The Road

Sweeney just made his own post about this book a few months ago. He said he loved it and it has the distinction of being a Pulitzer Prize winner. And although I'd never read a Cormac McCarthy book, I was a big fan of the film version of No Country For Old Men, though that may have been due to the Coen brothers more than McCarthy. Anyway, what I'm trying to get at is that this book came into my backlog with a whole lot of hype. And it was a good book. But I didn't think it was great. McCarthy's real strength here was in describing the cold and desolate post-apocalyptic world in which the story takes place. In said world, the feeling of death and despair just kind of pervades everything. And the tone felt so dark due to both the descriptions of the settings and the frank curtness with which every horrible detail was described. But as far as the two characters in the book - the man and the boy (father and son) - were concerned, I really wasn't blown away. Sweeney said he thought their dialogue and conversations felt very real. I disagree. They spoke in such abbreviated sentences. Neither ever really did much more than ask or answer a question. And though I suppose character backgrounds aren't so important once the world has ended, it would have been nice if there was something distinguishable about them. Of course, the counterpoint is that they could stand in for any father and son, that there was nothing special about them. I guess that's valid too. The book was both very slow but also a quick read; it's only 287 pages, with frequent dialogue and paragraph breaks, but the entirety of the novel's action involves the haggard pair limping down a long road toward the coast in search of a better life. The ending was a bit too predictable for my liking and the final paragraph echoed No Country's final scene; random and not noticeably conclusive or symbolic of the story's theme, moral, or message. Ultimately, I did enjoy the book. But it was not the 10 I was hoping for and cautiously expecting. I'd call it an 8. If you read it, I think you would enjoy it. But it's nothing I'll ever demand anyone to read. Oh, and one more thing - Cormac McCarthy doesn't use quotation marks. He just thinks they "look stupid." So dialogue and narrative are sometimes hard to distinguish from one another. He also uses apostrophes in some contractions like "he'd" but not in others like "cant" and "wont." I won't lie - all of this flexibility with punctuation probably helped detract from the book for me. Punctuation isn't there to look "not stupid." It only looks stupid when you don't - sorry, dont - use it.