Best known for his
Border Trilogy, hailed in the San Francisco Chronicle as "an American classic to stand with the finest literary achievements of the century," Cormac McCarthy has written ten rich and often brutal novels, including the bestselling
No Country for Old Men, and
The Road. Profoundly dark, told in spare, searing prose,
The Road is a post-apocalyptic masterpiece, one of the best books we've read this year, but in case you need a second (and expert) opinion, we asked
Dennis Lehane, author of equally rich, occasionally bleak and brutal novels, to read it and give us his take. Read his glowing review below.
--Daphne Durham
Guest Reviewer: Dennis Lehane
Dennis Lehane, master of the hard-boiled thriller, generated a cult following with his series about private investigators Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro, wowed readers with the intense and gut-wrenching Mystic River, blew fans all away with the mind-bending Shutter Island, and switches gears with Coronado, his new collection of gritty short stories (and one play). Cormac McCarthy sets his new novel,
The Road, in a post-apocalyptic blight of gray skies that drizzle ash, a world in which all matter of wildlife is extinct, starvation is not only prevalent but nearly all-encompassing, and marauding bands of cannibals roam the environment with pieces of human flesh stuck between their teeth. If this sounds oppressive and dispiriting, it is. McCarthy may have just set to paper the definitive vision of the world after nuclear war, and in this recent age of relentless saber-rattling by the global powers, it's not much of a leap to feel his vision could be not far off the mark nor, sadly, right around the corner. Stealing across this horrific (and that's the only word for it) landscape are an unnamed man and his emaciated son, a boy probably around the age of ten. It is the love the father feels for his son, a love as deep and acute as his grief, that could surprise readers of McCarthy's previous work. McCarthy's Gnostic impressions of mankind have left very little place for love. In fact that greatest love affair in any of his novels, I would argue, occurs between the Billy Parham and the wolf in
The Crossing. But here the love of a desperate father for his sickly son transcends all else. McCarthy has always written about the battle between light and darkness; the darkness usually comprises 99.9% of the world, while any illumination is the weak shaft thrown by a penlight running low on batteries. In
The Road, those batteries are almost out--the entire world is, quite literally, dying--so the final affirmation of hope in the novel's closing pages is all the more shocking and maybe all the more enduring as the boy takes all of his father's (and McCarthy's) rage at the hopeless folly of man and lays it down, lifting up, in its place, the oddest of all things: faith.
--Dennis Lehane
-- Dieser Text bezieht sich auf eine andere Ausgabe:
Taschenbuch
.
“Despite Cormac McCarthy’s reputation as an ornate stylist,
The Road represents both the logical terminus, and a kind of ultimate triumph, of the American minimalism that became well-known in the 1980s under the banner of ‘dirty realism’ . . .
The Road is a much more compelling and demanding book than its predecessor . . . The new novel will not let the reader go, and will horribly invade his dreams, too . . .
The Road is not a science fiction, not an allegory, and not a critique of the way we live now, or of the-way-we-might-live-if-we-keep-on-living-the-way-we-live-now. It poses a simpler question, more taxing for the imagination and far closer to the primary business of fiction-making: what would this world without people look like, feel like? These questions McCarthy answers magnificently . . . [His] devotion to detail, his Conradian fondness for calmly described horrors, his tolling fatal sentences, make the reader shiver with fear and recognition . . . When McCarthy is writing at his best, he does indeed belong in the company of the American masters. In his best pages one can hear Melville and Lawrence, Conrad and Hardy. His novels are full of marvelous depictions of birds in flight, and
The Road has a gorgeous paragraph like something out of Hopkins . . . The writing [is] often breathtaking.”
–James Wood,
The New Republic“Fundamentally it marks not a departure but a return to McCarthy’s most brilliant genre work, combined in a manner we have not seen since
Blood Meridian: adventure and Gothic horror. That book is usually viewed not only as McCarthy’s greatest–a view I passionately share–but as representing a kind of fulcrum [in his career] . . . There are strong echoes of the Jack London—style adventure [and]
Robinson Crusoe [in
The Road] . . . For naturalism operating at the utmost extremes of the natural world and of human endurance a McCarthy novel has no peer. . . McCarthy has to be accounted as a secret master and the rightful heir to the American Gothic tradition of Poe and Lovecraft . . . I think ultimately it is as a lyrical epic of horror that
The Road is best understood . . . The father is visited as poignantly and dreadfully as Odysseus or Aeneas by ghosts . . . Replete both with bleak violence and acute suspense, [this is] a layered, tightly constructed narrative that partakes of the epic virtue it attempts to abnegate . . . What emerges most powerfully as one reads
The Road is not a prognosticatory or satirical warning about the future, or a timeless parable of a father’s devotion to his son, or yet another McCarthyesque examination of the violent underpinnings of all social intercourse and the indifference of the cosmic jaw to the bloody morsel of humanity . . . It is a testament to the abyss of a parent’s greatest fears . . . It is in the audacity and single-mindedness with which
The Road extends the metaphor of a father’s guilt and heartbreak over abandoning his son to shift for himself in a ruined, friendless world that
The Road finds its great power to move and horrify the reader.”
–Michael Chabon,
New York Review of Books“It’s hard to think of [an apocalypse tale] as beautifully, hauntingly constructed as this one. McCarthy possess a massive, Biblical vocabulary and he unleashes it in this book with painterly effect . . .
The Road takes him to a whole new level . . . It will grip even the coldest human heart.”
–John Freeman,
Sunday Star-Ledger“Rendered in beautiful and powerful prose . . . McCarthy still stands tall among our best writers . . . In the nightmarish setting that McCarthy has envisioned, humanity shines brightly through.”
–Connor Ennis,
The Associated Press“
The Road [is] Cormac McCarthy’s new masterpiece . . . Lush, sensuous prose . . . Gorgeous descriptions . . . . . . He evokes Hemingway’s literary vision in order to invert it, first by eliminating the promise that nature can provide a refuge from human destruction and finally by giving us redemption in the form of the love between a parent and a child.”
–Jennifer Egan,
Slate“The love between the father and the son is one of the most profound relationships McCarthy has ever written.”
–Yvonne Zipp,
Christian Science Monitor“
The Road is a wildly powerful and disturbing book that exposes whatever black bedrock lies beneath grief and horror. Disaster has never felt more physically and spiritually real. In a way McCarthy is the last survivor of a vanished world. He is, essentially, a modernist, miraculously preserved like a literary coelacanth from the age of Hemingway and Faulkner, writers of high style and high purpose without an iota of aw-shucks relatability . . . There’s a stripped-down intensity to his work that is just awesome.”
–Lev Grossman,
Time“One of McCarthy’s best novels, probably his most moving and perhaps his most personal . . . Every moment of
The Road is rich with dilemmas that are as shattering as they are unspoken . . . McCarthy is so accomplished that the reader senses the mysterious and intuitive changes between father and son that can’t be articulated, let alone dramatized . . . Both lyric and savage, both desperate and transcendent, although transcendence is singed around the edges . . . Tag McCarthy one of the four or five great American novelists of his generation.”
–Steve Erickson,
Los Angeles Times Book Review“No American writer since Faulkner has wandered so willingly into the swamp waters of deviltry and redemption . . . [
The Road] is Beckett at its most gritty . . . McCarthy is too seasoned a writer to over dramatize what may be the last drama of all . . . The reader feels a bone-deep identification with the characters’ plight . . . And to its credit, you don’t see what has to be coming in this endgame novel–a moment of such simple goodness and humanity that even its elegiac fact is a thing of comfort . . . He has written this last waltz with enough elegant reserve to capture what matters most.”
–Gail Caldwell,
Boston Globe“As a reader of everything good I can get my hands on, I’m always thrilled when a fine writer of first-class fiction takes up the genre of science fiction and matches its possibilities with his or her own powers . . . Now Cormac McCarthy, one of our country’s most lauded writers, has done it and made a dark book that glows with the intensity of his huge gift for language.
The Road is a postatomic apocalypse novel as we’ve never seen one before, a black book of wondrous paragraphs that reads as though Samuel Beckett had dared himself to outdo Harlan Ellison . . . Why read this? Aside from the fact that Cormac McCarthy could write instructions on a microwave that sounded like a version of the King James Bible, why keep pushing ahead? Because in its lapidary transcription of the deepest despair short of total annihilation we may ever know, this book announces the triumph of language over nothingness.”
–Alan Cheuse,
Chicago Tribune“Chilling and beautiful . . . The reader is captivated and surprisingly, charmed. To such bleakness McCarthy brings the real and genuine warmth of humanity . . . Breathtaking . . . McCarthy justifies the very worth of fiction in the consummate breadth and dimension of his work.”
–Andrew Hubner,
New York Post“McCarthy is a gutsy, powerful storyteller . . . The writing throughout is magnificent.”
–John Barron,
Chicago Sun-Times“[McCarthy] might be expected to rest on his laurels as one of our best living novelists. Instead, it is clear that McCarthy is not going gently into that good night . . . We find this violent, grotesque world rendered in gorgeous, melancholic, even biblical cadences . . . Few books can do more; few have done better. Read this book.”
–Duane Davis,
Rocky Mountain News“Cormac McCarthy’s subject in his new novel is as big as it gets: the end of the civilized world, the dying of life on the planet and the spectacle of it all. He has written a visually stunning picture of how it looks at the end to two pilgrims on the road to nowhere . . .
The Road is a dynamic tale, offered in the often exalted prose that is McCarthy’s signature, but this time in restrained doses . . . Vivid, eloquent . . . The accessibility of this book, the love between father and son expressed in their quicksilver conversations, and the pathos of their story will make the novel popular, perhaps beyond
All the Pretty Horses . . .
The Road is the most readable of his works, and consistently brilliant in its imagining of the posthumous condition of nature and civilization . . . The rhythmic poetry of McCarthy’s formidable talent has made us see the blasted world as clearly as Conrad wanted us to see.”
–William Kennedy,
New York Times Book Review (cover)
“His most compelling, moving and accessible novel since
All the Pretty Horses . . .
McCarthy is particularly well-suited to the task [of imagining a post-nuclear world] because he writes so beautifully and convincingly about violence, despair and men in desperate situations . . . McCarthy brilliantly captures the knife edge that fugitives in a hostile world stand on . . . This makes for genuine suspense . . . Amid this Godot-like bleakness, McCarthy shares something vital and enduring about the boy’s spirit, his father’s love and the nature of bravery itself.”
–Deirdre Donahue,
USA Today“Admirers of Cormac McCarthy will find themselves in reassuringly familiar territory with his new book,
The Road...
