The Road (Oprah's Book Club) | Cormac McCarthy

The Road (Oprah's Book Club) | Cormac McCarthy | Word Perfect

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The Road (Oprah's ...

	The Road (Oprah's Book Club) Cormac McCarthy Vintage Books, 2007 - 287 pages average customer review:based on 1613 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Riveting, Spare, and Great

This is a great book that is also an absorbing and easy read. The brutal and brilliant simplicity of the book is remarkable. McCarthy imagines the world after the nuclear apocalypse in which everything is stripped away and then asks, "what's left?"

In part, the answer is the kind of evil that is resurgent in McCarthy's other books and that is best captured by Golding in "Lord of the Flies" when he imagines children on a Pacific Island stripped of civilization. McCarthy paints a picture of scavengers and cannibals, treating chained slaves like meat on a hoof. But the rest of the answer comes from the father's love for his 10 year old son born right after the apocalypse. This child is far more angelic than the children imagined by Golding, mostly because he is raised by the father and invested by the father with everything that seems good and noble in human nature. The symbiotic and redeeming love between father and son, and the portrayal of this relationship as the bedrock for all of human civilization, is the theme of the book.

Much of the book concerns the day to day job of survival, and the father's remarkable cleverness in getting through each day. But ultimately, the book also concerns the father's limitations. The fixation on survival strips him of all ability to trust or to act like one of the "good guys" that he and his son talk about. Also, the new man is going to have to leave the road entirely and find a way to survive on the land. The father seems unable to cut his connection with this dangerous artifact of the pre-apocalyptic world, whereas the son and those he ultimately must ally with are more willing to live entirely away from the road.

The writing style brilliantly fits the themes of the book. It is maniacally spare -- like Hemingway on steroids. He never even uses quotation marks. Yet it is always clear who is speaking. And while spare, the language is at times extraordinary poetic, particularly the concluding paragraph.

It will be interesting to see how this book is received in literary circles. I think it confirms McCarthy's reputation as a great American writer.

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Word Perfect

Spare and grim and word-perfect. This clear classic is made transcendent by the last two paragraphs. Bravo.

reviews: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, page 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16

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