Curtis reviewed The Road (Oprah's Book Club) by Cormac McCarthy (Oprah's Book Club (57))
Review of "The Road (Oprah's Book Club)" on 'Goodreads'
4 stars
This is the first book I've read by Cormac McCarthy, and I really enjoyed it. I read it in less than a day. His staccato style and use of subject-deficient sentences defines the pace of the story and fits the theme of traveling both wearily and warily down an endless, all-but-hopeless road.
McCarthy excels at describing the immediate: the dust on the road before them, the squeaking of the wheel on the shopping cart, the father's automatic attempt to avoid answering the questions asked by the son and the subsequent yielding to the inane, godless, yet ultimately serene truth. There is little to remember and even less to dream about, and neither father nor son do much more than move forward.
The Road is, of course, subject to the commonality of the metaphor. It is easy to analogize the road--the gray, ash-besotted, vagrant- and thief-infested road--to the path that one …
This is the first book I've read by Cormac McCarthy, and I really enjoyed it. I read it in less than a day. His staccato style and use of subject-deficient sentences defines the pace of the story and fits the theme of traveling both wearily and warily down an endless, all-but-hopeless road.
McCarthy excels at describing the immediate: the dust on the road before them, the squeaking of the wheel on the shopping cart, the father's automatic attempt to avoid answering the questions asked by the son and the subsequent yielding to the inane, godless, yet ultimately serene truth. There is little to remember and even less to dream about, and neither father nor son do much more than move forward.
The Road is, of course, subject to the commonality of the metaphor. It is easy to analogize the road--the gray, ash-besotted, vagrant- and thief-infested road--to the path that one chooses through life. The likeness is perhaps starker and more defined for the utter lack of reference to such an analogy. But McCarthy overcomes the obvious with a simple lack of presumption.
