The Road

Cormac McCarthy’s The Road is romping comedy satire that pokes fun at the male identity. It is about a father and son who go shopping on a gloomy day and assumedly forget where they parked and just keep pushing the shopping cart forever. The father just figures fuck it, and heads for the beach.

There’s lots of jokes about how men just won’t stop and ask for directions, which ultimately leads to the father’s downfall, as well as running gags about how men can’t cook and so these guys just keep looking for canned goods and eating beans. I also think the father is an ex-smoker because he keeps seeing everything as ashes all around him. Nobody ever quits for good.

McCarthy pays homage to many of the great buddy doofus road adventures such a Harold & Kumar moment when they stumble onto a bunch of people doing some kinky shit in their cellar. There’s also some Beavis & Butt-Head stuff where they fuck around with a flare gun, again, typical men not reading the instructions first. They exhibit a Beavis-like pyromania, constantly priding themselves on “carrying the fire”. They play cowboys and Indians with their flare gun and some dude with a bow and arrow.

There’s also some flashbacks to the father having a post-birth abortion debate with his wife. That’s when the satire gets rough. I mean, fuck, women already have the right to kill people living inside them, next they want the right to kill them after they leave? I hope our current legislation has some sort of statute of limitations on that sort of thing because I’ve been inside some women who would probably want to kill me. Haven’t we all?

This book is written in simple sentences with lots of space between them and large margins, so it is easy to read in a single sitting/shitting. They even cut out most of the apostrophes to make it leaner and meaner. The book is printed in high definition with the ability for you to make your own commentary track. Bonus features include information about the copyright and pagenumbering.

Overall this book is fairly merry romp and a good road trip comedy. I think once they start putting GPS machines on shopping carts these types of situations will become immediately dated, but I think for now it’s pretty funny. Kinda like how mobile phones would make all those old slasher movies obsolete.

I think we’ve all got a little lost now and then and wanted to look strong in front of kids and so we don’t just ask for directions. So we can relate. It’s a good book, and it’s won some prizes I’ve heard of such as The Pulitzer and The Soontobeamotionpicture Award. So I think it is worth reading.

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