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.
Superior

Hands down my favorite book of the semester so far, and likely to remain so. I can’t decide if I’m just incredibly lucky that I picked this one to write about for my short paper, or if I like it so much at least partially because writing about it made me read it more carefully and work harder to understand it than I did for any of the other books. Possibly some of both, but I think it would’ve been my favorite anyway. Cornelia is a comfortably well-off white woman in the South in 1969; Julia, better known as Tweet, is her black housekeeper. The two women share a kitchen-based relationship characterized by Tweet telling stories from her past and Cornelia pretending to listen (she’s mostly deaf, which becomes one of many metaphors for the way she tunes out the problems and lives of other people). Various traumatic incidents happen which force Cornelia out of her shell. I want to tell more, but I won’t, because it’ll turn into an essay, and nobody reading this site wants that. The best thing about it, though, for me, is the narratorial voice, which is intrusive, tongue-in-cheek, sometimes self-contradictory, and generally complicates everything in the book. I pretty much love it when books are self-aware and highlight their own constructedness, and Douglas does a stupendous job with that. I want to read everything she wrote.
Superior

Git yer disfunctional families, right here. The mother is controlling, the father leaves when the kids are little, the oldest son is mean and brusque, the daughter is a commitmentphobe, and the younger son is just a little slow (and actually, their interpersonal relationships are even worse than that suggests). Lots of things happen, as we follow the family from the mother’s marriage on through her death as an old woman, and a lot of it is quite good. I mean, the things that happen are usually bad, but the book is good. I’d never read Anne Tyler before, and I’m not sure I’ll jump right out and read something else of hers, but I enjoyed reading this as much as any of the other Southern Lit books up to this point. The third-person narrator moves back and forth between the different characters points of view, which makes them much more complex than they initially appear.
Above Average

Yes, I read this in anticipation of the upcoming film version. I was actually going to wait until after I’d seen the film, but a friend warned me that a major part of the book is the way it’s told, and knowing the plot beforehand would ruin some of that. Folks, SHE WAS RIGHT. This is quite probably the best book I’ve read all year. I didn’t really know anything about the story before I started reading it, and I think I enjoyed it all the more. But for those who always ask “what’s it about,” here’s what it’s about. There’s Cecilia, the daughter of a wealthy landowner in 1930s Britain. And Robby, the gardener’s son who has grown up almost as part of the family. In defiance of the fading class structure, they realize they’re in love. And then there’s Briony, Cecilia’s thirteen-year-old sister, who writes stories and sees Cecilia and Robby when she shouldn’t have. And there’s World War II. And the Blitz. And a focus on characterization and atmosphere that overshadows even these horrific world events. And everything, characters, plot, tone, structure–everything is perfect. I want to read it again for the first time right now.
Superior

originally written 3/28/06