The Road, A Book Review

September 2007



It’s September 25, 2007, and I would like to tell you how I spent my day with the Xbox 360, as Master Chief, playing Halo 3 and kicking ass, and that’s exactly what I would have done if I were still living my old life. But my old life is as dead as the dinosaurs. So instead I passed the entire day; that is the time I wasn’t walking from Largo to Clearwater and then from Clearwater back to Largo, reading The Road by Cormac McCarthy. So that’s what I’m going to talk about.
I heard so much about this book, many rave reviews, and I have to admit until I did, I had never before heard the name Cormac McCarthy. I don’t watch Oprah, and I could care less what book she is pushing, though I love books so much I’m glad that she pushes them. So I picked it up.
I found myself wondering, just every so often exactly what happened to the punctuation in this book. There are no quotation marks in The Road. But it works. There are so few characters, manly just a man and a boy and the post apocalyptic world that they live in, and such limited dialogue that maybe Mr. McCarthy just figured, hey I don’t need no stinking quotation marks. Does he use them in his other books?
I can’t be sure if this book totally blew my away, or just left me empty. I think it may be both. And if you consider that, it’s actually a huge complement to Cormac McCarthy. I think the book was all about leaving you empty. The man and the boy in his story are lurching through a world devoid of color, devoid of birds, almost but not quite devoid of life, struggling to find food, to make it through the day, to survive.
I’ve never read anything so bleak. Two hundred eighty pages of grim strife, and the love between a man and his son.

KGD

09-25-2007