Suffering The Benz

I finished Cormac McCarthy’s latest novel, The Road, last week. This was one of those books that stayed with me. Its post-apocalyptic imagery haunted my dreams and thoughts while I was reading it, and I kept returning to it when I was in the midst of other things. Very distrubing, but unlike most of McCarthy’s work, it ends with something that can only be described as optimism, though that word is a stretch in a tale of a man and a boy making their way south through a withered husk of civilization that’s fraught with cannibals, ash and sunless vistas.

I’ve also become addicted to HBO’s The Wire, a bleak chronicle of inner city Baltimore. There’s a character named Bubbles who pushes a shopping cart packed with junk through the bleak streets. I couldn’t help but make the comparison to McCarthy’s novel, where the nameless protagonist and his son also push a shopping cart through a landscape that is frighteningly similar …