The Glass Castle and The Road

I read The Glass Castle right before I read The Road, so that's two books about pitiful starving children in a row. Meanwhile, the next book group pick is Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

I also can't stop thinking about a bit from Cormac McCarthy's NYT interview, which I blogged about yesterday:

McCarthy's style owes much to Faulkner's -- in its recondite vocabulary, punctuation, portentous rhetoric, use of dialect and concrete sense of the world -- a debt McCarthy doesn't dispute. "The ugly fact is books are made out of books," he says. "The novel depends for its life on the novels that have been written." His list of those whom he calls the "good writers" -- Melville, Dostoyevsky, Faulkner -- precludes anyone who doesn't "deal with issues of life and death." Proust and Henry James don't make the cut. "I don't understand them," he says. "To me, that's not literature. A lot of writers who are considered good I consider strange."

His is a very purist view of writing. I admire his view, but I'm not sure I share it. It's a great point for debate, though.

More on The Road

So today The Road wins the Pulitzer Prize when I was just blogging about it yesterday. I did some more research on the book today, one interesting piece was from The Chicago Tribune about Oprah picking the The Road for her book club. The writer, Julia Keller, calls Oprah and author Cormac McCarthy "one of the oddest and most unlikely cultural pairings since Arthur Miller and Marilyn Monroe." She also reports on McCarthy's notorious aversion to the press:

Whatever McCarthy's motivation for agreeing to be on the show, it isn't money, say longtime observers of McCarthy's work. He turns down speeches, awards, teaching gigs and other familiar trappings of the contemporary writer's life, preferring to live in the desert Southwest and do his work. Like literary recluses such as J.D. Salinger and Thomas Pynchon, McCarthy is more familiar through his absence than his presence.

Read the whole article here.

I also found this longer, more definitive profile of McCarthy from when he gave a rare interview to the New York Times in 1992. You can find it via the previous link or on the NYT's Cormac McCarthy page here.

Oprah's Pic: The Road

I read Oprah Winfrey's current book club pic this weekend: The Road, by Cormac McCarthy. I can't remember the last time I read a book this disturbing. A man and his young son are on the road, traversing a post-apocalyptic landscape (nuclear war? meteor strike?) and hiding out from other survivors bent on rape, murder and cannibalism.
If that sounds austere, it certainly is, but the writing is elegant and convincing. I can't get some of the grimmer scenes out of my head.
I would say the pick is out of character for Ms. Oprah, but one of the things I like about Oprah (and I do like her) is that she usually has a surprise up her sleeve. So it's not out of character in that sense.
The Oprah web site says that Cormac McCarthy is going to give her his first television interview. I'm sure the chance to reach the massive Oprah audience is to tempting to pass up. (Only one author ever did, I think.)
Maybe I'll think of something more profound to say upon further reflection, but right now all I can do is shake my head in disbelief over the power of The Road.