The Road
by Cormac McCarthy
Book Summary Information
Author: Cormac McCarthyEdition: Mass Market Paperback
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2007-05-01
ISBN: 0307386457
Number of pages: 287
Publisher: Vintage Books
Book Reviews of The Road
Book Review: overgrown & remarkably tedious short story, potholed w/ sophomoric gimmicks & poor dialog
Summary: 2 Stars
When gimmicks get in the way of a book's readability, as they do in triplicate in Cormac McCarthy's novel "The Road", 256 pages feels like a long row to hoe.
Most notably, McCarthy declines to name his main characters. The idea, presumably, is that in a post-apocalyptic and post-societal world, the time for names has passed. It's about animal survival. Cute, but not very practical, as borne out in McCarthy's execution. As both of his main characters are male, the number of masculine pronouns quickly becomes overwhelming, and the prose gets awkward in its lurches and stretches to make the idea work. He seems likewise to have an aversion to using specific descriptions of the rubble of his lost world, so the opportunity for poignancy - the reader's connection with this scenario as a possible future for his or her own world - is lost. (Fortunately, it's an oversight neither Richard Matheson nor Stephen King make in their respective apocalyptic masterpieces.)
Next on my list of grievances is a rather silly refusal on McCarthy's part to use quotation marks, and to use apostrophes in his contractions. It makes me wonder if the celebrated author is one of those people who can't be bothered to use punctuation and capitalization in emails. What's somehow more infuriating is that he isn't consistent about it. He condescends (presumably) to use apostrophes in a small minority of contractions, to make sure we get, for instance, that he's saying "we'll" and not "well". Maybe we're not National Book Award winners, but I'd like to think the average reader is capable of puzzling through a missing apostrophe.
A good author leans on his or her word choice to get ideas across, not on typography or the shape of the letters on the page. Otherwise, why not go whole hog and make the margins into curvy parallel lines, to give us a visual reminder that we're talking about a road here?
Oh yeah - I promised you a third gimmick. The sentences. Chopped. The onslaught. Unrelenting. Verbs in absentia. Merciless. Again and again. Throughout. We need this approach, apparently, to fully feel the desolation.
Most of the time, the dialog is simplistic and spare. This, too, is an attempt to highlight the harshness of the new reality the characters are navigating. But the dialog's style changes completely during one expository remembered scene between the main character and his dead wife. It becomes suddenly florid, stilted, and melodramatic - showcasing both McCarthy's difficulty writing realistic dialog and his inability to get into the heads of female characters. Ron Charles (The Washington Post) says of the scene: "Most middle-school boys have a more nuanced understanding of the opposite sex than McCarthy demonstrates in his fiction, and he does nothing to alter that impression here."
Gimmicks aside, is this a good read - a memorable story, at least? Well, yes and no. If "The Road" had been a short story, tight and mean, it might have had a chance to sing, to give a 21st-century Naturalistic spin to the dystopian future myth. But McCarthy doesn't show us one powerful day in a long brutal struggle against all odds. We get months of it (and feel those months). Every mile is like the previous mile, and the mile to come.
If you read "The Road", keep a close eye on your bookmark. Those times I lost my place, I had a heck of a time finding it, as there aren't even chapter or section breaks to guide the way, and the style and content of this book are remarkably, excruciatingly homogenous.
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