The Road
Cormac McCarthy's latest novel, The Road, takes a fairly basic premise, an apocalyptic event ravages the world and leaves few survivors, and tries, mightily, to make something of it. The plot, centered around a father and son who are among the survivors and are simply trying to stay alive, is rather scant in terms of traditional narratives with arcs and resolutions. Perhaps that's not the point of the book, and I doubt McCarthy would say that it is, but his previous novels have taken other barebones narratives and made something of them, so it's not foreign territory to him as a writer and shaper of worlds. One could argue that this book serves as a loosely termed bookend to his previous novel Outer Dark, but in that novel the quest the two characters set out on had a definite purpose. The father and son here simply have to survive with what's left of humanity, but this leaves the reader with little knowledge of what the ultimate purpose of the narrative is supposed to be.

A lot of the criticism can be attributed to McCarthy's style as a writer. His novels seem to be comprised of episodes more than definable chapters. In previous books, Outer Dark and Blood Meridian, this style worked to his advantage and the reader didn't necessarily feel as if they were reading a disjointed narrative. For one reason or another the time lapses worked in these two novels. However, in The Road and No Country for Old Men the narratives seem lacking in one thing or another, in the latter it seems as if the plot advances forward illogically at several key moments which had me wondering if some pages were missing from the text. In the former novel the problem isn't so much that there are jumps in the narrative, but that the narrative is almost too static in nature. The events do not build upon each other in a cohesive manner, which leads to the reader feeling as if they could pick any random point in the book to start reading and not feel as if anything has been missed. There's only so much plot that can be made out of two people walking from town to town looking for supplies and avoiding the "bad guys."

This is not to say that the book isn't without its highpoints. In fact, the ending of the novel is pretty powerful especially for McCarthy who seems to be an expert and conveying emotional detachment in his characters and lacing his novels with a sense of distance. The novel certainly would have benefited from more episodes that work on the level the ending does, which leads me to believe that the novel may have better served as a novella or short story. McCarthy is a master craftsman, but I'd like to see his novels in the future utilize traditional narrative structures instead of the fragmented nature he's been relying on lately.