At The Millions, a handful of writers are throwing down their two cents for the best books of the Millenium so far.
Among the more moving reviews is Bret Anthony Johnson’s elegiac take on McCarthy’s The Road.
I think, in fact, he distills through his appreciation of the novel the most fundamental power of storytelling:
“This is perhaps the most shocking aspect of The Road: what remains, what you remember years after you’ve read the book, is the beauty, the compassion, the relentlessness of possibility that burns on the colorless horizon. You understand—much in the way that you first understand poetry, through feeling and syntax and imagery rather than logic—that no matter how desolate the story, it is made bearable through language. There is, the novel asserts, something like triumph in the very telling of a tale, a commitment to the act of witness, and to receive a story is to exalt the imagination, to participate in the process of faith, to accept deliverance.”
