The Sum-Up: Father and son journey across post-apocalyptic America. You know. You’ve seen the movie.
There is beautiful and powerful stuff in this book, all in very concise, unchaptered segments, of course. This is McCarthy, and McCarthy is a genius with minimalist language and un marked dialogue. He knows how to handle the language. The parts I really appreciated, however, were the little unexpected bursts of humor.
Yes, the journey is harrowing. Yes, the characters gripped me and I felt honest relief and comfort when they did. And, yes, it was all very grim and ashy. But yet, there was humor.
One of my beliefs as a writer is in the absurdity of life, even amid the most abysmal circumstances. And I appreciated so much those moments of absurd, unsought humor. It felt very strange to want to laugh.
It seems like a dangerous book for humor. There’s no real place for it. However, as most of it does rise from the little boy, and little boys can be quite funny, there is a good conduit for it. I think, in my bold hypothesis, that the humor simply came out naturally in the effort to write a child’s dialogue. And because of the humor, the child was more authentic and more lovable and all the more cherished.
It’s nice to write a book with a good conduit for humor.
