The Road

So last night I started reading Cormac McCarthy's The Road around 10:00. I read that thing all the way through until at 3:00 am. I have never plowed through a whole book before (I am a pretty slow reader), but I could not stop and I wasn't tired and it was sickening.

So here's the deal. It is post-apocalyptic America and a father and his boy, who is about Bear's age, are struggling to survive in a burned out world full of desperate survivors and empty of food. They have one gun with two bullets, meant for suicide, should it become necessary. They are headed south towards the ocean and he is dying so he wrestles with all the questions that go along with leaving a boy in that way. They forage and wander and talk. The conversations they had and the language and personality of the boy gave me absolutely no option to picture a boy who was not Bear...which made me almost cry most of the time. A little guy, like Bear, making some hard choices and seeing terrible things, but urging his dad to do right.

What hit me hardest was the boy's absolute vision of the world as having in it only Good Guys and Bad Guys -and his constant requests for his dad to identify those they met as either. Cormac McCarthy nailed that little boys' spectrum of black or white.

It was hard to read. And good. The Road.