Their clothes are ragged, their shoes long since disintegrated. The road they walk is covered in gray ash, the landscape unrelieved by color or even movement, except when the weather shifts and cold winds or lashing rains drive them under their makeshift shelter. They forage for food and approach starvation numerous times through the short narrative, which takes place over the course of a few months or so. Their lives, such as they are, seem hardly worth saving. Pushing ahead of them a shopping cart that holds meager possessions covered by a rotting tarp, the man and the boy (neither have names) follow the blistered black top, watching behind them for the “bad guys” that might not just impede their journey, but ruthlessly end their lives. No exposition cushions the catastrophe of the world through which they move.

The little bits of back-story he provides appear like moments of color in an otherwise black and white film. McCarthy doesn’t explain how they came to be on their journey. A man and a 10-year-old boy walk empty interstate highways in a post-apocalypse environment, consulting frayed pieces of an ancient map to find their way south or to a coast. The story is simple, bleak in its desperate elegance. I can only offer you my impressions and how it felt to be carried along by this story and the searing images McCarthy has wrought. I can’t offer you background on McCarthy, or compare this latest novel to his oeuvre. It’s just that those aren’t the kinds of novels I usually pick up and enjoy.īut reviews of The Road intrigued me, and reading the book, I was powerfully moved, so I’m recommending it here. That is, they seem to be resolutely, openly, avowedly, unashamedly about men. Even in good reviews, his books have always sounded rather male-identified. For Your Viewing Pleasure: Gender, Sexuality, and Popular CultureĬormac McCarthy isn’t an author I’ve ever before read.Feminist Performance Festival Roundtable (2011).“Feminism, Utopia, and Performance”: The Progressives Corner (2012).Performing Que(e)ries Part IV: Holly Hughes in conversation with Jill Dolan (2013).“What Makes a Jewish Theatre Artist” (2013).Teaching and Mentoring, for Grad Students and New Faculty.“Feminist Performance Criticism and the Popular: Reviewing Wendy Wasserstein” (2008).“Colleague-Criticism: Performance, Writing, and Queer Collegiality” (2009).“On ‘Publics’: A Feminist Constellation of Keywords” (2011).“Casual Racism and Stuttering Failures: An Ethics for Classroom Engagement” (2012).“Performing Jewishness In and Out of the Classroom” (2012).“Feeling Women’s Culture: Women’s Music, Lesbian Feminism, and the Impact of Emotional Memory” (2012).“To Teach and to Mentor: Toward Our Collective Future” (2013).

The road mccarthy