Cormac McCarthy

I experienced a number of emotions while reading Cormac McCarthy's The Road - and one of them was disappointment.

From the start, I had the sense that McCarthy had taken the easy way out: it was like what I was reading was originally intended as some sort of thought experiment, or experiment in what a novel could be if everything - including punctation - were stripped away. 

I understand why McCarthy composed The Road as he did, but that doesn't mean that he's hit the bar in terms of stylistic success. For me, The Road seems easily imitated: I was expecting the detail and complexity of All the Pretty Horses; what I got instead was book with a compelling premise, composed in a way that seemed both rushed and lazy.

And again, I understand why McCarthy wrote The Road as he did: that much is clear. But for me, On the Beach, for instance, is a more complete meditation on the apocalyptic state, at least in part because it's more descriptive, more aware. 

There's no doubt, of course, that McCarthy's novel is an emotional one, and by the end, I felt for characters. That said, I would have felt even more had they assumed a three-dimensional quality. These characters were almost flat, and their journey, while moving, could have been so much more. 

For me, McCarthy's exercise in rhetorical compression was only so successful: Saramago, for example, reaches considerable stylistic heights in Blindness, and he does so without proper punctuation. I think, in the end, that I wanted The Road to be more like that: daring, complete, raw, and unwavering. I wanted to it be like another great Saramago novel, Death with Interruptions, which imagines a world without end, a world very much the opposite of McCarthy's.