Reviewed
by Dr. David Gaines Associate Professor of English and Paideia
Program Director
A father and son,
referred to only as “the man” and “the boy,” go on the road
south by southeast through a post nuclear-winter America.
Food is scarce. Roadagents roam the ravaged landscape. Evidence
of atrocities abounds. It’s the end of the world as we know
it and no one feels fine. At one point the man tells the boy,
“It’s not dark yet.” But we know it’s getting there.
Darkness notwithstanding, the Pulitzer Prize Committee, Oprah,
and novelist Michael Chabon (just to name a few admirers who
I enthusiastically am joining) have come together around Cormac
McCarthy’s The
Road. It is a terrifying tale that will
make a
great movie (in fact, it is rumored to be in development with
Viggo Mortensen as “the man”). In a wonderful piece in The
[February 15, 2007] New York Review of Books, Chabon
described The Road as “a return
to McCarthy’s most brilliant genre work: adventure and Gothic
horror.” Much of the book’s weight is carried by a series
of dreams and rightly so because this is one of those rare
works that gets in our heads and changes our dream lives.
McCarthy achieves this magic through spare prose and no chapter
divisions (only white space breaks up the snapshots of the
journey and the shards of the past). He frequently favors
sentences without verbs, just like his trees with no leaves.
Many of those sentences somehow come across as sensory impressions,
documentary inventory, and screenplay descriptions all at
once. This time, less is indeed more as the profound lies
down with the mundane, as the man and the boy—who tell
themselves the story that they are “the good guys”
who “carry the fire”—speculate about God,
forage for canned food, and shiver under their blankets under
the ashen rain.
At
one point McCarthy describes “the absolute truth of
the world” as “[t]he cold relentless circling
of the intestate earth. Darkness implacable. The blind dogs
of the sun in their running. The crushing black vacuum of
the universe. And somewhere two hunted animals trembling like
ground-foxes in their cover. Borrowed time and borrowed world
and borrowed eyes with which to sorrow it.” And yet,
in the face of all that darkness the man watches the boy run
or swim and he bites his lip. “In the nights sometimes
[that same man would] wake in the black and freezing waste
out of softly colored worlds of human love, the songs of birds,
the sun.”
The Road is somehow what might
have happened if Philip K. Dick, the author whose story inspired
“Bladerunner,” had collaborated with the musician
Paul Simon on “Graceland” and the two of them
had borrowed in equal doses from the vocabularies and minds
of Hemingway and Faulkner. Crazy for sure. But if you’re
feeling strong, I urge you to dive in. Be forewarned, however:
your dreams will never be the same. Nor will the incredibly
resonant word "okay."
What We're Reading
features reviews by members of the Southwestern University
community. Some reviews were previously published in the Library's
annual Summer Reading List.
Reviewed
by
great movie (in fact, it is rumored to be in development with
Viggo Mortensen as “the man”). In a wonderful piece in The
[February 15, 2007] New York Review of Books, Chabon
described The Road as “a return
to McCarthy’s most brilliant genre work: adventure and Gothic
horror.” Much of the book’s weight is carried by a series
of dreams and rightly so because this is one of those rare
works that gets in our heads and changes our dream lives.
At
one point McCarthy describes “the absolute truth of
the world” as “[t]he cold relentless circling
of the intestate earth. Darkness implacable. The blind dogs
of the sun in their running. The crushing black vacuum of
the universe. And somewhere two hunted animals trembling like
ground-foxes in their cover. Borrowed time and borrowed world
and borrowed eyes with which to sorrow it.” And yet,
in the face of all that darkness the man watches the boy run
or swim and he bites his lip. “In the nights sometimes
[that same man would] wake in the black and freezing waste
out of softly colored worlds of human love, the songs of birds,
the sun.”