When He Woke In the Woods In the Dark And the Cold...

Title - The Road
Author - Cormac McCarthy
Genre - Fiction
Published - 2007
Pages - 287
ISBN - 0307387895
..........................FFR - 4, 5 ,8

When I saw this book reviewed on Oprah, and her interview with the author, I was intrigued enough to want to read it. Until I got the audio version, however, I just didn't have time. Now I've listened to it, and even though the narrator is absolutely fantastic and the story relatively moving, I honestly felt like the author spent more time droning on and on using adjectives and adverbs which just didn't fit the nouns and verbs they were modifying.

To make things worse, McCarthy apparently doesn't feel the need to name his main characters. Which is fine, I suppose, though I like to care about the characters in any story I'm reading and I am more likely to care about a character that I can name than one I cannot. Instead McCarthy uses "the man" or "the boy" over and over ad nauseam. Add to that the fact that he NEVER once distinguishes between "the man" = main character, and "the man" = various random encounters whilst on the road, and we have momentary contextual confusion as our brains try to sort out just which "the man" is doing or saying a thing.

Even when there is no pointless third person, there are moments when the pronoun "he" is used without clarification of whether "he" is the man or the boy.

This was my first experience with Oprah's book list, and I have to say I'm disappointed, but not surprised. McCarthy has written a novel swallowed up by the "intellectual elite", which is to say he's an emperor in new clothes, and if we can't see them, we must be fools, though I'd be surprised if many of the people who laud this book really truly cared about it at all beyond earning the right to say "Why, yes, I read that masterpiece!".

Summary: Great narration. Decent character development. Vivid, though occasionally obscure descriptions. Gruesome, ghastly, and occasionally depressing - which, considering the setting, fit very well. Once you get past the author patting himself on the back for having a huge vocabulary (aka access to a thesaurus) it becomes easy to get lost in this sad world with these two lonesome drifters.

I don't really recommend this book for anybody who likes to enjoy reading or who want to enjoy stories in general, nor to anybody who likes clarity, or who wants to actually care about their protagonist. To everybody else I have one word: Library.