I recently read the same book as Ann just wrote about—Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. I really liked it on many levels. It was exquisitely written, with poetic prose that did not get in the way of the story. That’s a very rare thing. While reading it, I was always engaged in the story, yet the language was beautiful throughout. I also really liked that the story was bare. The characters bounced from incident to incident, without subplots and without a host of minor characters or a sense of carefully crafted development. There was no sense of inevitability about it. It felt like anything might happen to the characters, and that the novel would have been equally good no matter the particular events that unfolded. It was how the characters lived in the world McCarthy created for them, rather than the events themselves.

This novel was, to my reading anyway, a well executed thought experiment in the way my philosophy professors used to talk of such things. Imagine the world gone hopelessly wrong—a world where life truly is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” Now consider what your view of life would be. What gives life its value for us? This is what the novel was about. And I agree with McCarthy’s conclusion. I suppose we all would agree with him in the abstract, but minds change when reality hits.

The world McCarthy creates evoked for me at some points the same sort of feeling I had when watching the recent movie “28 Weeks Later”—a momentary but powerful sense that I wouldn’t want to be alive if I had to live in such conditions. In both the movie and the novel, life for the characters has been reduced to bare survival. All of life’s joys, pleasures, and goodness are gone. McCarthy’s novel seems to argue that life stripped of goodness is not worth living -- that we can loose much and still find purpose in living, but that there are limits beyond which life isn’t worth it. I certainly agree. There’s a kernel of insight here that I feel the need to tease out and to clearly articulate, but I think it’s probably just bullshit on my part—always trying to reduce everything to philosophical principles. But still … hehe … still, I feel like often there’s a dichotomy of beliefs or values out there—those people who feel that there’s something about life that is sacred and of inherent worth. I don’t believe that. And then there are those who think life’s value lies somehow in how it is lived. If you loose all of the things that make life good—human dignity, the joys of everyday existence in the world, whatever—then there’s no particular value in life. And it’s not worth living. I myself don’t feel like I must live at all costs. There’s nothing special about my life. And I like how McCarthy’s book challenges us to think about how we’d react to a fundamental disintegration of our lives. For me, I think it comes down to the fact that I simply don’t have a tenacious spirit in the face of severe adversity. If I can’t have my sunny Saturday mornings looking out at the garden with a cup of strong coffee in hand, I don’t want to go on!

As an aside, Ann had a few quibbles with the book. I don’t share those. She makes a very good point that the narrative slide by unnoticed. She’s absolutely right, and it’s part of what makes the book so compelling. My only quibble is that in a few spots it seemed like the narrative poked through—a jarring first-person “I” when the reader doesn’t expect it. It seems like McCarthy should fix those few occurrences (listen to me giving McCarthy advice!), and he’d have a near perfect novel.