Writing Tools

If you're looking for a short novel to discuss with your writing and reading friends -- perhaps at a newsroom brown bag lunch -- I'd recommend "The Road" by Cormac McCarthy, an Oprah's Book Club selection and winner of the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. To facilitate some good talk, or to help enrich your reading experience, I offer these questions for discussion:

1. McCarthy sets his novel at some time in the future after some unspecified worldwide disaster. The author does not reveal how the world became a wasteland: nuclear war? natural disaster? collision with an asteroid? global weather catastrophes? In a sense it doesn't matter. The world is no longer a place that is congenial to human beings -- to culture and civilization. Even though the author doesn't reveal his view, it's fair for readers to imagine the "back story." What do you think happened to the world -- a world in which murder and cannibalism have replaced care and community?

2. Since the start of the new millennium, we have experienced the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, the destruction of New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina, and wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Throughout history, the end of one era and the beginning of another have produced two contradictory responses: the belief that the world is coming to the end, and an impulse to create a new, better era. Although "The Road" is set in the future, all good stories help us understand the here and now. What lessons do you draw from this novel that we can apply to creating a better world?

3. McCarthy does not name his characters. They are "the man" and "the boy." I can't think of another story in which characters we care so much about are nameless. Perhaps the author is saying that in a world so hostile to humans, names have no meaning. Or that these characters represent every man and every boy -- every person who faces death and despair. Kurt Vonnegut once said that the best way to tell a story was to create a good, likable character and spend the novel doing horrible things to that person. Think of all the horrible things that happen to the man and the boy. Now think about the ways in which you as a reader identify with both of them.

4. American literature gives us many examples of stories about two characters, usually men or boys, who leave the civilized world behind for an adventure on "the road." Think of Huck and Jim escaping on a raft on the Mississippi River. Think of Ishmael taking off on Captain Ahab's ship in search of Moby Dick. These great stories help us understand what is most important in human life when experience is stripped of the trappings of civilization. In "The Road," the characters, time and again, stumble upon the relics of culture and technology, most of which are useless, but some of which sustain life. How did reading this novel influence your thinking on important expressions of culture that you may take for granted: family, food, health care, transportation, shelter, community?

5. Two technical literary words have been used to describe this novel. One is "dystopia," the opposite of "utopia." If a utopia describes an ideal world, a dystopia describes a horrific one. "Brave New World" by Aldous Huxley and "1984" by George Orwell are examples of important, influential dystopias. Such stories gain their power by exaggeration, by taking significant problems in contemporary society and enlarging them so we can see them more clearly and dramatically. Another word is "post-apocalyptic," meaning after the apocalypse or the great catastrophe. We are familiar with such stories, not only from literature but from popular culture. Think of the series of Mad Max movies starring Mel Gibson. Great authors take advantage of these familiar forms, but then add something special, a distinctive vision or revelation. How is "The Road" different from other such stories you have experienced?

6. Important literature helps you remember key scenes from other works of literature. For me, "The Road" called to mind the scenes in Shakespeare's "King Lear" when the great king, stripped of all power and possessions is left standing, almost naked, in the wilderness, in the midst of a terrible storm, shaking his fist at the heavens. In "The Road," the man and the boy are also stripped down to the essentials of life: a tarp, a grocery cart, makeshift shoes. Authors use such moments to dramatize what is truly important in human existence: love, loyalty, courage, persistence, hope, generosity. As circumstances get worse and worse -- in the world and in literature -- human values can get stronger and stronger. I'm thinking now of another American literary classic, "The Grapes of Wrath" by John Steinbeck. The setting is another American wasteland, the dust bowl of the 1930s, in which the Joad family becomes part of a great exodus of farmers and workers headed west from Oklahoma. In that book's famous final scene, an astonishing act of life-sustaining selflessness, a young girl nurses a starving man. Re-read the final scenes of "The Road" and discuss the life-sustaining values that they promote.