Review: The Road

The Road by Cormac McCarthy
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I don't usually read post-apocalyptic stuff. But this--this is transcendent. McCarthy is a master storyteller and sculpts his words to fashion perfection. I was moved to cry many many times, my breath stilled at how raw and real, the stripped down bare beauty and humanity of it. The kindness and empathy, the love in austere hate and soot and ugly dirt. I would never have thought I could love a book as much as I do this. It's a testimony to the power of his writing--his style so lean, it makes Hemingway look like Dickens. His prose is almost poetry, mesmerizing and hypnotic. I just finished reading the last page, so perfect, I willed it to be the last sentence because it felt like the perfect musical note, the most ripe melody on which to end a song. The plotting and content of this will not beckon anyone, but the gorgeousness of the writing, the sheer lilt, the love in exchange between father and son, everything from the coke can to the baked beans and water, to those last few pages of of canned peaches. I will never think of peaches --canned or fresh--ever again. I will never not want to share. Now with all that's happening in our country and world, now more than ever, each page struck my heart with terror for our planet. It seemed more real than not, that our world will come to an end, and that's the scary part--that it didn't seem like a future sci-fi reality, but very much a present cataclysmic event around the corner. I have never read anything remotely like this, and I doubt I ever will: his writing is beyond reproach, beyond anything I've ever come across--lean and spare, masculine, strong and supple, muscular punchy packed dense sentences. Nothing extraneous, barely any punctuation and little use for attributing the speaker to the sentence. Oddly, it works beautifully. Normally this would've been too bare for me, but it has an unexpected elegance to the writing. It's literary and will forever stand the test of time, for the writing g alone, and add to it, the content, it's one of the most top five most continually current pieces of literature out there. It should be required reading for high schoolers learning about climate change, it ought to be required reading in English lit, and in science class, and in every other class I can think of. After I finished it, I googled McCarthy and was shocked to learn he won the Pulitzer Prize for literature with this novel. Why am I not one bit surprised? He deserves it. Every damn sentence is a gem, an incandescent light sparkles off every page. I tore this book as if literally there is no tomorrow, as the McCarthy writes about. I could not read it fast enough, as if someone might snatch the paperback away from my fingers. I'm head over heels seriously in love with this, my heart heavy with grief over what we humans, our species does to each other and to this fragile world we step on. I somersaulted into this book and came out the other end a radically changed person--for the better. You will be too. Please please read it.




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