McCarthy, Cormac. The Road. New York: Knopf, 2006.

I expected myself to dislike this book, mostly because of what I'd imagined McCarthy's style being: too gritty and tough and neo-post-manly, whatever that means (I imagine it being a kind of performative terseness and gritty tangibility in the very far wake of Hemingway and the very near wake of the Seventies' men's movement).

I loved it, though. I think, in terms of recent post-apocalypse novels, I much prefer Atwood's tragicomic approach—her delving into characters' lives and histories, seeking proof or explanation for the events she's narrating—than McCarthy's bleak one. Here, his characters ("the man" and "the boy" who is his son), wander along the road heading south after some kind of unnarrated event has destroyed the planet, including its flora I think but especially its fauna. The cow is extinct, and as such people are now eating other people.

Bleak, bleak shit. This perhaps explains the cover but I still think it's inexcusable. Of course, McCarthy is one of the five best novelists of the last twenty-five years, and so his books don't need such cheap gimmicks as compelling covers to sell. I'm being a little too cynical; I think McCarthy is extremely talented. He's incredibly good and making all the actions and tensions of his characters' lives palpable. (What I felt when the man and the boy, near starvation, come across a bunker filled with canned goods was a kind of warming ecstasy in my chest.) His sentences are some of the best I've read in a long time. Behold:

In that long ago somewhere very near this place he'd watched a falcon fall down the long blue wall of the mountain and break with the keel of its breastbone the midmost from a flight of cranes and take it to the river below all gangly and wrecked and trailing its loose and blowsy plumage in the still autumn air. (17)

Have you ever met those minor savant types at certain points of your growing up who seemingly have outleapt everyone in your age bracket in terms of vocabulary, dropping words like "inconceivable" or "ostensibly" or other such vague smart-sounding Latinate terms into conversations about video games or pooping? Reading McCarthy is like spending time with that sort of person, except that instead of dropping nerdy "big words" into the conversation, he's dropping very tangible Anglo-Saxon words we've all always known in our guts but have too easily forgotten, spending as we have been altogether too much time with the comforting and easy and vague Latinates.