The Road I hope we never travel

If you've not read Cormac McCarthy's The Road yet, do it! You might want to wait for a cold, cloudy day. . .or maybe not. My lit class starts discussion of this novel today. When I first read it two years ago I had no idea what to make of the form, the language, the message. . .it is at once lyrical, epic, post-apocalyptic, and down right tear-jerky. Now, that's hard to pull off in a 240 page novel!

The novel tells the story of a father and son traveling to a sea-shore in a post-apocalyptic world. Everything is dead but a few humans. . .and some of those are cannibals. The father is obsessed with survival and the son with remaining human. Therein lies the central but subtle conflict of the book.

Here's a sample paragraph.

The land was gullied and eroded and barren. The bones of dead creatures sprawled in the washes. Middens of anonymous trash. Farmhouses in the fields scoured of their paint and the clapboards spooned and sprung from the wallstuds. All of it shadowless and without feature. The road descended through a jungle of dead kudzu. A marsh where the dead reeds lay over the water. Beyond the edge of the fields the sullen haze hung over the earth and sky alike. By late afternoon it had begun to snow and they went on with the tarp over them and the wet snow hissing on the plastic.

Also, keep a dictionary handy. McCarthy is meriless with his arcane vocabulary.