Thursday, May 17, 2007

Can't rid myself of this guy ...

... James Wood on Cormac McCarthy's The Road: Getting to the End. (Hat tip, Rich Barron.)

"One has a persistent, uneasy sense that theodicy and the absent God have been merely exploited by the book, engaged with too lightly, without enough pressure of interrogation. When Ely says that "there is no God and we are his prophets," the phrase seems a little trite in its neat paradox of negation."

I would submit that the very relation between the father and son is exploitative. McCarthy knows that such a relation is deeply affecting and he uses it to camouflage the nihilism of his book: "Son, we're all gonna die and everything's headed to pure oblivion. Let's hug."

Now that I think of it, something Chuck Palahniuk said at the library last week seems pertinent. Chuck said that he thought oh-so-slow movies like The English Patient could be improved with the inclusion of some fast-moving zombies. So could The Road.

1 comment:

  1. Wood's piece is - as to be expected - altogether interesting.

    How do you decide when evoking emotions is exploitative? I've just watched the film The Lives of Others, for example, and was surprised by how manipulative, trite even, I found certain of its plot elements to be. Yet most everyone else wouldn't agree with me.

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