The Road Again

I’ve finished about half of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. It’s been on my “to read” pile for a while, but I’d put it off actually beginning it because I’d always heard that McCarthy’s writing had a Hemingway macho style to it. And then Oprah chose it as one of her reading club books, giving me yet another reason not to begin it.

But I began it the other day when Dillard’s The Mayfields seemed too slow a read for my mood of the moment and I was pleasantly surprised. The story is both exquisitely beautiful and haunting, often at the same time, and the writing is direct and clear. In many ways the mood it evokes reminds me of that captured by the biblical writer in the Akeda story, with its intertwining of love and horror.