The Road
I just finished reading Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. It was a beautiful, bleak, sort of empty book.
My overall impression is that it wasn’t about characters or plot so much, though both of those elements were there. Character moreso than plot, which was really deliberately thin. It was about a mood, and about the way words sound in your head.
I haven’t read any other of McCarthy’s books, so I don’t know to what extent this is true of his work in general, but The Road really was an extended sort of echoing of dying words in the reader’s mind. It sort of felt like a tunnel of consciousness, like the only way you have to perceive the world is through the noise a word makes inside your skull when you’ve read it, and after you’ve read it, as it decays quickly away like a spent atom, you are lonlier than before you knew there was such a noise.
I may suffer from a lack of empathy, but I didn’t feel sorrow for the collection of vagabonds and cannibals desultorily winding down their empty existences in these pages. I felt more of a sadness coming to realize that the only way we know the world is through stories we tell ourselves, the only way we understand it is through the stories other people tell us, but ultimately the stories go away and there’s not much for the mind outside of stories.
I wouldn’t say it was depressing. Starkly meditative, maybe. I wonder if the film adaptation will be so deliberative.
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