Pajiba

Good review, but I disagree on a couple of things. I thought despite the sparse language, McCarthy was explicit - which was what drew me in. I am in awe of a storyteller who can weave and draw me in with such clean lines. This does seem to be McCarthy's style.

I also did feel there was hope - for the father and the boy and for humankind. I found hope in the ending that the boy would receive help and that there were some good people left who would find a way to go on.

Overrated.

Nice review. I've been on the fence about this book, but think I'll give it a try.

Humanity is like a cockroach and this book is an excellent description of both our negative and positive abilities to survive anything.

There are a lot of doomsday people out there, myself included, saying that humanity will eventually extinguish itself. In my opinion, nothing could be farther from the truth.

The book itself stayed with me for a long time. I really enjoyed the bleakness and the hope. I did find it interesting that aside from the nihilistic mother, there were no females to speak of other than the cannibals' mates/wives/sex slaves. Maybe he just can't write women, but i wonder about a possible Traditional Judeo-Christian reading of the Divine Father and Son.

Lalalala. Back to work.

I believe the sparseness was entirely deliberate because it is definitely not the norm for McCarthy.

Have you read Child of God? I found it similar.

"In The Road, I just felt like the author wanted to show off his vocabulary."

Ugh - sorry, but this is a cheap shot of a criticism. And there's nobody more tedious than Umberto frigging Eco. If you want to recast it as intellectually rigorous, fine.

Loved this book, the first of McCarthy's that I've read, I cried buckets at the end. The sparseness of the prose echoed the characters' existence- just the basics, every word in its place for a reason. Some of the lines were heartbreaking: father and son, "each the other's world entire". I didn't find it hopeless at all. The boy carried all the surviving shreds of humanity and decency within him.

Its not very often a book or movie will haunt me, and this one sure did.

The easiest way, I find, to understand The Road is to think of it as poetry and not prose. When you read a poem you rarely expect to find the familiar three-act story arc of setup, confrontation, and resolution. Although these are present, McCormack instead chooses to emphasize tone over plot, and The Road has buckets of tone.

For this reason the ending and resolution can't be clearly defined because there isn't enough information. *SEMI-SPOILER* We don't know if the Earth is dead or will recover, so we can't say if any action is meaningful in the long-term.

The author seems to be fine with this ambiguity and expects that readers will debate where there is any hope for the protagonists because that is the central theme of the poem -- prolonged, irrational persistence against hopeless odds.

But, y'know, who reads poetry these days (outside of school)? The only way a poetry author can hope to make a living is by disguising it as sort of a Mad Max meets Mahler.

i have read all of mccarthy's books. i find his style to be engaging and poetic. i am often horrified, often heartbroken at his words.

that said, i will never read the road again. if you are a parent, as i am, and neurotic about your children, as i am, then the road is all your nightmares put to word. it is a meditation on the relationship between parental love and fear.

p.s.

in regards to the critique concerning his use of vocabulary- i suggest a dictionary. just because you don't know a word, doesn't mean it was an obnoxious choice.

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