On the Beach? Nope, on 'The Road'

Cormac McCarthy will be pleased to learn that he has earned the coveted Dave's Book Club award for his 2006 novel The Road. I know there have been other, lesser honors, such as the 2007 Pulitzer Prize, but that's no reason to stint. C.M., I now bestow a lifetime membership in Dave's pantheon of pretty good writers. (Your seat is right up there, third row left.)

While perhaps not the best book ever written, and despite a plot that can be summed up in a single sentence, The Road is carried along by McCarthy's haunting prose and an idea that never fails to capture this writer's imagination: eluding cannibals in a post-apocalyptic America. The whole last-people-on-earth concept has fascinated me since I read Pat Frank's Alas, Babylon as a kid, and since then I've read any similarly-themed book that has come my way. McCarthy fans might cringe to hear me say this, but I'm also a big fan of Stephen King's The Stand, which is arguably the thickest post-apocalypse book ever written.

In many ways The Road is the polar opposite of The Stand. It's 287 pages, for one thing, compared to about 700,000 and counting for the King opus. And there are only two real characters, compared to King's sprawling cast of thousands. While King cast his yarn as an epic struggle of good vs. evil, McCarthy's work is a meditation on survival against a chaotic and indifferent universe. The horrors his two protagonists encounter derive not from some tangible force of evil, but from other survivors who face the same struggles they do -- and opt for a somewhat more convenient means of putting food on the table.

For all the simplicity of its plot, The Road is a fascinating read. The journey entails hundreds of challenges, great and small, and the way these tests are met or circumvented is just as interesting as the effects they have on the father and son. I was reminded at one point of the Tom Hanks movie Cast Away, in which the simple logistics of survival drove the story on without dialog or change of setting.

Having just read McCarthy's Blood Meridian before picking up this book, it was interesting to note what seems a fundamental change in the writer's world view between 1985 and now. While The Road will never be hailed as the feel-good book of the decade, its hint of hope and redemption is positively upbeat compared to the steely nihilism of Blood Meridian.

But now I'm getting too windy. Bottom line: Two thumbs up. Dave-Bob says check it out.

Comments

Peter Rozovsky said…
You'd best be careful to maintain the lofty standards of the Dave's Book Club Award lest the mainstream media start referring to it as "prestigious."
==============
Detectives Beyond Borders
"Because Murder Is More Fun Away From Home"
http://www.detectivesbeyondborders.blogspot.com/
August 24, 2007 at 3:09 AM
Dave Knadler said…
Yes, there's always that risk. Then there are those unscrupulous daytime talk-show hosts who might try to rip off my idea.
August 24, 2007 at 10:06 AM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Sleuths are only as good as their sidekicks

Image
I recently read the much-lauded Wash This Blood Clean From My Hands , by French author Fred Vargas, and like many others found it quirky and engaging. Her deft writing left me happy to have found another series character to follow: Commissaire Adamsberg. But that's not what this post is about. I've decided that others do a lot better job with reviews than I do, and I hate laboring over my shallow insights only to find later that I've echoed what everybody else said a long time before. (And yes, I can hear you saying: "But that's never stopped you before." True enough. Nor will it now.) So, short version: Wash This Blood is a good book. Buy it. But for all the talk about it being "eccentric" or even "kooky," it does share one key device with nearly all other detective fiction: the sidekick. Adamsberg's reliance on gut instinct and intuition is sharply defined by the hard-nosed, scientific approach of his second in command, Capitaine
Read more

A farewell to copy

Image
On Friday I walked out of a newspaper building as an employee for the last time. During the stroll to the far end of the parking lot, I did a brief review of my career. Here's the high point: I've worked at newspapers that have won Pulitzer prizes. And the low point: None of those Pulitzers were won while I was working at the newspapers in question. Hey, I'm sure that's just bad timing. Of the half dozen papers I worked for, the best was the Philadelphia Inquirer. The worst was the Daily Inter Lake in Kalispell, Mont. When you enter the cavernous newsroom of the Inquirer, you pass by a wall festooned with pictures of reporters and editors who have won Pulitzers. It is a measure of my love of journalism that when I looked at these pictures, I usually reflected not on the prize-winning stories they reported, but on the clothes they were wearing. Look at them: All these gifted journalists, photographed at the very apex of their careers, and most of them are dressed like t
Read more

Wall Street and Willa Cather

Image
I've been reading My Antonia , Willa Cather's 1918 novel about growing up on the Nebraska prairie. It's a beautiful book, poignant and uplifting, full of characters who reflect the truth of life in all its joy and pain. It's also an instructive portrait of the time in America when explicit toil was required for mere survival, never mind success. I've been reading it against the background noise of Wall Street's collapse, men and women on CNN droning gravely about the consequences of greed, and the need to ensure that the greediest of all do not, in the end, go broke. It's a complex issue. It takes someone like Yale business student David Bledin, writing an op-ed for the Washington Post, to put a human face on the unfolding tragedy. You think you have it tough; think what it's like for Masters of the Universe-in-training who now rue the rigors involved in chasing a seven-figure salary: "... once I could afford to splurge on a Zagat-rated "$$$
Read more