BOOK REVIEW: Pulitzer Prize winner The Road (by Cormac McCarthy)

Over from the road by Cormac McCarthy from a review by Markus McDowell

I have a difficult time understanding why this won the Pulitzer Prize, unless it was because of the author’s reputation. I almost stopped reading almost every day, and only kept going because I have a hard time not finishing books, in order to give them a fair hearing.

The setting and concept is a fascinating one—the world has been destroyed by some unnamed cataclysmic event, resulting in burned cities and land, ash falling continuously, and the fall of governments and civilization, along with massive extinction. A man and his young son are traveling south, trying to escape winter and to survive. Along the way, they scavenge for food and shelter, do their best to avoid others who, more often than not, will kill them for their belongings (or cannibalism).
Wondering what will happen to them may be enough to keep you reading. It is clear from the beginning that one or both of them will die. It might even be that the father will kill the son to keep him from a “fate worse than death” from humans turned barbaric. This makes, for me at least, a sense of dread each time I picked it up: would I read of a tragic death of the boy, or the father (leaving the boy alone in this world), or a father killing his own son?

If there was something redeeming or instructive in it, I would have rated it higher. Even the moral struggle of a parent killing their own child to keep them from a horror has some merit in art. But that theme is merely mentioned, not addressed or developed. Moreover, the two protagonists never grow, never change, and never learn anything new. They are the same at the end as at the beginning. The final resolution happens so suddenly and has little meaning, other than to make the reader think “so more of the same, with a change in protagonists. The author has said he had no idea where this story was going, and he apparently finished it in that mode.

The style is one I enjoy, for the most part. Being a fan of Hemingway, the simple, efficient, yet profound prose was enjoyable. Yet, on occasion, McCarthy strays from it to adopt another style, without transition or change of POV, to more flowery and expansive prose. Likewise, the voice changes near the end, then back, and then back again. Looking back, it may have been to foreshadow what was going to happen, then back to the normal voice, then switching again once the foreshadowing came to be. But in the midst of it, it just seemed sloppy.

Perhaps that was me, and another reader would see the value in the literary skill (and maybe this is why it won the Pulitzer).
As a whole, the book is disturbing, dark, and depressing. Again, that would not be a problem if there was some change in the characters (positive or negative), or if the story enouraged the reader to struggle with a moral issue or the human condition. But as it stands, it reads like another all-too-common “contemporary fiction” piece that simply says “things are terrible, humans are terrible, and that’s just the way it is and will be. Kill yourself or wait for death to come.”

Personally, I find nothing artistic or meaningful about that take on the genre.