Cheerful read before 12/5

[Matthew Ryan]

Wow, I didn't know McCarthy had a new one coming out already. Between this,
the upcoming Vollmann, Danielewski, and of course Pynch's, the end of year
reading platter is gonna be pretty full.

On 7/23/06, Ya Sam <takoitov at hotmail.com> wrote:
>
> The Road
> Cormac McCarthy. Knopf, $24 (288p) ISBN 0-307-26543-9
>
> Violence, in McCarthy's postapocalyptic tour de force, has been visited
> worldwide in the form of a "long shear of light and then a series of low
> concussions" that leaves cities and forests burned, birds and fish dead
> and
> the earth shrouded in gray clouds of ash. In this landscape, an unnamed
> man
> and his young son journey down a road to get to the sea. (The man's wife,
> who gave birth to the boy after calamity struck, has killed herself.) They
> carry blankets and scavenged food in a shopping cart, and the man is armed
> with a revolver loaded with his last two bullets. Beyond the ever-present
> possibility of starvation lies the threat of roving bands of cannibalistic
> thugs. The man assures the boy that the two of them are "good guys," but
> from the way his father treats other stray survivors the boy sees that his
> father has turned into an amoral survivalist, tenuously attached to the
> morality of the past by his fierce love for his son. McCarthy establishes
> himself here as the closest thing in American literature to an Old
> Testament
> prophet, trolling the blackest registers of human emotion to create a
> haunting and grim novel about civilization's slow death after the power
> goes
> out. (Oct.)
>
> http://www.publishersweekly.com/article/CA6355293.html
>
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