Review of The Road

 The Road

Author: Cormac McCarthy

Publisher: Vintage

Date of Publication: September 2006

McCarthy gives his readers hell. Literally. America is burned and pillaged. Roads lie caked in ash and corpses. Dying trees burn on a vast, hopeless altar to an absent god. Cities are pinnacles of fear rather than civilization. And – if they want to survive – people themselves see others as the last incarnate form of evil. In this wasteland, a man walks with his son. Their only goal is to reach the sea, and their only permanent possession is a gun. They survive because surviving is the only purpose they have left.

There does not yet exist a common conception of mass extinction that can match the scale of death The Road. The relationship between the man and his son is the easiest – almost the only – part of the world with which to empathize. The son doesn’t want to disappoint his father by giving up, and the father is incapable of relinquishing his responsibility to protect his son. The boy becomes godlike to his father, a beacon of purity and decency that, even if physically and emotionally sullied, is not yet corrupted by the horrors the pair face. In return, the care and effort that the father invests in both the pair’s survival and their continued humanity enables the father to be a similar figure of goodness to his son. This loop of investment and inspiration gives the pair the sense that they might be “good guys”, that they might yet glean something worthy from destiny, even if that destiny itself is bleak. Even if forsaken, man is not yet purposeless.

McCarthy allows his readers to see easily that the man and the boy find purpose in doing what’s right, despite desperate circumstances. What he doesn’t give away so easily is what to do with that purpose when it seems so utterly futile in a world that’s inexorably dying and unrelentingly destitute and depraved. Such is one of the many questions raised by the book: what is the purpose of seeking and protecting a sense of self when the only accomplishment is another miserable few moments of survival? This question is asked and unanswered. . At the utmost surface level, readers embark on a relatively monotonous journey with a relatively predictable end. The writing itself becomes tiring, lacking punctuation and speech tags, blending the pseudo stream of consciousness narration with description of the bleak surroundings. And yet, hundreds of thousands of readers have chosen to accompany the man and his son on their journey. We want to believe that even if all we knew of society and humanity vanished, purpose, hope, and virtue can survive as long as we do. 

The Road asks readers to consider at what point we are no longer human, and whether there is a point at which we can no longer recover humanity. It is beyond a depressing read. It is disturbing, haunting, and filled with a longing for beauty expressed in arcane language to feel as though that beauty is only a taunting memory. The freedom of the readers is to take on the world of the novel willingly – and be able to leave it for a better one.

- D. K. Nuray

Review of The Overstory

The Overstory

Author: Richard Powers

Publication Date: April 2018

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

          Monuments are traditionally created for that which is past. The Overstory is a monument to that which currently surrounds us – sentience, in thousands upon thousands of forms. This is a novel full of people, but truly peopled by trees. And trees talk a lot. They warn each other about infectious species. They share food. Old trees even help new seedlings grow. This is a novel about how trees survive, and how we fail to learn from them.

          Powers’ story alternates between the viewpoints of nine characters. Each character enters the story with an inclination for detachment, and experiences a life-altering form of fundamentally displacing root shock. There is Adam, the psychology student who knows everything and believes nothing. Nick loses his entire family. Patricia loses her calling and community. Everyone has an identity crisis; everyone, at some point, feels lost, alone, is temporarily blinded by fury or despair. What brings them together is trees, and what forests show them is the necessity and authority of time. 

          Environmental stewardship is immensely challenged. Telling people to behave differently implies that they are behaving wrongly. In The Overstory, by placing human motivations in the context of “tree time,” the concept of the individual breaks down into a sum of largely selfish and unimportant actions. Social hierarchies and material values appear as irrelevant and petty when a tree as old as Christianity is butchered to put money temporarily in pockets. Creating empathy so far removed from our sense of want, immediacy, and personal relevance is difficult. So Powers utilizes the lens of greatest possible empathy – that of his characters. He creates characters that are fundamentally broken, and then heals those characters with the patience, dignity, and generosity of trees. Each person pours themselves into that new form of life they discover in a mutualistic relationship between their own salvation and that of the trees. It is this mutualism that makes the loss of trees devastating, and that enables the weight of each non-human death to impact readers. Ironically, the magic of the characters is that they allow us to empathize not just with their excruciating experience, but also with their ultimate insignificance in comparison to the trees they each come to love.

          Through his storytelling, Powers delivers something more powerful than any polemic manifesto. As much as any activist, Powers illuminates the reciprocities of nature. He is both a romanticist, believing in and striving for harmony, and a student of potential apocalypse, advocating the transformation of human relationships. The effect is more comprehending and resigned than hopeful. He devastates readers into responsibility, into idealism, and into the combination of the two that must exist to save the forests he imbues with a life richer than our own.

- D. K. Nuray