The Road

by JS

I just recently finished Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Road. The novel is dedicated to taking the consequences of apocalypse to a logical and horrifying conclusion. Out of this narrative innovation, stripped of the usual kinds of motivation, two characters stark efforts of survival play out against the cruelty of necessity. Despite what the back cover blurbs indicate, this is a novel really more about life and death than love or faith.

Maybe it is a litmus test. How do you respond when bound by the vacant horror of hopelessness? The short vignettes, the sparse sentences, the unforgiving nature of survival, these are totems in a ritual, a chant intended to bring the reader in easily closer to the desolation of the now than he or she would otherwise willingly go.

Honestly, I wasn’t happy there, and wouldn’t choose to go back. I’ll take the sensual sentences of The Savage Detectives over The Road, happy with the frivolous charm of poetry over the brutality of the near reality. I now know that when civilization falls, I’ll be the first to go down with it, and I’ll be chanting the lines of Roberto Bolaño Ávalos as I do.