![]() ![]() Now he has given us his great American nightmare … The Road is a novel of transforming power and formal risk. This is a very great novel, but one that needs a context in both the past and in so-called post-9/11 America … we should remember that the history of Cormac McCarthy and his achievement is not an American dream but near on 30 years of neglect for a writer who, since The Orchard Keeper in 1965, produced only masterworks in elegant succession. “Shorn of history and context, Cormac McCarthy’s other nine novels could be cast as rungs, with The Road as a pinnacle. –Michael Chabon, The New York Review of Books “The paradox in every part and sentence of the post-apocalyptic narrative-evoking even as it denies-is repeated as if fractally by The Road as a whole … All the elements of a science fiction novel of the post-apocalypse are present or at least hinted at…There are bits of satire of a very dark order in the hints that religious extremism caused the holocaust, and in the relentless way McCarthy deprives the foolish reader of the reassurances … The Road is neither parable nor science fiction, however, and fundamentally it marks not a departure but a return to McCarthy’s most brilliant genre work, combined in a manner we have not seen since Blood Meridian: adventure and Gothic horror.” ![]()
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