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The Road -- May 2007 Book Pick |
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 In a return to fiction, the Reader's Ink
Book Club has chosen Cormac McCarthy's novel, The Road, as their
pick-of-the-month for May 2007. The Road's plot is an interesting genre of fiction known as a robinsonade, which is defined as
works describing an individual's or a small group's survival without the aid of
civilization, as on a deserted island.
Cormac McCarthy won the National Book Award for his novel
All The Pretty Horses, which is the first book in McCarthy's
Border Trilogy. All The Pretty Horses was also made into a movie directed by Billy Bob Thorton. Another novel by McCarthy, No Country for Old Men is also being released as a
movie. No Country for Old Men is being directed by the Coen Brothers. Currently in production, it is set to be released some time in august.
Publisher Weekly Review:
Starred Review. 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. 250,000 announced first printing; BOMC
main selection.(Oct.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division
of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
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Last Updated ( Friday, 11 May 2007 )
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