Eric Recommends: ‘The Road’
Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road” won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction this year and was on quite a few Best of 2006 lists. I have finally read it and can tell you it’s one of the most beautiful, emotionally devastating books I’ve ever read.
It’s set in a near post-apocalyptic future, where something (nuclear war, probably) has destroyed all animal life and most human life. A man and his little boy walk through the rubble, finding food where they can, avoiding marauders who would cannibalize them, hoping to find other survivors who can be trusted — other “good guys,” in the parlance of the man and the boy. They are good guys themselves, the man reassures his son, although it may be that the man is becoming less of a good guy as time passes and the situation becomes more desperate.
It is not a science-fiction or horror novel. We don’t learn what caused the devastation, because it’s irrelevant; that’s not what the book is about. McCarthy’s writing is spare all the way around. We don’t learn anyone’s names, nor specifically what part of the United States they’re wandering through. Only references to “the interstate” confirm that it even is the U.S.
McCarthy even writes largely without commas. Preferring to start a new sentence fragment where a comma would have gone. Mostly brief sentences like this. There are no chapter divisions. Contractions like “don’t” and “won’t” don’t get apostrophes. Dialogue does not have quotation marks. Usually I find tactics like these pretentious and annoying — “Ooh, look how modern I am! I don’t use punctuation!” — but it works here because it fits the stark desolation of the story. Everything has been pared down to its barest essentials.
The story itself isn’t particularly elaborate, but McCarthy’s vocabulary is; evidently the world’s thesauruses survived the apocalypse. What’s more, he writes beautifully, poetically, piercingly. It’s hard to cite individual passages. It’s more the overall effect. And when you boil it all down, it’s really just a story about the love between a little boy and his papa.
August 16th, 2007 at 6:05 am
I loved this book too. I felt it for weeks after I finished it.
August 16th, 2007 at 1:13 pm
It is a brilliant book.
And while it is not what people think of as ’science fiction’, it is in fact what is commonly called ’speculative fiction’. Which is the fancy new term for what well written sci fi has turned into.
August 16th, 2007 at 1:38 pm
As I read this book I kept noticing how beautiful his writing was. Phrase after phrase, I would admire how he put his words together. Eventually I realized that that was all I was noticing. The writing was wonderful, but the story just wasn’t there. The boy didn’t feel real. He was too perfect, too innocent for the world he grew up in. I guess it is considered part of the brilliance of the book that McCarthy didn’t explain anything about the world it was set in, but didn’t anyone wonder how all the animals could be dead but the humans were still alive?
August 16th, 2007 at 1:54 pm
Slash: Speculative fiction is probably a good description of the book. I wouldn’t say “science-fiction” because it doesn’t have any science in it. In fact, he goes out of his way NOT to talk about the science-y stuff (e.g., what happened to the world).
Tammy: Almost all of the humans were dead, too. Some animals probably survived, but not very many, and with all of their food sources gone, they wouldn’t have lasted long. The humans only managed because they could find old reserves of canned goods to survive on.
August 16th, 2007 at 3:16 pm
Eric: that’s exactly why they started using that term. Science fiction has too much lasers and robots baggage. A well written story about a possible future doesn’t need any of that.
Tammy: That’s part of the appeal, I think. There is that feeling of inevitability to the world. Canned food runs out. Humanity is over.
August 16th, 2007 at 6:21 pm
Yeah, the book -is- SF, just not the SciFi kind of SF.
Ursula LeGuin published a very funny essay recently on the horror the literary elite have towards “genre” fiction.
“On Serious Literature”, I think it’s called.
August 16th, 2007 at 6:25 pm
Here we go:
http://news.ansible.co.uk/a240.html#leguin