental survival. How can the human spirit endure having nothing to live for?
The recent movie CHILDREN OF MEN depicted a society crumbling under the weight of knowing that no more children would be born. They had nothing to live for, because there was nothing to pass on. THE ROAD takes this feeling and amplifies it to an almost intolerable degree.
The story has brief moments of respite, when things go reasonably well for a short time. It's amazing what a relief these moments are...because the rest of the book is BLEAK. (The last couple of pages offer the absolute tiniest smidgens of what might be taken for hope. That's as "happy" as it's gonna get.)
I just finished the book yesterday, but I know I'll have a hard time shaking the feeling it left me with. While this is not an easy book to endure...it is very well written and it is an amazing achievement. Its perceptions of the state of these two main characters is so convincing. I highly recommend the book, even to a younger audience (say about 13 and above.) There's no bad language, it's very fast moving and I think could change the way a young person feels about the power of books to leave an important impact on their lives.
Book Review: THE ROAD: Style as Metaphor
Summary: 5 Stars
In THE ROAD Cormac McCarthy creates a nightmarish apocalyptic vision of a country wrecked by some unnamed upheaval. McCarthy is not the first writer to portray a wasted landscape, but what marks this novel as special is his ability to keep the reader involved in a story that is as nearly devoid of plot as any book I have read. An unnamed man and his young son tread the United States seeking food and survival in a time and place that offer very little hope of achieving either. From the first page to the last, they walk, they talk, and very occasionally encounter other survivors. Yet, it is a disservice to literature to expect that any novel must follow traditional lines of character development, plot complication, and other areas that we normally expect to find. THE ROAD is thus not a plot driven work. It is theme propelled, with the careful reader being rewarded with what seems to be ordinary conversation but instead the duo's comments to each other reveal a breathtaking universe of despair that is only slightly leavened by an ending that suggests that even in this blighted landscape of crunching loneliness there is a smidgeon of optimism that not even a nuclear winter can crush.
As I read THE ROAD I was reminded of the similar bleak countryside of Walter Van Tillburg Clark's much anthologized short story, THE PORTABLE PHONOGRAPH. In both works, Clark and McCarthy allow the landscape to speak and act as eloquently as any human can. Where Clark's atom blasted United States suggests a continuity of human compassion, McCarthy delves more deeply into the morass of nihilism that does not allow its inhabitants to know for sure what distinguishes the good guys from the bad. The son often questions his father as to whether they are good when he sees that his father is quite willing to kill others merely to ensure their own survival. Such questions strike directly at the core of what it is to be human. McCarthy provides no easy answers as the father drills his son with the needed mentality to be a survivor.
Then there is the blighted land itself. Nowhere in the book does the sun shine brightly. Instead a corrosive grayness covers all. The duo often have trouble even seeing clearly for a short distance. Rain is frequent and chilling. It is as if nature itself has turned against humanity by creating an anti-Eden from which all fruit has been banned. It matters little whether this blight originated from massive nuclear strikes or asteroid collisions. What matters more is how the very few survivors manage to live while maintaining a bare semblance of what they used to call humanity. Even their clipped conversations are fragmented. Language has become as crippled as the humans walking on their Road that starts nowhere and leads nowhere. THE ROAD then is a truly nightmarish vision of a world gone mad, and no one can retain either his sanity or his normalcy. The reader is luckier. He can close the book to see the sun and ponder how thin is the line between this world and that.
Book Review: A book to read
Summary: 5 Stars
Sometimes, you stumble across a book you can't put down. One that, for whatever reason, affects you so thoroughly, you find yourself needing to finish it, to get to the end. To find out what happens. It helps when that book is a painstakingly beautiful and heart-wrenching novel, set in a post apocalyptic United States and features two characters struggling against survival and depending on each other for food, security, life and, most importantly, hope. In a world that's been burnt to a crisp, ash still in the air and corpses dried and dessicated, how can two people survive and keep to the idea of "hope." Can you even have hope in a world that's died?
A bit ago, I finished reading The Road by Cormac McCarthy, a blisteringly fast read contained in less than 300 pages. For some unspecified reason, America as we know it is gone. Everything has been burned, turned to ash. And at the heart of it are two individuals, never named. A man and his son, world-weary and traveling down a road, trying to get to the coast. Why? It's the invisible carrot, dangling over their heads. Hope that maybe somewhere things are better, knowing deep in their hearts that it probably isn't to be.
But the man made his pledge and continues down this path, not for himself or for the future but for his son, a young child who has been forced to grow up and be more mature than anyone 30-40 years older. Throughout this slim novel, interspersed with tightly (and tautly) written passages of fear and action, these two individuals must fight for food, water, a place to sleep and for each other. Armed with only a gun with three bullets in it, there is this constant fear nagging in both the man's mind and the readers that, after two bullets are gone, there is only one bullet left. And who would it be for?
Thematically, The Road constantly goes back to the question of "why are we doing this?" The man often contemplates how easy it would be to end his life. And yet, he struggles onward, faces evil men and explores what it means to be human--both in the evil capacity to kill, murder and do unspeakable acts but also the good capacity of unselfishly and altruisticially loving someone so much and keeping to that human hope that has saved so many individuals. The story is dark and the path we take throughout is full of heart-wrenching moments. I don't think I have ever been on the verge of tears while reading an entire novel. It's not a book to read at work--a mistake I made.
It is however a book that should be read by everyone. It still sticks to me, even a couple weeks after I finished it. Forget the fact that it's been recently put on Oprah's list. It's a book that should be read and thought on by everyone. It's an unapologetic look on our human side, exposing the demons and the angels living inside each of us.
Take a look at The Road. It's definitely one of the most thought-provoking and heart-wrenching (without being cloyingly so) modern novels I've read.