Despite Numerous Warnings, I was Surprised to Discover this Novel is Indeed Depressing

This Audiobook Guy is Atrocious

Over the summer, I thoroughly enjoyed reading Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men. Also an exceptional film, No Country For Old Men was riveting in its delivery of a cat-and-mouse thriller that kept me turning pages through its compelling characters. It had the impression of any other cat-and-mouse thriller with its persistent Sheriff, and morally ambiguous protagonist, but one particular character, Chigurh, enabled the novel to deliver something entirely irresistible. An incredibly well-written novel, that certainly had me thinking about another McCarthy novel when another free-choice option came around.

Sadly, The Road is garbage. Drench a novel in words with a negative connotation, and cram it full of monotonous dialogue between two utterly uninteresting characters, and you have The Road. This novel is less deserving of Pulitzer Prize than Fun Maps: A quirky collection of geographic curiosities by Michael J. Trinklein.

Also, Tom Stechschulte is an utter disgrace to the audiobook industry--a complete clown. He does the voice for The Road, and it completely eludes me as to how someone, with so little talent, could survive in such a cutthroat business. He changes his voice for the characters haphazardly, and his voice sounds like he’s just been waterboarded for the last three days and decided to start reading The Road aloud. Whatever menial salary Tom Stechschulte is making off coughing every thirty minutes, while literally muttering the dialogue parts under his breath, I can confidently say is too much.

It’s not actually that bad, but I just wanted to demonstrate what happens to the tone of your novel when every other word you write is solely in one tone. Every other word of this novel is “grey” or “black.” And, as the title suggests, I was warned by multiple people that this novel was very slow moving, and incredibly depressing. Also at one point or another there’s apparently cannibalism, so at least I have that to look forward to.

“And finally he just sat in the road and didn’t get up again. The boy hung on to his father’s coat, and they went past. No one spoke. He was as burnt looking as the country. His clothing scorched and black. One of his eyes was burnt shut, and his hair was but a nitty wig of ash upon his blackened skull. As they past, he looked down, as if he’d done something wrong. His shoes were bound up with wire, and coated with road tar. He sat there with silence, bent over in his rags.” (McCarthy, 49).

So this is what I’m talking about. It turns out this man was struck by lightning, so I’m not completely sure how he’s still alive, but what’s more important is what McCarthy seems to be doing. The description of this man is far from that of a human being, all that we learn about is his physical features. Of course, both of our characters don’t actually talk to this mysterious man, so there’s not much opportunity for the description of him as a person, but nevertheless the focus is still on the physical features. This focus on physical is also evident in the descriptions of the landscape, and just as with the description of the man, they are also negative. Perhaps, McCarthy is attempting to equate these things in some way, suggesting that this post-apocalyptic world is slowly withering away it’s inhabitants, as seen with this particular character, to which the aspects of their appearance are mirroring that of the landscape.

“All the day following, they traveled through the drifting haze of wood smoke. In the draws, the smoke coming off the ground like mist, and the thin black trees burning on the slopes like stands of heaving candles.” (McCarthy, 46).

So, for comparison, this is a description of the landscape only pages before. The negative tone is supported by not only more blatant nouns like “wood smoke" and “smoke,” and verbs like “burning,” but also by less obvious words like “thin” and “heaving.” All of it contributes to a subconscious, depressed mood that I have to experience while reading this novel. Anyway, this tone of negatively describing the appearance of things is the stylistic approach McCarthy is trying build up for this post-apocalyptic world.

McCarthy’s obsession with describing the landscape, the sky, and just about everything else in this novel can certainly intimidate someone to reading this novel. But an even more intriguing stylistic idea comes from the way in which our characters are bonding through this experience.

A quick tangent; I absolutely hate the characters so far. Any dialogue this  novel attempts to create is just purely basic (I mean we’re talking the negative log of this hydroxide concentration of like 1) and the most uninteresting thing to listen to. Of course Tom Stechschulte makes it worse, but at one point in the novel the father visits his childhood home, and the child is all like “Nah man, I’m scared.” The father is like “It’s okay, Son,” but the boy insists that there’s some problem with going inside. They eventually go inside, but honestly, how could you be scared of going inside your father’s old home?

Whatever. The only positively depicted parts of this novel are that of the father and boy bonding over small situations and preserving while they head south. At one point in the novel, the father finds a Coca-Cola and gives it to his son. It’s a nice little scene in this sea of negatively connotated tone.

“He slipped the boy's knapsack straps loose and set the pack on the floor behind him and he put his thumbnail under the aluminum clip on the top of the can and opened it. He leaned his nose to the slight fizz coming from the can and then handed it to the boy. Go ahead, he said,” (McCarthy, 33).

Instead of objectively positively describing this scene, as there are very few positively charged words in this passage, these scenes among the father and son are ripe with dialogue. They share this small moment with this coke, and the father is even optimistic about the future when asked by the boy about whether he will ever see one again. The style is neutral, and the dialogue too, but I think McCarthy is drawing subtle hints of optimism and bonding through scenes like this. Just listening to scenes like this through the audiobook just puts a smile to my face with the idea of how a simple coke is to powerful in creating conversation between them, and also knowing CNN is probably hunting this recording down because Tom’s voice is the the absolute poster-child for neutrality in this scene. Have some emotion, Tom, seriously.