The Road - Cormac McCarthy

Between his winning the Pulitzer Prize for fiction this year, Oprah's surprising choice of The Road for her book club, the "exclusive interviews" with the press-shy author, and the current critical acclaim for the Coen Brothers' adaptation of his previous novel No Country for Old Men, I became quite curious about Cormac McCarthy late in 2007. I didn't know much about him before, and I suppose I still don't, but I read The Road just before Christmas, and it was an unforgettable experience.

The book is about a man and his young son walking along a road trying to get to the coast of a literally burned America. It is so bleak at times that you wonder if there can be any light coming at all, but just at those darkest moments there is some small but shimmering beauty seen in an event along the way, like the part when the man (the characters are never given names) finds a can of Coke among the ruins of an old pop machine and gives it to his son who has never tasted a Coke before and doesn't even know what it is. "It's really good," the boy says, and the father simply answers, "Yes, it is." Those moments happen more than you might expect in this novel. The reader starts to be faced with the question of what is really necessary for one to have in life, and to learn the importance of appreciating what he has. The man and his boy have nothing but an old shopping cart, which they fill with whatever food and clothing they can find along the way. Ash is everywhere. The man is losing hope, facing death, and finding it harder and harder to be good, while the boy is all hope and idealism and desperately wants to be reassured that they are still "the good guys."

McCarthy is famous for his style of punctuation, which is to say, his lack of punctuation. He's not very fond of commas, never uses a semi-colon, and doesn't employ quotation marks to identify speech. He claims that if you write well, the page doesn't need to be cluttered with all kinds of squiggly little marks. It's surprising at first, but very easy to follow. He is also well-known for using a fair bit of archaic language, and I'll admit that the words on the page in The Road often pointed out the limits of my own vocabulary. That's not his fault, though.

It's a great book (and a fairly quick read, too), and it made me want to read more of his works soon, so I'm looking forward to reading Blood Meridian in the next month or so and then starting on the Border trilogy soon after.