The Road (2006)

It's probably just as easy to make criticisms about Cormac McCarthy's end-of-the-world exercise as it is to praise it to the skies. I have heard it both ways, mostly the latter. There's definitely something about it that gets inside of you—I've been reading it the past few days, and in the past few days I've been in a mood—sad, depressed even ... "emotional," as people say when they don't know what else to. Whether it's the book or other external factors is hard to say. But I keep thinking about the book a lot, as when I am on walks. I don't know how much I believe some of it, notably the cannibalism and the pederasty, but who knows what such a world would look like. Little things just take your breath away, like a thought in passing about how cows have become extinct. Or a conversation between the protagonists, a father and his son, about how there probably aren't any crows anymore. Or birds. That's when you start to grasp the scope here. It's a devastatingly imagined picture. I like that the great disaster that caused it is unknown—nuclear war is the first place you want to go, but there didn't seem to be any issues with radiation. Just fire, or rather, now, ash. Whatever the event was it happened in the lifetime of the father. It pleases me somehow to think that Yellowstone went, although it could as well be a meteor strike. In any event, it's not central to the story, which is about the will to survive and, even more, the faith that there is purpose in it, on which the stakes are raised as high here as I can remember ever seeing them. McCarthy is probably most often compared with Faulkner, but long passages here often reminded me of Hemingway, because of the simple, rhythmic dialogue between the father and son that occupies so much of this. Overall it's not as scary as I thought it might be, though there are some indelible images, most of them horrifying, such as the cellar where people are kept imprisoned and alive even as they are chopped apart for food. Or the newborn infant on a spit. Just awful stuff. The wife and mother committed suicide before the action of this book even starts. I have a feeling, if I ever did become a survivor in such a scenario, I'd be likely to go her route. I'm just not sure I have that much faith, and perhaps that is what gives me such profound pause about The Road.

In case it's not at the library.