Jonathan Poritsky

Cormac McCarthy’s The Road is great, but that doesn’t mean I was wholly blown away by it. Sparse lan­guage and stark apoc­a­lyp­tic land­scapes aren’t exactly new ter­ri­tory, and that sort of stuff doesn’t exactly get my noo­dle going. It’s a par­lor trick of sorts that Mr. McCarthy has pulled off grace­fully. The plot and style are sim­i­lar to any comic book or pulp novel or B-movie from a bygone era, but the author has imbued this thin palate with a lit­er­ary cog­nizance that raises story out of the muck and grime of a post-apocalyptic landscape.

The story fol­lows a man and a boy walk­ing down a road, search­ing for sus­te­nance and dodg­ing evil-doers, after the end of days. How and why the earth has been scorched into obliv­ion is never explained because it doesn’t need to be. Mr. McCarthy has kept as much infor­ma­tion out of the story as pos­si­ble, even going so far as to do away with con­trac­tions and other for­mat­ting niceties, like quo­ta­tions marks or chap­ters. The mes­sage is clear: show only what is needed, noth­ing more. I’ll fol­low suit, and offer you noth­ing more of the plot, it would ruin the expe­ri­ence of read­ing it.

According to IMDb, Mr. McCarthy’s books have been adapted into four films so far, includ­ing last year’s Best Picture win­ner No Country For Old Men. The Road rep­re­sents one of three more films com­ing out adapted from his work. I doubt the film will be very good, but it’s obvi­ous why it would be made. The novel’s stripped down nature reads just like a screen­play. Action, action, dia­logue, scene. This for­mula lent itself extremely well to No Country, which fol­lows the book almost to the letter.

But this book is very dif­fer­ent. There is no chase. There is noth­ing to strive for. Ultimately, there seems to be no rea­son to live in this non-world that the author has drawn up for us, which is why this book has mys­ti­fied read­ers since its release. Is it a great read? Yes. Is it any­thing more than that? No. Do I rec­om­mend it? Hell yes.