First thoughts on "The Road"

I’ve been avoiding The Road pretty much since it was first published. Although a great admirer of Cormac McCarthy, as the father of two small boys I thought a novel about a man and his young son wandering a postapocalyptic landscape would tap directly into the “wake up screaming” center of my cerebral cortex. But a few months ago a friend insisted I borrow his copy, and after getting through the stack of comic books and the-American-Republic-is-long-gone-and-never-coming-back literature on my nightstand, I started reading it. 87 pages in, I have this to say:

1) Boy oh boy, can Cormac McCarthy write. His prose is spare, but florid; the best description I’ve ever heard of it is “like Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner, but at the same time.” From a lesser writer, his style would be ridiculous; but McCarthy is our great American master, and every word is carefully considered, serving a purpose (and sometimes I think that purpose is to build my vocabulary). I’m compelled as much by how he writes as with the story he’s writing. However, while I can live without quotation marks (the American literati’s union has apparently forbidden their use), I always find the absence of apostrophes jarring (although a few seem to have sneaked in past the proofreader).

2) My fears about reading this book were dead on. This story is every father’s worst nightmare; that plus McCarthy’s gripping prose adds up to a reading experience not unlike waking up from a bad dream and then trying to fall back asleep in order to continue it.

3) McCarthy has this much right: the essence of true manhood is being a husband and father, and the essence of those roles is a willingness to kill, but more centrally to die, for one’s family.