New novel, new comfort zone
Eric Shonkwiler
Issue date: 10/26/06 Section: Lifestyles
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Beyond the typical prose of McCarthy: harsh, stringent, clipped, and simultaneously rampantly verbose, his newest novel, "The Road," has few similarities with his previous work.
There is slim comparison between the apocalyptic desolation present in this novel and his newly-old West landscape of the Border Trilogy. The country is bleak, sparsely populated and equally so colored. Two characters present themselves, but they are constantly antagonized by forces we have forgotten.
Hunger. Tree-splintering cold. Rain and ash that commingle to create a world so gray that we forget it is not the only color that ever existed. The world has been devastated by an event we know nothing of, and the pair that we follow through the novel are past looking for answers. They are father and son, "each the other's world entire."
McCarthy brings to this work a world devoid of the existential beauty that his former stories populated, instead breathing into it a love that is true and unspoiled. This sundered family searches for warm weather, for people who would take them in, traveling south along an unending road alike traveled by scavengers, cannibals, and the burnt bodies of the dead.
They are "the good guys." They "carry the fire." Stories told to keep the boy a boy, and to keep the man a father.
What McCarthy fails to do in "The Road" is create a lasting imprint upon the reader. Like the wind that constantly howls around the protagonists, we are swept through the book too quickly, the road, however arduous, is shared with us too little.
The development of the two characters is stunted. This, it would seem, is actually the goal of McCarthy. In writing with immediacy and urgency, in repeating the landscapes, colors, pains of the world, he forces us into the world all the more completely.
What he does, however, is stretch out the last gasps of humanity that would strike us with their power were they not so held. "The Road" would best be condensed by considerable length, or added to by the same measure.
As it stands, McCarthy has certainly accomplished a work that grips the reader with its senselessly plundered world, and keeps them in it in hopes that the very presence of the reader will press the survivors on.
There is slim comparison between the apocalyptic desolation present in this novel and his newly-old West landscape of the Border Trilogy. The country is bleak, sparsely populated and equally so colored. Two characters present themselves, but they are constantly antagonized by forces we have forgotten.
Hunger. Tree-splintering cold. Rain and ash that commingle to create a world so gray that we forget it is not the only color that ever existed. The world has been devastated by an event we know nothing of, and the pair that we follow through the novel are past looking for answers. They are father and son, "each the other's world entire."
McCarthy brings to this work a world devoid of the existential beauty that his former stories populated, instead breathing into it a love that is true and unspoiled. This sundered family searches for warm weather, for people who would take them in, traveling south along an unending road alike traveled by scavengers, cannibals, and the burnt bodies of the dead.
They are "the good guys." They "carry the fire." Stories told to keep the boy a boy, and to keep the man a father.
What McCarthy fails to do in "The Road" is create a lasting imprint upon the reader. Like the wind that constantly howls around the protagonists, we are swept through the book too quickly, the road, however arduous, is shared with us too little.
The development of the two characters is stunted. This, it would seem, is actually the goal of McCarthy. In writing with immediacy and urgency, in repeating the landscapes, colors, pains of the world, he forces us into the world all the more completely.
What he does, however, is stretch out the last gasps of humanity that would strike us with their power were they not so held. "The Road" would best be condensed by considerable length, or added to by the same measure.
As it stands, McCarthy has certainly accomplished a work that grips the reader with its senselessly plundered world, and keeps them in it in hopes that the very presence of the reader will press the survivors on.
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