What, Advent already?
Thursday, June 21, 2007
Well, to be sure, it’s a long green season before Advent, but as Karl Barth writes (as best I can recall his words while away from my library), what other season does the church live in but that of Advent? In a review of the book that was hailed in these Ruminations long before Oprah chose it, Janet Maslin writes about Cormac McCarthy’s The Road:
Somehow Mr. McCarthy is able to hold firm to his pessimism while allowing the reader to see beyond it…Although The Road is entirely unsentimental, it gives father and son a memory to keep them moving, even if it is the memory of how and why the boy’s mother chose to die…she gave up and took a bullet…
The mother’s suicide is one more reason for astonishment at Mr. McCarthy’s final gesture here: an embrace of faith in the face of no hope whatsoever. Coming as it does after such intense moments of desperation, this faith is even more of a leap than it might be in a more forgiving story. It adds immeasurably to the staying power of a book that is simple yet mysterious…The Road offers nothing in the way of escape or comfort. But its fearless wisdom is more indelible than reassurance could ever be.
–The New York Times, 9/25/06.
