BOOKS BOUGHT:
- Skellig—David Almond
- Clay—David Almond
- Tom’s Midnight Garden—Philippa Pearce
- Queuing for Beginners: The Story of Daily Life from Breakfast to Bedtime—Joe Moran
- The Road—Cormac McCarthy
- Better: A Surgeon’s Notes on Performance—Atul Gawande
- The Rights of the Reader—Daniel Pennac
BOOKS READ:
- Skellig—David Almond
- Clay—David Almond
- Sharp Teeth—Toby Barlow
- The Road—Cormac McCarthy
- The Brambles—Eliza Minot
- Queuing for Beginners—Joe Moran
- American Born Chinese—Gene Luen Yang
I had all sorts of clever introductions to this month’s column written in my head, opening paragraphs that would have provoked and inspired and maybe even amused one or two of you, if you were in a really good mood. When I read the Eliza Minot novel, I started working up this riff about the joys of uncannily accurate impersonation; when I read the David Almond novels, I was going to tell you all to abandon adult fiction and turn to books written for kids and teenagers. And then I read the Cormac McCarthy novel, and they all seemed inappropriate, like trying to tell New Yorkers about my news first on September 11, 2001.
As you probably know by now—and more than eight million of you voted for it in the Believer Book Award—The Road may well be the most miserable book ever written, and God knows there’s some competition out there. As you probably know by now, it’s about the end of the world. Two survivors of the apocalypse, a man and his young son, wander through the scarred gray landscape foraging for food, and trying to avoid the feral gangs who would rather kill them and eat them than share their sandwiches with them. The man spends much of the book wondering whether he should shoot his son with their last remaining bullet, just to spare him any further pain. Sometimes they find unexpected caches of food and drink. Sometimes they find shriveled heads, or the remains of a baby on a barbecue. Sometimes you feel like begging the man to use his last bullet on you, rather than the boy. The boy is a fictional creation, after all, but you’re not. You’re really suffering. Reading The Road is rather like attending the beautiful funeral of someone you love who has died young. You’re happy that the ceremony seems to be going so well, and you know you’ll remember the experience for the rest of your life, but the truth is that you’d rather not be there at all.
What do we think about when we read a novel this distressing?...
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contributor
contributor
Nick Hornby is the bestselling author of eight novels, including High Fidelity, About a Boy, and, most recently, Just Like You. He has also published several works of nonfiction including his ground-breaking debut, Fever Pitch, and has written numerous award-winning screenplays for film and television including Brooklyn, Wild, and State of the Union.
