Why didn’t anyone tell me…

I just read The Road by Cormac McCarthy. All I can think of is that he’s the modern equivalent of Ernest Hemingway, that cheerful soul. There were a couple things I thought were odd about the book and I won’t be reading any more McCarthy. First, the characters’ names are “The Man” and “The Boy” – no other name is ever given. This had the unusual side effect of letting your mind wander on what their backgrounds are and what they look like beside general descriptions. I actually started thinking they were black, but then later the boy, oops, sorry,  “The Boy” was suddenly pale white, which kinda shot that apart. Also, the catastrophe they survived is never given a specific description or date, just that it was about or more than 10 years ago. I guess this is to keep your concentration on the lives and emotions of the characters, but plainly their emotions weren’t all that deep or interesting. The book doesn’t appear to have much in the way of shape either. The end could have happened in the third chapter the way it felt. There were chapters that had shape, but the book as a whole didn’t ramp either up or down. And this book got really big reviews. Maybe in hands more accustomed to simpler storytelling it’d be more interesting.