The Road Ruiner

You might remember that a couple of months back, I went into pretty good detail about how monumentally moved I was by Cormac McCarthy's The Road, which won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2007. For anyone who missed it, either the column or the novel itself, the book is simply a flat-out masterpiece. It's honestly -- and I'm sorry for the hyperbole but I don't think I'm overstating it here -- damn near a life-changer, the kind of searingly powerful piece of writing that comes along only a few times in a generation. It's just that good -- that potent.

Whether you find yourself personally affected by The Road or not, it seems almost impossible to deny McCarthy's skill in creating something of such breathtaking poetic beauty; you'd have to be an idiot -- or maybe someone who gets a visceral thrill out of being a contrarian just for the hell of it -- to argue with the fact that the man can write like a son-of-a-bitch.

Well, I'll let you decide which one of the two Salon's Stephanie Zacharek is. Her review of the film adaptation of The Road -- a movie which hits theaters this weekend -- is actually not much more than an excuse for her to air what are obviously some long pent-up grievances against the book. Now of course everyone's entitled to his or her opinion and God knows I've taken plenty of shots at people higher up the cultural food chain than I am, but Zacharek's review comes off as laughably petty -- to say nothing of mildly disconnected from reality; her denigration not just of the book but of McCarthy's writing in general left my fucking jaw hanging open -- not because I think it's impossible to criticize Cormac McCarthy, but because Stephanie Zacharek calling Cormac McCarthy "gracelessly repetitive" is like the president of the Amarillo High School A.V. club calling Stanley Kubrick a "painfully tedious" filmmaker.

Salon has some really terrific writers and reporters -- Joan Walsh, Mike Madden and Glenn Greenwald immediately come to mind. Then it has the wonder twins of movie and TV criticism: Stephanie Zacharek and Heather Havrilesky, respectively. Havrilesky in particular is to me what Tom Friedman is to Matt Taibbi -- a writer so bloody awful that I can't help but read. Her regular column is sort of like -- to borrow a line from the movie Go -- The Family Circus of commentary; it's impossible to ignore because it just sits there every Sunday, waiting to suck.

Don't believe me? Try to make it through this.

As for Zacharek's review of The Road, you have to see that for yourself as well -- and make sure to pore over the comment section to see how many others feel the same way I do.

Salon: "The Road: Post-Apocalypse Now" by Stephanie Zacharek/11.25.09

"Each the Other's World Entire"

Maybe it wouldn't have floored me as absolutely as it did if I didn't have the inescapable ghost of my young daughter haunting my home and my head. Maybe it wouldn't have left me sobbing on my couch, head in hands, completely overcome with emotion, every nerve in my body seemingly stripped raw. Maybe it would've been just another book to me -- astonishingly written, but without impact -- if my ache for my child weren't so profound.

Then again, maybe not. Because regardless of whatever tenuous allusions I may draw from it to my own current situation -- specifically, the unfaltering compulsion to never leave my child's side -- there's no getting around the obvious: Cormac McCarthy's The Road is a flat-out masterpiece.

With the upcoming release of the film adaptation -- which I now know will border on blasphemy in its attempt to give big budget style, form and clarity to a work which has none of these -- I finally decided to sit down and read the book that won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2007.

And I'm glad I waited, because as I said, I'm not sure this landmark novel would've held the kind of visceral power I found in it had I not finally understood what would drive someone to want to protect his child at all costs, even in the face of absolute horror and hopelessness.

From a practical perspective, Cormac McCarthy makes me want to walk my laptop outside and ceremonially set it on fire, promising never to touch my fingers to a keyboard again. He's that good. His command of the English language, in all its delicate intricacies, is just staggering. No one other than maybe Don DeLillo, another American master, can compose an entire novel out of poetry that's at once cryptic and absolutely coherent the way McCarthy can. And make no mistake: The Road is his magnum opus. Its arc is positively Biblical. Its imagery is overwhelming. Its moral is both epic and intensely personal: that even in the face of the most epochal of human tragedies, where death and desolation are omnipresent and hope for the future is a distant memory, there is still -- as one reviewer put it so perfectly -- "the miracle of goodness."

It is, without question, the most moving book I've ever read.

At its core, The Road is the story a father's trek through the unforgiving aftermath of an unspecified apocalyptic cataclysm with his young son. That's really all that can be said about it, because I'm not sure I could properly put into words just how affecting the details of this sad journey at the literal end of the world are. Once again, McCarthy writes poetry, and he does something most authors can only dream of: Without being obtrusive, he allows readers to understand that the story is unfolding completely organically -- that what you don't quite understand you're not meant to, and there's no reason to correct what doesn't need to be corrected. The result is lovely, profound, and absolutely devastating -- possibly the most unexpected treatise on the salvational power of unconditional love from any writer in recent memory.

I've seen the trailer for the movie, which will be released next month. It may be decent, it may not -- but I can already tell what it won't be: It won't be the same story told in the book, nor will it be told in the same manner. And regardless of whether McCarthy's novel even could be properly translated to film, it seems a crime to adjust it in any way -- let alone so thoroughly.

I can't say this enough: If you haven't read The Road -- you just have to.