reader response: The Road by Cormac McCarthy
January 21st, 2010 | Published in books, reading | 2 Comments
I finally read and finished Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. My main motivation was a book group (which I missed after all), but I picked up this book so many times without finishing in the past couple of years that it was immensely satisfying to have finally read it.
Everyone knows it’s a bleak story. About as bleak as they come. I was pregnant the first time I really tried to read it, which was STUPID. The next time I tried seriously, Massimo was a few months old. Even MORE STUPID. If you are expecting a child or have a child under one year of age, DO NOT ATTEMPT TO READ THIS BOOK. For you will fail. It felt like McCarthy was trying to tear out my happy little heart and eat it raw.
But this time, Massimo was 18 months old. Still young, but not so young that I’m giddy and on cloud nine. This time, reading The Road felt more like an attempt to peacefully (which is not to say nicely) stop my heart, while leaving it in place. It is bleak. Heart-breaking. Tear-inducing. Breath-taking. Horrifying. Everything you would expect a post-apocalyptic, dystopic story to be. That said, I sailed through it in two days. That’s some quick reading for the working parent of a toddler. It is a story you want to get through as quickly as possible. How McCarthy managed to live within that story for the duration of writing it (how long did it take, I wonder?), I cannot imagine. When I was younger, I spent years exploring dark places of the mind and history. For a while I thought it desensitized me, but I think it actually had the opposite effect. Two days was about all I could handle of The Road.
A note about the ending: Some people say it’s positive. I saw it that way, possibly because I needed to see it that way. However, if I project the story and follow it into the future, I don’t see any real hope. Where the book ends is a positive blip in an ultimately hopeless situation. There were several positive blips throughout the book, followed by terrible things. There’s no reason to think it will change. How’s that for an ending?
January 22nd, 2010at 1:26 am(#)
I cruised through The Road pretty quickly, too. It really messed me up the first time I read it, but the second time, I kept latching on to how biblical/pretentious McCarthy’s prose can be at times. Blood Meridian is a better book, though I wouldn’t just hand it off to anyone. It’s cartoonishly violent, and has a lot of the same themes as The Road. It messed me up even more than The Road.
As for being desensitized, I’m only that way when it comes to violence as shock value, where it serves no point. Don’t ask me why Blood Meridian had to be so violent–it’s one of the most violent books I’ve ever read, right up there with the Aeneid–but it’s not senseless violence. You get the feeling that there’s a point to it all, which is the difference. If you plop me in front of a Saw movie, or a Kill Bill movie, I’ll probably fall asleep out of sheer boredom.
February 4th, 2010at 8:24 am(#)
Oh, what? I’ve been wanting to read this book but maybe I’ll wait until I’m 80 or something, considering that I’ll be pregnant and/or having young children for the unforeseen future.
But seriously, I have no experience with Cormac McCarthy though I do have All The Pretty Horses sitting on my shelf waiting to be read, so hopefully that will be a less shocking introduction to her writing.