Book Review: The Road

The Road by Cormac McCarthy, ISBN 0307387895, Vintage Books , 2007, fiction

Rating: 5 of 5 STARS
Source: 2009 TBR Award Winners List

I wonder how many book reviews have been written on this book? I would imagine thousands. I'm not sure what I could possibly add. The philosophical and spiritual aspects of this book would give one writing fodder for months and months. McCarthy puts the depths of both love and human depravity on center stage. Endurance, goodness, evil, hope, despair, innocence....so much.
So much.

And I'm sure just as much has been written about McCarthy's writing style. It took me about 20 pages to get into his rhythm, to follow the sparse, sometimes incomplete, sentences... To digest the lack of quotation marks in dialogue and apostrophes missing in certain contractions... To find the flow in the micro 'chapters.' It was, in short, beautiful and completely complimentary to the story he was telling.

Read it. To say it's a powerful story of sacrificial love of a father for his son is to do injustice.

Just read it.

So - what else do I have to say? As someone who dreams of being a writer one day, McCarthy's writing is both intimidating and inspiring. I found myself dog-earing page after page. He uses words I'm not familiar with or words that I am familiar with in ways that I'm not. I've listed below some of my favorites with links to their definitions:

Gambrel - In an old batboard smokehouse they found a ham gambreled up in a high corner.
Discalced - They were discalced to a man like pilgrims of some common order for all their shoes were long since stolen.
Windrow - ...and the bend of the river was choked with great windrows of black limbs and brush and trunks of trees. (McCarthy uses this word several times. I find it beautiful.)
Macadam - Late in the day they came to a place where the fire had crossed the road and the macadam was still warm and further on it began to soften underfoot. (Again, another common word in this novel.)
Obsidian - She would do it with a flake of obsidian.
Rachitic - He was lean, wiry, rachitic.
Siwash - ...he rose and walked out and cut a perimeter around their siwash camp...
Runic - Runic slogans, creeds misspelled.
Phalanx - The phalanx following carried spears or lances...
Mendicant - They set out upon the road again, slumped and cowled and shivering in their rags like mendicant friars sent forth to find their keep.
Palimpsest - The billboards had been whited out with thin coats of white paint in order to write on them and through the paint could be seen a pale palimpsest of advertisements...
Intestate - The cold relentless circling of the intestate earth. Darkness implacable.
Scrim - Sketched upon the pall of soot downstream the outline of a burnt city like a black paper scrim.
Middens - Middens of anonymous trash.
Bolus - Watching while they opened up the rocky hillside ground with pick and mattock and brought to light a great bolus of serpents perhaps a hundred in number.
Verdigris - Then he found a coin. Or a button. Deep crust of verdigris.
Isocline - At the tide line a woven mat of weeds and the ribs of fishes in their millions stretching along the shore as far as eye could see like an isocline of death.
Clerestory - The weak sea light fell through the clerestory portholes.
Bindle - Lastly he made a bindle in a plastic tarp...
Pampooties - They'd wrapped their feet in sailcloth and bound them up in blue plastic pampooties cut from a tarp...
Salitter - The black shape of it running from dark to dark. Then a distant low rumble. Not thunder. You could feel it under your feet. A sound without cognate and so without description. Something imponderable shifting out there in the dark. The earth itself contracting with the cold. It did not come again. What time of year? What age the child? … The silence. The salitter drying from the earth. The mudstained shapes of flooded cities burned to the waterline. At a crossroads a ground set with dolmen stones where the spoken bones of oracles lay moldering. No sound but the wind. (See the link on 'salitter' to The First Morning post on some history of usage. Beautifully written post.)
Sloe - He sharpened a quill with his small pen knife to scribe these things in sloe or lampblack?Crozzled - Ten thousand dreams ensepulchred within their crozzled hearts.
Loess - Tracks of unknown creatures in the mortified loess.

There are many, many other passages I would share with you, but this is already way too long of a post, and I've got laundry to do, so I'll end it here. I highly recommend reading this, especially with others. There's so much to talk about. Enjoy.