#6: The Road by Cormac McCarthy

Best of the Millennium
September 23, 2009 | 2 books mentioned 12 2 min read

Related Books:

coverThere are, in Cormac McCarthy’s impossibly affecting novels, details that simultaneously open up his dismal universe and draw in the reader. In Blood Meridian, it’s the Apache wearing the wedding dress. In All the Pretty Horses, it’s the bullet hole in the wallet. In No Country for Old Men, the glass of milk, still sweating on the coffee table. In The Road, it’s the can of Coke, pulled from the guts of the vending machine. No, it’s that the soda has somehow stayed carbonated after the cataclysm. No, it’s that the father lets his son drink the whole thing. Surely this is one of the most humane and deeply inhabited moments not just in fiction from this millennium, but in all of literature.

And yet the book is rife with such moments, replete with such deep empathy for the father and son that some of the bleakest passages will turn your stomach as only love can. This is perhaps the most shocking aspect of The Road: what remains, what you remember years after you’ve read the book, is the beauty, the compassion, the relentlessness of possibility that burns on the colorless horizon. You understand—much in the way that you first understand poetry, through feeling and syntax and imagery rather than logic—that no matter how desolate the story, it is made bearable through language. There is, the novel asserts, something like triumph in the very telling of a tale, a commitment to the act of witness, and to receive a story is to exalt the imagination, to participate in the process of faith, to accept deliverance. Why else, then, would the father in the novel—when his son is too scared to sleep, when the noise of the world dying its cold death keeps him awake—comfort the boy with narrative? They’ve been stripped of everything except voice, but even on the darkest path words can retain their meaning, their promise of light that will lead lost travelers home.

Read an excerpt from The Road.
More Best Fiction of the Millennium (So Far)
Best of the Millennium, Pros Versus Readers

is the author of Corpus Christi: Stories and the editor of Naming the World: And Other Exercises for the Creative Writer, both from Random House. Currently, he is the Director of Creative Writing at Harvard University and can be reached on the web at www.bretanthonyjohnston.com.

● ● ●
● ●
Best of the Millennium

#5: Pastoralia by George Saunders

Best of the Millennium
September 24, 2009 | 2 books mentioned 6 2 min read

I concluded my voyage through Liberal Arts in May 2000—a typical fairly useless poised-to-succeed-and-doomed-to-fail twentysomething of a hazy new millennium, and a less typical city-sluck Irangelite-turned-Brooklynite with no concept of the country I’d lived in for nearly two decades—when George Saunders’ second collection came out. I was of course was many universes and still many years removed—it took me a few years to discover him—from the five stories plus title novella of Pastoralia. But I was already lovedrunk on American stylists and dark humorists and determined to only follow writers who turned my world upside down—still, I don’t think I had ever read anyone as revolutionary as Saunders. I certainly didn’t know of a writer with a world as fully realized as his, that America that I wholly dreaded and yet came to grasp more tenderly after going through Pastoralia’s psyche-of-below-average-to-average-America rollercoaster ride.

Immediately I fell in love. First reason: the humor that was earth-shattering; best reason: the humanity that was something else.

Saunders is in many ways our most contemporary writer, the voice of the Boomers/Gen X-ers/Millenials world we currently inhabit, the scribe of Saracuda-crazed Jerry-Springerian Red America of the Eighties/Nineties/Aughties. But it’s not just the scenarios but the sentences—especially the seamless coexistence of high and low that only reminds us their segregation in art is actually what’s shocking—that in themselves tell me Saunders isn’t simply one of our best writers, but one of our best humans. Even in the lowest and lowliest Saunderian universe—”Winky’s” self help seminar, perhaps, to combat those “crapping in your oatmeal”—there is the infusion of an entirely genuine authorial affection. His America, our America, is of course horrible but without the horror.

Is he funny? Is he wacky? Saunders is mostly observant. The average man in Pastoralia works as a caveman at a theme park (“Pastoralia”) or male stripper at an aviation-themed-strip club (“Sea Oak”) to make ends meet. Does life look like this? Actually in our America of Reality™ and color-coded neverending War(s?) on Terror, of Parables of Joe Plumber and Tales of Tito The What-Did-He-Do-Again, I’d say we’re more there than we might wish… and maybe closer than Saunders even guessed while writing Pastoralia just before the end of a decade and millennium, and the beginning of a rather Unbrave New World.

Read an excerpt from Pastoralia.
The Millions review of Pastoralia
George Saunders Year in Reading
More Best Fiction of the Millennium (So Far)
Best of the Millennium, Pros Versus Readers

Best of the Millennium
| 2 books mentioned 6 2 min read
● ●

12 comments:

  1. What a beautiful review! This book has received accolades everywhere, but this is up there with the most poetic I’ve read.

  2. I had a rant about McCarthy’s violent sentimentality half-prepared, except you people put Sebald in your top ten, so you’re off the hook.

  3. This review makes me want to go purchase the book at this very moment and do nothing else but read this book till I’ve absorbed it completely.

  4. Do it Derrick, you’ll have it read in a few hours and won’t regret it.

    Bradluen, I’d like to hear your rant about McCarthy’s violent sentimentality, out of interest.

  5. Bradluen, I’m not sure what you mean by “violent sentimentality,” but you’ve given me the courage to say, very quietly, that i find the rapture over The Road sort of puzzling. I enjoyed the book, but I enjoyed it because it was willy-inducing and…gruesome, I guess. And it was sort of default-enjoyable because it was post-apocalyptic. Derivative is a strong word, but it seems to me that people act like no one ever wrote a story along these lines.

    My two cents.

  6. I was very disappointed by this book.
    Maybe its interest wanes if someone has read a lot of science fiction.
    The book is quite touching but I found it also not very imaginative and very repetitive and Providence’s recurrent role in the story is at best really upsetting. (I’m starving…oh some apples. I’m cold.. oh a blanket. A flaregun… oh some bad guys). The plot completely bored me.
    The writing is perfect though.

    I much much much preferred ‘All the pretty horses’.

  7. Please, please, please. What father wouldn’t let his son drink all the coke (even the LAST one) any where, any time, any place? What on earth is so special about that?
    The “colorless horizon” burns with…colorless horizon. This book is a travesty of the story telling art. It shows what a Big Name author can get away with.

  8. Wow, why isn’t 1984 on this list, Big Brother? Censorship is quite passe on the internet, or so I thought, but when you critcisize the critic they get their feelings hurt. Here, again, is the worst line of criticism I’ve ever read:

    “In The Road, it’s the can of Coke, pulled from the guts of the vending machine. No, it’s that the soda has somehow stayed carbonated after the cataclysm. No, it’s that the father lets his son drink the whole thing. Surely this is one of the most humane and deeply inhabited moments not just in fiction from this millennium, but in all of literature.”

    The “guts of a vending machine?” A father letting “his son drink the whole” coke is “surely one of the most humane and deeply inhabited moments…in all of literature?” This is insane and asnine.

  9. Complete horror with the darkest world I have ever seen. The father/son relationship a most profound story to such a backdrop. Excellent read.

  10. this book bored me all the way till the end. i can’t see why it got all the good reviews. it is writing well but so are hundreds of other books that don’t get anyware near these lists.
    this book only got ware it got because it made the opra book club.i don’t think we would have even noticed it if it didn’t

  11. I only made it about a third of the way through this book. I found the son to be a flimsily written foil for an author who wanted someone to speak words of innocence for the father to brood over. In a novel that is entirely about two people in a dying world, I really need both characters to be real. This novel failed that. There must be something about the father’s brooding that struck a chord with people, but it didn’t work for me.

Add Your Comment:

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Best of the Millennium

#14: Atonement by Ian McEwan

Best of the Millennium
September 22, 2009 | 2 books mentioned 1

Months before Ian McEwan’s Atonement was published in the U.S., the galley was being passed from bookseller to bookseller at Book Soup, where I worked at the time. My usually jaded coworkers were effusive, and by the time they had passed the book on to me, my interest was piqued.

Atonement introduced me to McEwan, one of the leading literary lights of the last 25 years, a prolific and sometimes controversial novelist. It proved to be quite an introduction. Atonement is told in three parts, nestling the mannered charms of an English country house up against an arresting tale of Britain at war, and it has an ending that turns an admittedly accomplished but conventional novel into a gut-punch of a book that toys with the idea of the reliable narrator and gets one thinking about the ethics of story-telling and the power that a writer has to bend history to his will.

McEwan was a Booker winner in 1998 for Amsterdam, but it was Atonement that cemented him as that rare thing, the literary superstar.

Read an Excerpt from Atonement.
More Best Fiction of the Millennium (So Far)
Best of the Millennium, Pros Versus Readers

Best of the Millennium
| 2 books mentioned 1
● ●
● ● ●
Best of the Millennium Notable Articles

Best of the Millennium, Pros Versus Readers

Best of the Millennium Notable Articles
September 25, 2009 | 2 books mentioned 85 3 min read

One thing I know after working on The Millions for all these years is that the site has some incredibly knowledgeable and avid readers, the sort of book people I loved working with back in my bookstore days and who are the lifeblood of literary culture. And so, even as we were polling our distinguished panel of writers, editors, and critics, we wondered, what do Millions readers think? We polled The Millions Facebook group to find out.

The list our readers came up with was very interesting, and deviated in noticeable ways from that of the Pros. Before I get into the details. Have a look at the two lists below (Links in our panel list go to the writeups we published throughout the week.  Links in our reader list go to Amazon):

Panel

Readers

1
The Corrections
by Jonathan Franzen

1
The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
by Junot Díaz

2
The Known World
by Edward P. Jones

2
2666
by Roberto Bolaño

3
Cloud Atlas
by David Mitchell

3
Middlesex
by Jeffrey Eugenides

4
2666
by Roberto Bolaño

4
Cloud Atlas
by David Mitchell

5
Pastoralia
by George Saunders

5
The Road
by Cormac McCarthy

6
The Road
by Cormac McCarthy

6
Atonement
by Ian McEwan

7
Austerlitz
by W.G. Sebald

7
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
by Michael Chabon

8
Out Stealing Horses
by Per Petterson

8
The Corrections
by Jonathan Franzen

9
Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage
by Alice Munro

9
Gilead
by Marilynne Robinson

10
Never Let Me Go
by Kazuo Ishiguro

10
White Teeth
by Zadie Smith

11
The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
by Junot Díaz

11
Kafka on the Shore
by Haruki Murakami

12
Twilight of the Superheroes
by Deborah Eisenberg

12
The Kite Runner
by Khaled Hosseini

13
Mortals
by Norman Rush

13
Never Let Me Go
by Kazuo Ishiguro

14
Atonement
by Ian McEwan

14
Austerlitz
by W.G. Sebald

15
Varieties of Disturbance by Lydia Davis

15
Empire Falls
by Richard Russo

16
Middlesex
by Jeffrey Eugenides

16
Runaway
by Alice Munro

17
The Fortress of Solitude
by Jonathan Lethem

17
The Master
by Colm Tóibín

18
Stranger Things Happen
by Kelly Link

18
Half of a Yellow Sun
by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

19
American Genius, A Comedy
by Lynne Tillman

19
Unaccustomed Earth **
by Jhumpa Lahiri

20
Gilead
by Marilynne Robinson

20
Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell
by Susanna Clarke
    

While everyone seems to agree that The Corrections is a great book (it was the panel winner by a landslide), Millions readers put seven books ahead of it, and anointed Oscar Wao the top book of the decade.  Our readers have always loved Oscar, so that wasn’t a huge surprise, but it was also interesting to see that the readers had a high opinion of  Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, rectifying probably the biggest snub on our panel list, (along with White Teeth).  But then, the readers snubbed The Known World, so who knows.

With a massive field of potential books, snubs were inevitable. Left off both lists were both of Jonathan Safran Foer’s novels, David Foster Wallace’s Oblivion (his only fiction of the decade), and Denis Johnson’s much praised Tree of Smoke. Voters were also dying to include Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives. It was ineligible because it was published in Spanish in 1998, but it makes one wonder, what books will seem like shoo-ins for this type of exercise 10 or 11 years from now but are completely under the radar (or still untranslated) today?

Moving back to the books that did make the list, I also loved that the readers included Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, a book that I’ve been hearing about from our readers for years, and Half of a Yellow Sun, a book that’s always had a lot of support in the online literary community.  Also intriguing is the appearance of mega-best seller The Kite Runner.

Finally, if we try to look for a consensus among the two lists, several titles appear on both, but the two with the most support across the entire spectrum of respondents are 2666 and Cloud Atlas, which, if you had to pick just two books to define the literary decade now coming to an end, would make for very interesting selections indeed.

We’ll be publishing follow-up pieces in our Millennium series over the coming weeks, so look for those. I also wanted to thank our panel and Millions readers for taking the time to participate in the series. If you enjoyed the series and value the coverage that The Millions provides, please consider supporting the site.

Best of the Millennium Notable Articles
| 2 books mentioned 85 3 min read
● ●