As for the rest of your comment, I’m certainly sympathetic. One of my most hated books reviewed on this blog is Nadine Gordimer’s The Conservationist. Ugh! What a book! I also don’t like it when an author is so pleased with metaphors that they cloud out the rest of the work, either because the metaphors don’t fit, because there are too many of them, or because they are so complex as to obfuscate even the simplest statements.

I do disagree with such a general negative disposition, though. Reading is not, in many cases, thinking enough. It might involve more thinking than, say, watching a soap opera, but maybe not. If an author is making things difficult just to make it difficult, then I’m with you. But I don’t feel that is the case all the time, and probably would disagree with you on many books.

I also disagree that Shakespeare wrote the way he did because people talked like that back then. If that was the case, what a brilliant society that must have been! Sure, some of what Shakespeare wrote even the drunkards in the audience groping women would understand more easily than we do today when reading it line by line. But Shakespeare used wordplay and metaphor all over the place (and invented words), so if someone understood them then it was because they liked being forced to think harder than what is required by just sitting down and watching a play.

You should rest assured that despite our disagreements, and my subsequent preachiness, this was all for the sake of discussion and not because I think lowly of you.

Oh yes, my goodness. The first time I picked The Road up, I put it down after a page. McCarthy’s prose can be overwrought, pompous and offputting. But thankfully I later had another go and thought it was brilliant. (More detailed comments here).

It’s absolutely about a father-son relationship. I don’t have a son but I can’t read it any other way. Michael Chabon makes the point perfectly in a terrific review (though I think it’s subscription-only access now). The Road isn’t sci-fi, it’s horror: a chillingly real evocation of a parent’s worst fears.

I would definitely be interested in your views now that you have a son. I agree with you about the occasional “huh?” that McCarthy’s language raises, and you picked a good quote to show that; but with this book I was definitely able to let that go because of how clearly it spoke to me most of the time. I wonder if it would be similar for you now.

By the way, cute son!

That was not sentimental. That was not sentimental.

As no-one else has picked up (or at least commented) on this, I thought I’d say: nice!

I too read The Road in 2006 – right at the end of the year, so it just missed being the first book I reviewed on my blog – and I gave it a notional four stars out of five, with the deduction coming from my usual feeling from McCarthy, that he sometimes overdoes it with his language (“The snow fell nor did it cease to fall” being one phrase that I recall).

However I do wonder now if I should reread it, now that I have a son of my own, to see if the added emotional heft pushes it higher still.