Cormac McCarthy's The Road - Thoughts **Possible Spoilers**

[Toby Frost]

Personally, I think Myers overstates his case a bit, but he makes a fair point. I did feel that The Road would have been gained more than it lost with a few less biblical images and a few more V8 Interceptors, but I wouldn’t go much farther than that. More generally, I am very wary of “literary” fiction in the same way that I’m wary of articles written in a certain sort of jargon: once I see “hegemony” I pretty much know what’s going to be said and what the author will think about it. It’s the same reason that seeing modern theatre has no great interest for me. I’m probably stereotyping, but I get the feeling that a lot of cutting-edge art involves people telling the audiences what they already think and want to hear, whether it’s “a man’s gotta walk tall, son” or “aren’t people in the first world just awful?”.

Anyway, back to The Road. I don’t quite agree with your assessment, Soulsinging, that The Road is just a bunch of John Wayne quotes disguised as deep thought, or that it’s indicative of a malaise in American culture. But I don’t wholly disagree, either: that’s just not quite how I see the book. I think McCarthy has a talent for making the normal sound epic, and when you discount the writing style (whether you think it’s bad or good) I don’t think there’s much more to it than, say, The Book of Eli (tough guy carries the word of God/civilisation across a barbaric land) or even Fury Road (tough guy discovers femininity and caring, with monster trucks). I liked both of those films. Perhaps the very idea that it’s possible to have meaningful relationships in a dog-eat-dog (or human-eat-human!) world is worth expressing again. I do wonder, though, whether the sheer lack of fun in The Road gives it a weight that it doesn’t entirely deserve.

 

[HareBrain]

I found Myers's essay a worthwhile and entertaining read. I can certainly see what he's getting at given the examples he cites, but I haven't noticed the trend myself (mind you, I don't read much modern American literary fiction). But I can't agree with him about McCarthy's All the Pretty Horses, which he picks out for criticism several times -- certainly not about the passage describing the horse being broken, which I remember worked on me like magic when I read the book (and still does).

I think every writer should read it, though, because it does make you think about whether you've ever used a sentence where the meaning was left vague in order to create an "impression", and whether that's actually a worthwhile thing to do (I suspect that in most cases it isn't), or whether you've used tautology for emphasis and because you thought it generated power by accumulation, when all it does is waste words.