Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ

Sometimes I just need to change gears with no notice and no serious analysis. I’ve always had this behavioral tic. I’ll just come home on a Friday after a long week and shave my head, or buy and wear women’s t-shirts or interlocking male symbol earrings (you can borrow, just ask). Or pick up something short and compelling to read while toiling through never-ending (yet very worthwhile) behemoths. I did this a few months ago by racing through The Stranger and The Lover during my earliest foray into Proust; with To the Lighthouse while reading Infinite Jest. And now I’ve done it again with The Road, which my brother suggested would act as a good ‘palate cleanser�. True.

There’s something about taking a long time to finish books that, independent from my actual enjoyment of the currently-readings, frustrates me. I can’t figure out why this is, but I imagine that it’s not unusual and may account for the long-book phobia common among people who still read a hell of a lot of pages/books per year. It isn’t readily apparent why one long book is harder to tackle than three or four short ones over the same time period, but I think most would agree that this is indeed the case. (Thoughts?) At first I suspected that this need-to-finish anxiety may have been exacerbated by Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ, but I now believe that this website actually keeps me accountable and encouraged to finish long books by threatening me with admission of failure in front of 60-odd (not â€�60 oddâ€�--that number’s probably closer to 50) stranger-friends.

So anyway, with no end in sight for the other books I’m reading, I wanted a quick fix. No matter how pathetic the need from which it stemmed, I had to feel the satisfaction of finishing a book, and soon. So I picked up The Road, which promised to be completeable in a few solid sittings, and it certainly fulfilled that requirement. I can’t recall ever being sucked into a story so quickly and thoroughly; McCarthy immediately invokes a desolate setting and desperate mood with only the barest of sentences. It’s like he’s tapped into something so primordial that we humans can’t help but sit transfixed. I think it’s pretty damn close to “The Entertainment� that DFW dreams up in Infinite Jest--something so entertaining and engrossing that we’d give up eating/going to the bathroom/sleeping to continue with it. This is getting a little excessive, but bear with me: it’s been a long time since I read a real page-turner. In a sense, The Road is kind of like a kid’s book for adults, in that it reminds me of the experience of reading when I was child. I’d pick up a Roald Dahl, and it was creepy and moving and delightful and I just couldn’t put it down; McCarthy pushed the same buttons that Dahl was manipulating all those years ago. I’d forgotten what this sort of reading experience was like, and its reemergence was a welcome revelation.

Raw, visceral power in a book allows you to forgive a great deal, and thankfully, McCarthy doesn’t push his luck too hard with the reader here. Yeah, his punctuation omissions are unnecessary and annoying, and he frequently switches words around into awkwardness for novelty’s sake, and occasionally he pops out with two-sentence paragraphs that are borderline nonsensical in the context of the book. But given his masterful instinct for pacing (notable for its utter unnoticeability while reading), and the gripping sense of purpose and dread he infuses in each paragraph, these truly become minor quibbles. Perhaps most impressive is how simple McCarthy makes it all seem. I bet more than a few writers and would-be writers read this and thought, “Damn, if only I had written this first,� rather than the actually true statement of “Damn, I wish I could write something like this.�

In no aspect is this beautiful simplicity more apparent than in the preternaturally moving and sparse dialogue. After the first few father-son exchanges, only a couple pages into the book, I knew that this story had the raw materials to really get to me, in the same way that Kevin Costner asking his dad for a catch makes me swallow in an embarrassingly audible fashion at the end of Field of Dreams. And the book followed through on that early promise. Boy, did it ever. Cried like a baby. Never before have I seen two or three-word sentences carry that kind of weight, convey so much with such unwriterly restraint.

Along with the dialogue, it’s the book’s handling of morality that elevates this to the 5-star level. The setting allows for a distilled treatment of basic goodness that's astonishingly potent. How often did I find myself siding with the father when the protagonists encountered others on the road? How often did my own cynicism and skepticism match his, while I became impatient with (what I perceived as) the boy’s innocence and naivety? My tears weren’t only for the characters in the book. I am ashamed and in awe.