Another view of "The Road"

Stephen Amidon reviewed Cormac McCarthy's The Road for the Sunday Times (London).

I think Amidon gets McCarthy's style right. His closing paragraph:

One of the wonders of McCarthy’s style is that it manages to be both archaic and immediate, as if the prophet Jeremiah had found work as a Detroit crime reporter or a Darfur war correspondent. Near the novel’s end, father and son briefly rest on a highway above a dead swamp, and the view seems to be right back to the beginning of time. “Perhaps in the world’s destruction it would be possible at last to see how it was made. Oceans, mountains. The ponderous counterspectacle of things ceasing to be. The sweeping waste, hydroptic and coldly secular. The silence.” If there is relief on offer from The Road’s grim mayhem, it is to be found in the desolate beauty of its vision, not in the ephemeral consolation of a nurturing human relationship.

William Kennedy also wrote a fine review for the New York Times Sunday Book Review.

Click here for my review.

--Marshal Zeringue