The Road

By Cormac McCarthy
2006
256 pages. Audio: 6 hours and 39 minutes
Fiction

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I am caught in a conundrum of my own making. Before I started this series I decided that I would only review one novel from each author. Following such an approach would mean introducing my readers to 50 different authors rather than my 50 favorite novels from as few as 20 authors. And along the way I would allow myself to point out when an author had written additional works that I thought you should check out.

But then I came to Cormac McCarthy. I have told my students that he is one of very few living American authors before whom I would genuflect. He has been so imitated, so admired, and so awarded, that this demythologizing author seems like a myth himself. When the canon for the late 20th and early 21st century has been solidified, McCarthy will certainly be in it. Although many people preference his earlier work [1] I am in the minority group of people who think McCarthy reached his true greatness later in his writing.

He has written two post-2000 novels that I admire equally. In 2005 No Country for Old Men came out, followed a year later by McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic The Road. Movies made of both novels, and No Country for Old Men was so brilliant that it garnered a Best Picture Academy Award, and millions of people have seen it who have no idea that it is based on the work of one of our greatest American authors.

No Country for Old Men is about a drug deal gone bad, a Nietzschean super villain, and a law man who feels like the world has gotten too complicated for him. The Road is about a man and a boy trying to survive in a world that has been mostly destroyed among “the bad guys” who are pretty much vampires.

What I admire about these books is the pared-down simplicity and straightforward language of the storytelling. The conversations in The Road sound exactly like how two people would talk to one another. If you enjoy audio, I highly recommend the audiobook version of this novel. It’s as if the grand eloquence of Blood Meridian has blown itself out and all that is left is plain, simple prose.

The books are violent and quite disturbing in different ways. And while the prose is simple, the characters’ motivations are complex and rich. And so the secret is out. McCarthy has had enormous impact on how I preach. I want to present the richness and depth of the biblical world with the simple prose of Cormac McCarthy, my favorite American author.

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[1] For instance, Blood Meridian (1985) is an extremely violent deconstruction of the American Western. The single most sinister character I have ever encountered in a novel is at the center of this book. He is called only by the title “The Judge.” Of course. No name. Saying he kills a few people would be putting it mildly. The book is legendary for its grand, almost biblical, language. It reads like a sacred text, while decimating the notion of the iconic Western hero.