Respect the classics, man

With these long breaks between posts, it's extremely apparent that I'm not as well-read as other, faster readers. I try to be constantly reading, but don't finish things quickly. So I hope, then, that my ambiguosity over Cormac McCarthy's The Road is somewhat understandable. Don't get me wrong -- I thoroughly enjoyed this book, but there are some aspects of it that make me uncertain.

Like, where do you draw the line between High Art and Elitism? The direction, style of writing, and eventual end of the book are unlike most I've read. Do I classify that as novel, or as pretentious?

I'll back up and look at the book for what it is. First, it is spectacular. I picked up this book when my English teacher recommended that our class not read it because it's so difficult to read. Needless to say, I considered this to be a challenge. The Road was one of my summer purchases, and here I am reading it now.

Think about what McCarthy has to live up to for a minute. This novel was published in 2006, and now in 2009, America is obsessed with the Apocalypse (as I mentioned in my last post). Not to mention that this is the second Apocalypse novel I've read this year, if you count World War Z. There's a huge canvas of books out there, and whatever McCarthy does, won't it just be another drop in the bucket?

Wrong. McCarthy's novel is nothing short of a masterpiece. By nearly eliminating the questions of why and how from the novel, McCarthy focuses on the journey instead of the destination. There is an uncertain goal, and it is eventually reached, but the characters are never entirely sure what that goal is. The focus is on the destroyed landscape, and on some interesting (though not unique) themes of survival. The interesting dynamic is the parent one -- the father blurs the lines between reality and falsehood, and it's clear by the end that the son does not appreciate it. Yet they have no one else to turn to, and the father's role really is important. If not for him, they would both have died early on.

There are four major things that separate this post-apocalypse novel from the rest. The first, as I've mentioned, is the lack of details of what happened to the planet. This is pretty interesting, as McCarthy leaves it mostly to our imaginations, though I found it irritating that McCarthy began to gives us details but didn't quite tell us what happened.

The second thing is the writing style. Oh, the writing style. There is little punctuation beyond periods and capital letters; run-on sentences and fragments abound; quotation marks are absent; and furthermore, the characters are never named. I've read that this is supposed to reflect the chaotic state of nature into which the people in the story are cast. I certainly see that.

The third thing is the constant progression to the point of monotony. Discovery of places means less as the man and boy plod along because they've seen it before. In any other writer's hands, this would bring monotony to the point of boredom, but McCarthy makes it work in the context of the story, even addressing it.

The last detail that makes this book different is the ending. Spoiler alert, because (as I said), this is a really good book and you should read it. For the rest of us: I found the ending severely lacking. If the man had not been running the whole time, he might have been rescued. (Then again, would he have let himself be rescued? He's bone-headed, sure, but aren't a lot of us?) The boy leaving the road was the worst thing for me. Sure, maybe he deserves to: maybe the last few scenes set up his divinity -- and that's interesting. But upon reaching the end, I realized that I'd wanted either both characters to die or one of them to continue on the road. The road is so much an entity unto itself that I never wanted to leave it. What else is there to live- or read- for?

That last thing made me wonder, at first, if I just didn't "get" it. And so did a lot of the sentence fragments and run-ons in the description, actually. How much of that is surrealism and how much is literary pretentiousness? But no matter. The book is marvelous in itself, and anyone interested in good literature should definitely read it.

(I apologize if this post is less coherent than most. I wanted to get this up because I'm now halfway through my next book. I guess there's hope for me learning to read faster!)

(Also, that blog title made more sense to me when I started this. You'll just have to take my word for it.)