The Road, by Cormac McCarthy

I'll tell you something: I'm a little tired of books that give me the impression of understanding nothing. Not that the book is hard to understand: on the contrary, the story is very simple, and there is nothing complex in Cormac McCarthy's prose (except for some lyrical passages that mean absolutely nothing). What I don't understand is how such a book could have won the Pulitzer Prize, and how so many readers gave it a perfect score.

Go see the opinions of this book on GoodReads. A large majority of readers (74%) gave it a perfect or near perfect rating, while only 3% gave it the worst rating. But the most liked reviewer was one that gave it one star, and the second most liked gave it 5 stars. Both are absolutely adamant in their opinion. I agree pretty much completely with the one-star review (very complete, by the way), while I don't understand any of the arguments of those who give it a perfect score. Such a difference of opinion is still surprising. I'm in the one-star clan. What about you?

Summary

An unknown incident has completely ravaged the planet. The sky is constantly obscured by a grey dust or smoke; everything has been burned; nothing grows in the earth anymore; plants and animals have died; it is constantly cold. A man and his son (whose names will never be known) walk south hoping that it will be better there and try to survive.

Impressions

Let's take a random excerpt.

While the boy slept he began to go methodically through the stores. Clothes, sweaters, socks. A stainless steel basin and sponges and bars of soap. Toothpaste and toothbrushes. In the bottom of a big plastic jar of bolts and screws and miscellaneous hardware he found a double handful of gold krugerrands in a cloth sack. He dumped them out and kneaded them in his hand and looked at them and then scooped them back into the jar along with the hardware and put the jar back on the shelf.

– The Road, p. 142

This was a paragraph. We have a blank line, then another paragraph. Now you have a very good idea of what this book looks like. Lots of "and" that are supposed to give style, lots of enumerations. Lots of scenes that don't serve any purpose.

I'm a little harsh right now. But honestly, I tried throughout the book to figure out what it was that got the critics and, apparently, the readership so excited. And what I saw was a style that gets tiresome very quickly, monotonous scenes, a story that wasn't going anywhere, a father-son relationship that doesn't evolve, and pathetic dialogue. I felt like I had an Author with a capital A style flashed in front of my eyes and that I had to dig very deep to find any depth in it.

People praised the father-son relationship. They thought it was a touching story, showing that love conquers all. I'm not sure where they saw that. First of all, we don't know them. We don't know anything about them, they don't evolve, they barely speak, they don't even have names, and we don't get attached to them. Other than the fact that they are physically together, nothing in the dialogue or events made me realize that their love was particularly beautiful and powerful. The child was always scared, the father was always austere and protective like a real manly man. Nothing particularly poignant about that.

People have found beauty in it, but I think it takes a pretty wild imagination. The characters are hungry and cold all the time, the whole landscape is in shades of gray, nothing grows and everyone is miserable, and, spoiler alert, the father dies and we don't know what will happen with the child. An end that leaves a lot to be desired and that concludes absolutely nothing.

People have found it to be a "scary" book. Other than the two-three scenes of cannibalism that are thrown in our faces, I don't see anything really scary about this book. The main emotion I felt was boredom; in those scenes, I only felt vague disgust.

People have found McCarthy's style to be beautiful, minimalist, and direct. Considering the number of unnecessary coordinating conjunctions, the meaningless details about the objects they find, and the utterly incomprehensible lyrical flights of fancy, I find it neither beautiful, minimalist, nor direct. It's pedantic.

Why, then, was this book so successful? In my opinion, it's because, like many hard-to-read books written by pretentious authors, no one dares to say that they didn't understand it, that they found it boring, that they didn't see the point. These authors make flafla which surprisingly succeeds in impressing the literary "elite". It makes a reputation, the readers are sold in advance and work very hard to find something to like and not look stupid.

It used to make me feel like I was just a bit dumb. But after about 22 years of reading compulsively and having studied literature for a year and a half full-time in college (with excellent grades, by the way), I'm starting to assume that I can read, and that my opinion is perfectly valid.

If you think like me, I recommend this article in The Atlanticwhich is likely to make you laugh and boost your ego.