Fight the Fight

I don’t remember the when or who, but I remember hearing good things about The Road by Cormac McCarthy. I saw it on the Costco book tables and decided to give it a shot since I was in need of something to read.

I’d seem the movie trailers, but knew nothing more about the plot than it was a post apocalyptic story about a man and a boy.

Now that I read it cover to cover I’m going to make a proclamation about this book… Don’t bother with the book because watching a few minute trailer is more fulfilling than reading these pages.

So with that out of the way, what’s good with the book? Only a few things that come to mind.

The best is the dreary picture painted of the now deserted American landscape. It sticks in your mind.

The best thing for me is what others wouldn’t consider a major thing: as a reader you never really know what the circumstances of the apocalypse really are. My imagination seems to think that there’s a good chance of not knowing the big WHY, and I can’t recall a similar piece to a post apocalypse book or film that I’ve put to memory. McCarthy resisted using that as a politicized plot device that most others can’t resist using to make a statement.

The Road mostly disappointed on two areas: the characters and the writing.  Aren’t those kinda important when writing a book?

The characters were bad in my opinion because an elimination of society would produce a different kind of person. The father or man (no names were used in the writing of this novel) is a romantic figure in that he instills so many social norms of our society in the boy or son. Social norms only become so through reinforcement from people and forces external to a father / son relationship. Without reinforcement, the notions of regret, shame, and overall morality are not instilled over the same period of time. The product for me was a pair of characters that felt like someone was trying to write something play on current sympathies at the downfall of realism.

The biggest problem was the writing style. I sensed something was wrong pretty quick when I saw that there were certain contractions not following convention – but not in a uniform manner.  Maybe there was a rhyme or reason to it, but it’s not apparent to me or the other people I know who’ve read it.  Then the prose just began to go farther and farther into this “look what vocabulary I can use” kind of feel. Let’s take this single sentence as one example.

The sacred idiom shorn of its referents and so of its reality.

I read that and immediately wondered “who the hell writes like that?”  I’d hope someone took note that it’s not good for a reader to wonder why bother going on reading a book you just bought and are only 1/6th of the way through it… Now I wish I stopped there and got it out of my house. I should have read another one of my wife’s vampire novels laying around for a more fulfilling experience.