Cormac McCarthy redux ...

... A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a piece taking a contrarian view of Cormac McCarthy's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Road. The book really rubbed me the wrong way and I expressed my feelings in no uncertain terms. But I also cited details of the text that prompted those feelings.

I am told - though I haven't bothered to check - that some in the blogosphere took great umbrage at my effrontery. There were objections here, too, though most were expressed civilly. In fact, Lee Lowe and I had a pretty informative exchange.

A surprising number of people emailed me to thank me for confirming their own reaction. A couple wrote to demur. One of those who agreed was Ian Abrams, a literature professor at Drexel University, who invited me visit the class he teaches on apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic literature. I accepted and I have to say I was very impressed by the students. Their questions and obervations were well thought-out and engagingly put. Most liked the book, but all were open to discussion of it, without rancor. At one point, Ian reminded us all of something very important - that it isn't critics or reviewers or literary scholars who determine whether a book is great or not. It is readers.
And this has some bearing on why some people took my piece so personally. Reading is not an entirely passive undertaking. The reader only gets out of a book as much as the reader brings to it. The words set the reader's imagination going - or they do not. My imagination resisted McCarthy's words. Others' imaginations were engaged by them. So my - admittedly pointed - criticism of his book challenged a world those readers had helped bring into being. Perhaps the highest praise that can be conferred upon McCarthy's book is that neither admirers nor detractors react to it with indifference.