Review of The Road by Cormac McCarthy

The Road has received a lot of attention and won the Pulitzer. While I enjoyed seeing what all the critical acclaim was about, it was also just a great, fast-paced read. As nice as it is to read a book with interesting techniques, the bottom line is that there is no substitute for a great storyline. In review, I have comments from several angles.

Comparative Literature Studies
The Road is reminiscent of Tolkien’s Ring trilogy in that it is the story of a journey (as Chantell remarked). I wish McCarthy would have included an illustration of the map that the man and boy follow like Tolkien did. It would help outline the story course and keep the many plot incidents from blending together.

Narrative Shift
Chantell mentioned the narrative transition in the novel. The book is told from a third person point of view. Though still in third person, the perspective shifts from the man to the boy at the end of the novel. The reason behind this is that the father dies and the boy now assumes the role of the main character. It reinforces that the responsibility of survival now rests with the boy himself.

Gender Studies
Rebecca mentioned that she read this novel as part of a Men’s Studies class, and I can see how it would be very fitting. If you’ve read the Border trilogy, you’ve noticed McCarthy has always focused on male characters, much like the tough guy writers of the thirties, i.e. Hemmingway et al. In The Road, we follow a father and son entirely. It’s a very close look at the masculine psyche and the paternal instinct to protect and survive.

You can’t look at the novel from a men’s studies angle without conversely analyzing it from a women’s studies perspective. First we must question the absence of female characters. Do we write this off as McCarthy’s preference as an author, or do we critically read this as a misogynistic text? When McCarthy does bring in the mother figure, it is hard to find anything positive in her portrayal. She essentially abandons the family, taking her own life. Is McCarthy casting her as a representation of women and an attempt to reverse the traditional stereotype of mother as selfless caregiver?

At the least, this complicates the male archetype because in having to be both father and mother to the boy, the man takes on typically female-oriented roles such as cooking, bathing, and nurturing the boy. Is it possible McCarthy is saying that in the future (the novel is post-Apocalyptic), role reversals will be a norm because of the instability of the familial unit?

Religious Implications
I can’t help but read the novel as an Abraham-Isaac allegory. The man repeatedly deifies the child, which we can parallel to Isaac as the promise child. The mother is a minimal character in both the biblical story and in this novel. And the father and the weight of his decision loom at the forefront in both scenarios. Throughout The Road, the man continually struggles with the thought of needing to kill his son to save him from torture by the villains who roam the wasted Earth, “He watched the boy sleeping. Can you do it? When the time comes? Can you?” (29).

What about the man’s failure in the end to kill his son? After promising to never leave his son alone, he too abandons him like the mother. Are all humans (male and female) brought together in their failures?

Yet there is a family who adopts the boy. One criticism is that the ending could be read as McCarthy’s easy way of slapping together a quick, happy ending so we don’t leave the book utterly depressed. Yet I choose to believe it is an affirmation toward the communal ability to heal and a message that there is hope and redeeming qualities in others, even amid a world of evil.

Next on the Reading List: The Elephant Vanishes: Stories by Haruki Murakami

Deus Ex Machina, Part the Second (Now with Spoilers!)

Oops, She Did It Again
I said in the review that I’d give the writers another chance, so last week I picked up Berg’s latest novel, Dream When You’re Feeling Blue, from the library. It describes three sisters during World War II, and I loved it. Berg is a talented novelist: the dialogue, the descriptions of wartime life, the characterizations—all resonated with me. Everything in the novel pointed to Kitty, the oldest sister, marrying the man she loves—except she doesn’t.

[SPOILER ALERT—I have to gripe about this, and it doesn’t make sense if I don’t tell the ending. Sorry; at least I’m not ruining Harry Potter for you. You know I wouldn’t do that, right?]

For three days the ending bugged me. I had to admit Berg hadn’t used a bolt out of the blue (there are hints before the end that Kitty and her man might not want the same things) but I did find it hard to believe that a guy who loved her would give her up so easily when she (apparently: the breakup is not depicted) tells him they need to go their separate ways. He marries her sister (her sister! Dude, you don’t just DO that) who does want a cozy domestic life, who in fact needs it to survive, and Kitty never begrudges them. In fact, she’s planned the whole thing—she sacrifices her love for him and never admits she still loves him, even sixty years later.

Maybe that’s the part I found hard to swallow. Human beings aren’t willing to give up a chance for true love that easily. At least that’s what this romantic reader wants to believe.

Deus Ex Machina (Part the First)

Last year (goodness, was it really that long ago?) I wrote a review for 90&9 in which I complained about how the books I was reviewing ended. Both books left me feeling cheated. I won’t spoil the endings in case you want to read them, but suffice it to say that the Elizabeth Berg novel was the worst offender, with the solution to the family’s intractable financial problem arriving out of a shiny Cadillac (hint: think the King of Rock ‘n’ Roll).

Now, I have nothing against Elvis, but in this book he served as a deus ex machina, which literally means “god from the machine.” It refers to the practice, in ancient Greek tragedies, of lowering an actor playing a god onto the stage in a crane (the “machine”) to solve all the mortals’ difficult problems. According to Wikipedia, deus ex machina is used “to describe an unexpected, artificial, or improbable character, device, or event introduced suddenly in a work of fiction or drama to resolve a situation or untangle a plot (e.g., having the protagonist wake up and realize it was all a dream, or an angel suddenly appear to solve all the plot problems of a story that won't resolve itself by the characters). The phrase has been extended to refer to any resolution to a story which does not pay due regard to the story's internal logic and is so unlikely it challenges suspension of disbelief; allowing the author to conclude the story with an unlikely, though more palatable, ending.”

No Fair!
It drives me crazy when authors do this. It makes me want to throw the book at the wall (okay, I confess—sometimes I do throw it).

Why? Because it’s taking the easy way out. You as an author “write yourself in a corner” and then think up a way to make it all resolve in a way it NEVER would in reality. It’s an unearned ending. The “it was all a dream” ending has become infamous in cheesy TV shows and will get you mocked in a writing workshop like no other mistake, but there are other ways to use the deus ex machina that might get you published, but will earn you the disgust from exacting readers. I might not like the ending of your book—for example, I may wish it ended more happily, a common issue I have with a lot of bleak contemporary fiction—but if the ending seems to fulfill the entire book’s promise, then I don’t feel betrayed. There’s nothing more satisfying than a whodunit that ends up surprising us and then neatly tying up the ends of the story, but if the author can’t do that without violating what came before, then maybe he or she should go back and read some Shakespeare.

Part the Second coming up later today.

It’s Gotta Be The Atheists!

We can’t whine that the mainstream publishing industry is unreceptive, even hostile, to literature that has Christian characters, themes, and/or metaphors. There’s just too much evidence to the contrary. (And no, I’m not talking about Christian book publishers that, with few exceptions, are by Christians to Christians, and that only Christians know exist.)

Major awards and publicity have been given to overtly Christian literature in the last decade. To name just a few:

• Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead, a book about an aging Calvinist minister writing to his young son (how’s that for an exciting concept?), won the Pulitzer Prize in 2005.
• Kent Haruf’s Plainsong was fiction finalist for the National Book Award in 1999.
• Leif Enger’s Peace Like a River (2001) was a Book of the Month choice and featured in an NPR book club discussion.
• Brett Lott’s Jewel (1991) was an Oprah choice in 1999.
• Still one of the most prestigious forums for short fiction, The Atlantic Monthly’s annual Fiction Issue (on newsstands now) features three (of six) short stories that involve religious faith. Last year, there was one—Tim Gautreaux’s “The Safe.”

True, it’s not an overabundance of riches, though once you start including highly-regarded authors who include Christians or characters struggling with God in their works, the list noticeably inflates.

Shooting The Canon

This doesn’t include the Western Canon, where two of the all-time best were Christians:

• Many consider Dante’s Divine Comedy to be a greater poetic accomplishment than anything Shakespeare created.
• Leo Tolstoy created two fascinating prose classics—War and Peace, Anna Karenina—that are too often known for their length instead of their brilliance. He was also a master of short stories (“Master and Man”) and novellas (The Death of Ivan Illych).

Then there’s these Christian slackers:

• Flannery O’Conner’s short stories (“Parker’s Back,” “Revelation,” “A Good Man is Hard to Find”) were powerful enough to power her into the canon.
• Graham Greene (The End of the Affair, The Power and the Glory, The Heart of the Matter) is said to have been short-listed for the Nobel Prize for literature.
• C.S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia are undisputed children’s favorites.
• Fyodor Dostoyevsky is still proclaimed the most psychologically astute novelist who has ever written, penning Crime and Punishment, Notes from the Underground, and The Brothers Karamazov.

Defining their Christianity is not my intent. Showcasing their unflinching portrayal of Christianity, its themes and characters, is.
The Truth We Ignore?
Publishing isn’t nearly as biased against Christian works as it is against inferior works, (though it sometimes seems too eager to publish the inferior). Perhaps the problem isn’t hostile atheists, but Apostolics unwilling to bleed on the page for their calling. Perhaps we’d rather kind of give it a go from the safety of our churches rather than dive into the requirements publishing today demands.

Like Christian musical artists unwilling to move to Nashville to risk their lucky break, we may find ourselves not attending writing conferences (where agents and publishers examine manuscripts), or taking writing courses with experienced professionals (that costs money!), or going the extra mile for our calling, then wonder why we can’t get connected to major publishers. Everything takes work.

Most of the titles mentioned are the current and classic standards of literary excellence. If we’re to continue this tradition we must read them, study them, love them, and then seek to build upon them..

I think we can do it. I know we will do it. Wanna be first?

Appendix A

Best Author Interview of the Week:

The Special Fiction Issue of the Atlantic Monthly (on newsstands now) has a long essay / analysis on the best Creative Writing programs in the United States. Check out this interview with essayist Edward J. Delaney as he discusses the country's best graduate writing programs and how to compare them. Then go buy the mag.

Currently Reading: What Got You Here Won’t Get You There by Marshall Goldsmith & Mark Reiter, as well as The Art of Bone by Jeff Smith (Dark Horse Press) with the prodigy. If you’re unfamiliar with the Bone graphic novel series, and have a child under 12 (or 15?), then it’s time you discovered them.

It’s about the three Bone cousins (the greedy one, the stupid one, and the noble one) who fall into a mysterious valley full of magic, swords, betrayal and…rat creatures. Not to be missed. I read them through with my kid once and now he can’t stop reading them on his own.

And I thank you for your kind attention.

Metablognition

Technology and Writing
The ubiquitous writing form known as blogging has dominated the Internet since . . . well, since I’ve been familiar with the Internet. Think of any topic on earth, and there is sure to be a blog dedicated to it. Some have complained that technology has contributed to the decadence of the writing art, and in some ways I agree. The popularity of electronic communication has taken the formal wrapping completely off of what is now considered acceptable writing for communicative purposes—no one would bat an eye at the receipt of a text message like this: u wanna mt @ strbks @ 8 2nite? It’s the microwave popcorn of writing. Neither is it uncommon to see emails, even in more formal settings like the workplace, without a professional gloss. Technology has de-formalized writing for sure, and blogs are not exempt.

The Revolution Will Not Be . . . Posted?
Publishing writing used to be a long, drawn out process that involved quality ideas, painstaking revision, the need for approval and support from many others, and, simply, a whole heap of time and money. But with the advent of Blogger and others, there was a publishing revolution. Quality ideas? Painstaking revision and proofreading? Need of approval and financial support? Meh. Now anybody’s ideas could be literally spread to the world for free in very little time with the simple click of the “Publish” button. Now anybody can technically be a published writer. One short troll through the bloggery of cyberspace would show you that this is not altogether a great thing. But it is not altogether a bad deal either.

Harnessing the Power of Blog
As a blogger, one great thing I have found about the power of blogging is its connectivity element. My personal blog is just that, a personal blog. I don't pretend to have any lofty aspirations for it—its primary purpose is as a creative outlet. But it was simply amazing to me how quickly and easily I connected with people of like mind and shared experience with whom I simply would never had connected had it not been for the blog.

But beyond the personal benefits of blogging, I’ve been amazed to see how it has radically impacted rock solid institutions in our world, namely politics. It is not uncommon at all to read about well-written and well-organized political blogs in newspapers and popular news magazines. I’ve always been intrigued by the mobilizing power some of them seem to wield.

What if A/Ps were to focus on producing well-written and well-organized blogs like those in political spheres have? Could we harness the power of blog to radically impact our world? I believe we may have already begun.

(Still) Currently Reading: Never Eat Alone by Kevin Ferrazzi and bunches of Latin American Modernist poetry

Inspiration: The Shovel of God

I take inspiration wherever I get it. Today, my inspiration flows from an article … no, really just a single line I read yesterday in an article.

During my morning ritual of drinking coffee and telling my Abbey she’s the absolute best dog in the whole world, (she waits at the fireplace each morning with a waggy tail for this reminder) I was reading an article in Relevant magazine. It was a conversation with Anne Lamott, who is a very good writer and essayist about some of the inconvenient truths of life and Christianity. Anne loves dogs too.

The article was decent, with some rehashing of a lot of the stuff in her books. But one particular line she said grabbed me. It forced me to re-read it, mouthing each word quietly. Then it made me read it aloud to my wife, Ellen, who was checking her email in the chair next to me. As usual, Ellen made listening noises (something that married couples tend to do for each other). But the line compelled me to read it again … louder … this time getting her attention. When I finished, we both sat there, quietly, in stupid awe. And then (as only older married couples and close friends can do) we both made the hmmph grunting sound at the same time.

We looked at each other, and each knew what the other was thinking.

This one line was provoking us to change, to do something we’d felt we should do for years.

This one line held our attention all day.


Words can awake and exhume the dead

It’s strange how one sentence can challenge and inspire a person to change their life … or their outlook on life. One particular line spoken in a movie or in a song or poem can lift us up and give us wings to rise above the messes we’re in, or they can break us down and make us face our deepest fears. And when it happens, it usually re-awakens something inside us that fell asleep. It re-ignites some former passion that was once alive in us, but had been snuffed long ago out by circumstances. It exhumes something in us that had been buried by the dominoes in life that tend to fall on us.

Words have the ability to bring thoughts to us at our deepest level. Like shovels, they rudely dig through the daily junk of our lives deep into our being and inspire us at our very core. And when we pay attention to the trajectory of what inspires us at this depth, we see that in the grand scheme of life, we are continually being drawn into a certain direction. When we pay close attention to what re-ignites us and awakens us and inspires us, we recognize a particular theme developing in our life … some connection of deep desires strung together by a certain purpose.

Some people call it finding God’s will. I’d rather call it … finding God’s inspiration.

And it happens for all of us in different ways. There is something powerful about words, whether spoken, written, or sung. Different venues affect us each differently. Whether they rhyme or whether they are printed in a beautiful way. They hold the mysterious ability to uncover implanted desires in our heart and soul and mind … things that God placed within us and wants us to discover. Dreams, hopes, direction, etc.. And on the other hand, they also tend to uncover some harmful things in us that God wants us to deal with. Anxieties, fears, addictions, etc.


Ready to be unburied?

They say (the anonymous plural, “they”, whoever that is?) that we are all just 3 questions away from breaking down. And if you’ve ever spoken with a therapist who knows how to read people, you know what “they” are talking about. We are all on the edge of insanity. We are all oppressed to some extent by our fears. In one way or another, we are all screwed up so bad we are ashamed when others realize it. It is the price we pay for living in a fallen world. On the flipside of that though, I think that we’re also just one line away from being inspired. That is the grace of God in action. That is the power of words.

So read on.

Listen to another verse.

Take in one more line of a poem.

Struggle onward to that bit of inspiration.

Uncover where God is leading you … who he is revealing you can be.



Lazarus Come Forth
Simply from a simple line

Up from the grave I rise
From ashes of my demise, again
~William Sojourner


Toby Stevens


www.thejourneyanchorage.org

OOPS!

I keep forgetting...

Currently reading: Don Quixote by Miguel Cervantes (hey! you can't say I'm crazy until you read this!)--in a new translation which I infinitely enjoy and inspired by Chantell
A Tale of Three Kings by Gene Edwards (fabulous, fabulous book--hmmm, also about a mad man...)

About to read: The Book Thief by Markus Zusak (recommended to me by Ann Ahrens--I can't wait to start reading it!!)

Books: the last refuge of the deranged

Madness is all in the mind
Acts 26:24-25: Festus launches the accusation that "Much learning is driving you mad." To which Paul casually replies, "I am not mad,...but speak the words of truth and reason." Assuredly Paul's words sounded as if they were full of truth and reason to himself; however, in Festus' ears they sounded like pure crazytown. It is no different than when Don Quixote valiently launches into one of his flowery speeches of chivalry to a goatherd or a Basque. He is absurdly funny (until he becomes pitiable) in his lunacy. Yet, he too would say that he speaks the words of "truth and reason." How do we know who has truly been driven mad by too much reading?

Appeal to a text
For both Paul and Don Quixote there is a powerful camaraderie in the shared reading of the text. In the above passage from Acts, Paul continues his assertion of truth and reason by appealing to King Agrippa's familiarity with a text when he closes with the rhetorical question, "King Agrippa, do you believe the prophets?" In other words, the text of the prophets is one with which Festus has no familiarity. His lack of familiarity with the text causes him to dismiss speech he cannot relate to or understand as the ravings of a madman. Similarly, those with whom Don Quixote interacts are limited by their understanding and reading of books of chivalry. Those with no referent see only the most absurd.

First of two queries
Does extensive reading thereby limit our ability to relate with those around us? I think I most often hear that reading broadens our understanding and extends our world-view; however, the love of a book is rooted in that book's ability to somehow communicate to the very personal and individualistic you. The book has to "get" you or "express" you or somehow be saying something you wanted to say even if all you wanted to say was "I need to escape sometimes" or "There is a dark world that intrigues me." Books, by nature, seem to foster companionship. I have yet to meet a person who says, "I loved this book so much, I don't want to share it with anyone else. I wish I was the only person in the world who read this." Is this why we avid readers so ardently advocate for others to pick up the books we love? Is it really a selfish impulse that says I want to relate to you...I want you to understand me...I don't want to be crazy?

Query the second
As people whose faith and identity is rooted in a text, do we a) avoid reading it because the very reading of it makes us even more distinctive than our, oh, um, well dress? and/or b.) have a deep-seated need to get others reading it so that we can have some commonality of understanding?