The Road by Cormac McCarthy

I ordered The Road from the library a day before I found out it won the Pulitzer, because of a year-old review from an old copy of Stop Smil­ing that I picked up at Pitch­fork. The Pulitzer noti­fi­ca­tion, com­ing as it did from a thread about lit­er­ary crit­ics and their deri­sion for genre fic­tion, stayed in my mind as I read the book. It is the first thing that I’ve read by Cor­mac McCarthy, and I picked it up because the Stop Smil­ing review indi­cat­ed to me that it was sci­ence fic­tion writ­ten by a non-sci-fi author.

What is imme­di­ate­ly evi­dent is that McCarthy does­n’t care for tra­di­tion­al read­ing cues like quo­ta­tion marks around dia­logue and chap­ter breaks. I’m a big fan of exper­i­men­tal nov­els, but at times in The Road it is very dif­fi­cult to fig­ure out who is talk­ing to whom. Sim­i­lar­ly, no char­ac­ter has a prop­er name. In fact, I don’t think there is a prop­er noun in the entire book. So when the man runs into anoth­er man and they talk to each oth­er or have a tus­sle it is pret­ty much impos­si­ble to fig­ure out who is doing what. The writ­ing itself is often superb, but it seems to stum­ble just as reg­u­lar­ly, as when words like ensepul­chraled and croz­zled sit togeth­er in the same sen­tence and have lunch. The qual­i­ty of the writ­ing does­n’t enhance or uphold the plot either, which to me seems like a fair­ly large prob­lem, since I read books for the sto­ries, not the writ­ing. What I mean is that McCarthy seems inter­est­ed in writ­ing inter­est­ing­ly for its own sake and using the sto­ry itself to manip­u­late the read­er into a cer­tain mind­set as opposed to writ­ing and devel­op­ing a plot pure­ly for the sake of sto­ry­telling.

It could be argued and I would agree with the asser­tion that all sto­ry-telling is a manip­u­la­tion of the audi­ence, but what I’m think­ing is that McCarthy is more inter­est­ed in evok­ing a spe­cif­ic emo­tion­al reac­tion from his audi­ence than telling the sto­ry. It is a deter­mi­na­tion of vec­tors. The sto­ry is about a man and a boy in a post-apoc­a­lyp­tic world [just what destroyed the world is unclear, but from infer­ence I gath­er that it was some sort of mete­or impact] where every­thing is dead except for a few oth­er humans, and life is hid­ing from the oth­ers and scav­eng­ing canned goods.

They boy and man are depen­dent upon each oth­er, but as the book pro­gress­es it becomes evi­dent that the boy is the one best suit­ed and moral­ly under­stand­ing enough to live in this new world. The man can­not let the past go. The boy has no mem­o­ry of it. The basic plot actions are eas­i­ly fore­seen; you know they’re going to find a fall-out shel­ter and that this will be the high point of the nar­ra­tive, you know that their belong­ings will be stolen, you know that at least one of them will die [most like­ly the man, due to var­i­ous oth­er clues] and that this will be the low point of the nar­ra­tive.

In the end, I was­n’t that impressed. The writ­ing was excel­lent about half the time, but the sto­ry nev­er got me going. I’ve read more effec­tive and bet­ter writ­ten apoc­a­lyp­tic lit­er­a­ture, and sto­ries with just as much despair in less than the 241 pages of The Road. The dust jack­et said this would be McCarthy’s mas­ter­piece, and if that’s the case, I’ll pass on the rest of his stuff.