The Frame

by Cormac McCarthy

One of my best friends is doing her dissertation on McCarthy, and I’ve been promising her for a year that I’d read something by him. I debated making it No Country for Old Men on account of the Coen brothers film version coming out, like, this week, but my friend warned me that NCFOM is probably McCarthy’s worst book and that I should read The Road instead. So I did. And I sort of have two reactions. First, wow is this different than anything else I’ve read lately (which has been mostly Southern fiction with lush writing and lots of physical detail), and second, wow is this good. A man and his son (known only in the book as “the man” and “the boy”) walk the road in a postapocalyptic future trying to get to somewhere, anywhere, that isn’t completely burned up and deserted–deserted except for the gangs of cannibalistic killers who are essentially the only survivors still remaining. Really, not much happens in the novel besides a few times when their agonizing journey is punctuated by a tense conflict with dangerous men or by a fortuitous discovery of food that hasn’t already been scavenged. Yet the atmosphere is so wonderfully realized and the two characters so well-drawn that you can’t stop reading their story, their thoughts, their interactions with each other. The writing is very spare, very sparse. Lots of sentence fragments. Very effective. It’s both heartbreaking and hopeful; it sounds as though it would be depressing, and yet it isn’t. I did think the end was a bit abrupt and implausible, but that’s two pages out of a couple of hundred, so I don’t feel like complaining about it too much.
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