The Road by Cormac McCarthy

As the winner of the Pulitzer Prize The Road by Cormac McCarthy, was surrounded with much fanfare, and lots of press, but I don't believe it lived up to its promise. It could have been more. In a bleak post apocalpytic world a boy and his father keep pressing on in a grey world of ash, daily exposed to starvation both of the flesh and the mind. The barreness of the landscape matches that of the mind of the father, as he lets go of the memory of the 'old world.' Cormac McCarthy does a wonderful job of making his characters inner life as skeletal as their frames, and only part of that statement is sarcasm. I am sure as an author he accomplished exactly what he wanted to accomplish, his bare bones characters were a stark contrast to all that misery, darkness, ash and snow that they had to slosh through on the road. But as a reader I wanted more, I wanted to know what the boy understood of his mother's death, what faith did he have in his father, when often it seemed that this child was the moral guide for the two of them, what did this boy understand of love in a world littered with roaming bands of 'bad guys' whose ultimate goals may be to have you for dinner. I do believe in survival, but not at any price, I just couldn't 'swallow' the idea that many survivors would fall into cannibalism. To me, this part of the novel felt like a cheap trick, yes I can believe that someone would kill me for a can of beans, or the shoes on my feet, but how many would cook me for dinner? While I found his stark words often beautiful and understated, this detail left me as cold as his characters in the black night.The promise of McCarthy's writing, and the beauty of his phrases are masterful, and haunting. But again, I wanted more.

Mary
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