The “Perfect” Modern Novel - The Road (2006) Part 1

Fall literature spoils on the bloated wooden boards. You recognise the shape of names--fiction you once knew and loved--now reduced to damp, cloggy promises that threaten your balance. The world has emptied out, yet these recollections stick to the sky, unbidden.

This week the gang cracks into Cormac McCarthy's seminal classic, The Road (2006) and try to unpick the behemoth that is the novel.

Glossary: https://zeroindent.com/apocalypse/

J.M. Anderson: it really hit me hard. Especially run-on sentences and incomplete sentences and stuff. I'd have to go back, I don't what this is this talking about, you know? So that really took me out of it at the at the beginning. Just the the way that it's written.

D.C. McNeill: Yeah. Well, that that's kind of my point about like um McCarthy, you know, in that introduction, the first thing they say is like McCarthy writes like no one and no one else writes like McCarthy. And that's for a really good reason. Like these are hard books. You know, it's like when you sit down to read a Gene Wolf novel and you have to promise yourself that you won't stop and look up words and instead sort of dig around for context clues or what a particular section might mean or like might imply.

it's why I thought this would be really good for this show because there are some scenes in this book. Well, I don't know what happened, y'all. Like, just truly, there's some scenes in this where I'm like, I don't know... I know chronologically what is being told to me, but I don't know what it means.

I think there's this this passage from Vereen M. Bell that nails exactly what J.M. is talking about with like the pros being being difficult and don't worry this we will read a lot of this book because I think it's really illustrative to do that. But this this is a really good summation. This is Vereen M. Bell writing about the the kind of um the exact thing J.M. is pointing out:

"There is a powerful pressure of meaning in McCarthy's novels, but the experience of significance does not translate into communicable abstractions of significance. In McCarthy's world, existence seems both to precede and preclude essence, and it paradoxically derives its importance from this fact alone. The vivid faciticity of his novels consumes conventional formulae as a black hole consumes light. He is Walker Percy turned inside out--intuitive, unideological, oblivious to teological fashions, indifferent if not hostile to the social order, wholly absorbed in the strange heterocosm of his own making."

D.C. McNeill: There's one thing I want to highlight and then we can really get stuck in. What I've just tried to illustrate there is how much people have written and talked about this book and McCarthy as an author um for this exact reason, right? People like me are saying "This might be the best book ever written." And then you pick it up and read it and you're like, "This is really hard to read and I'm not sure if I'm enjoying the art of reading this thing that's in front of me." And both are true.

J.M. Anderson: "The one caveat that I did not let myself form a solid opinion yet is that I do not know if this book is supposed to be written by the kid who doesn't know English and doesn't know how to write aside from the little tiny bits that he was taught before dad probably dies. So the broken grammar is part of the diegesis maybe. So I was giving it a grain of salt, part of me was like just stick with it. Maybe this was done on purpose and then the other part of me was like nah.

D.C. McNeill: So I mean it's done on purpose but it's not like a it's not going to cash out in a-- "and here is the purpose", right?

Patrick Lovern: For me actually – because I some similar experiences at some points, you know had to read a paragraph went what the fuck did I just read and then I had to go back and read it twice more but strangely enough like the lack of grammar and syntax actually made it quicker to read for me, you know it's truly a conversion of a stream of consciousness from author to reader. I feel like I was able to blaze through it because the lack of grammar. But also I have been pretty intensely reading like the last year like very difficult things.

Yeah it was... I felt like it was way more effective that way because I feel like I know in a normal book like you're forced to cohhere to the structure of proper grammar and stuff like that, and you're always stopping and starting. Whereas this one it just flowed through me kind of thing, and it was yeah all the more better for it I think.