not a book for light reading
I just finished reading The Road by Cormac McCarthy. If you’re looking for a book to read while you’re sunbathing (when spring eventually warms into summer), this might not be the one to choose. McCarthy paints a bleak story of future America, ravaged to the core by a combination of human destruction and an unmentioned environmental disaster. It’s something on the lines of Farenheit 451 mixed with the futility of human effort in The Grapes of Wrath, set in the context of a much simpler straightforward storyline and riveted with far more horrific imagery.
“He made train noises and diesel horn noises but he wasnt sure what these might mean to the boy. After a while they just looked out through the silted glass to where the track curved away in the waste of weeds. If they saw different worlds what they knew was the same. That the train would sit there slowly decomposing for all of eternity and that no train would ever run again. Can we go, Papa? Yes. Of course we can.” (pg. 180)
I can clearly see why this book is being championed amonst literary moguls (and why Oprah has decided to crown it with one of her shiny round stickers of approval). It’s laden with layers of symbolism and imagery, intricately woven into the sparse and frightening (think: roasted babies) wasteland that the characters are walking through. There are meanings and emotions at each turn of the road, the fading memories of a past world (our current one) in each abandoned house.
Despite the accolades this book is receiving, I won’t be keeping it on my bookshelf. It it a good read, but beyond that, I found myself emotionally detached from the characters and their plight ~ call me heartless! Their journey through the American wasteland was a bit too tortured and prolonged, and I did not appreciate the bittersweet ending, that didn’t seem to me a good way to resolve the irrevocable path to death that McCarthy had spent 280 pages creating. Perhaps if I read this book again a few years from now, when it’s my turn to be a parent, I’ll feel much more emotionally affected by it. But for now, I’m ready to put it aside and move on to another.