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Thursday, June 21, 2007

What, Advent already?

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.

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