The Road by Cormac McCarthy For winning a Pulitzer, I wasn’t too impressed with the way McCarthy wrote his book. The storyline is okay, and McCarthy does often have good insights, but the choppy sentence structure and lack of verbs in describing the scenry were real putoffs. Chains of sentences such as this were truly annoying: They bore on south in the days and weeks to follow. Solitary and dogged. A raw hill country. Aluminum houses. Now I’m all for literary freedom, and certainly such playfulness with the English language should be encouraged in some cases, but McCarthy carried this technique much too far. The end result was a less vivid scene. It can be arguably said that a post-apocalyptic world is not vivid; however, I would argue that description should be vivid, even if the world is gray, dull, and lifeless. In any case, I believe McCarthy was attempting to create a sense of listlessness with that technique. Choppy sentences. Listless writing. But not good writing. I did enjoy the book, and my good friend was in tears after reading it, but I couldn’t help but feel it to be melodramatic. The boy was almost too endearing, sickeningly so. Children can be hard to write and I think McCarthy fell into the trap: readers often see a cute observation made by a child and think the kid is so smart…problem is the kid never thought that. Writers love putting their own ideas into the mouths of children, but it fails so often, McCarthy not withstanding. As for The Road representing science fiction as mainstream (let’s not kid ourselves, post-apocalyptal work takes place in the future so is science fiction), I thought the book did a nice job. Too many critics out there neglect books in the genre simply because they do not consider it credible, but that is a mistake. Don’t get me wrong, The Road was a good book, and I enjoyed reading it, but it did not live up to its hype. Oprah supposedly selected this for her book club and I can see why. It’s too bad that the parts the majority of her readers would swallow up were likely the soapy, unfulfilling parts I found in the book. Grade: 78/100

The Road by Cormac McCarthy

For winning a Pulitzer, I wasn’t too impressed with the way McCarthy wrote his book. The storyline is okay, and McCarthy does often have good insights, but the choppy sentence structure and lack of verbs in describing the scenry were real putoffs. Chains of sentences such as this were truly annoying:

They bore on south in the days and weeks to follow. Solitary and dogged. A raw hill country. Aluminum houses.

Now I’m all for literary freedom, and certainly such playfulness with the English language should be encouraged in some cases, but McCarthy carried this technique much too far. The end result was a less vivid scene. It can be arguably said that a post-apocalyptic world is not vivid; however, I would argue that description should be vivid, even if the world is gray, dull, and lifeless.

In any case, I believe McCarthy was attempting to create a sense of listlessness with that technique. Choppy sentences. Listless writing. But not good writing.

I did enjoy the book, and my good friend was in tears after reading it, but I couldn’t help but feel it to be melodramatic. The boy was almost too endearing, sickeningly so. Children can be hard to write and I think McCarthy fell into the trap: readers often see a cute observation made by a child and think the kid is so smart…problem is the kid never thought that. Writers love putting their own ideas into the mouths of children, but it fails so often, McCarthy not withstanding.

As for The Road representing science fiction as mainstream (let’s not kid ourselves, post-apocalyptal work takes place in the future so is science fiction), I thought the book did a nice job. Too many critics out there neglect books in the genre simply because they do not consider it credible, but that is a mistake. Don’t get me wrong, The Road was a good book, and I enjoyed reading it, but it did not live up to its hype.

Oprah supposedly selected this for her book club and I can see why. It’s too bad that the parts the majority of her readers would swallow up were likely the soapy, unfulfilling parts I found in the book.

Grade: 78/100