Review :: The Road :: Cormac McCarthy

Last night I felt the last snow of this Chicago winter. This has been a winter for snow--deep snow, wet snow, thunder snow. Today the sun is shining; you couldn't tell that the sky was spitting snow last night.

I was driving home from work when the Blizzard of 2011 hit Chicago. As I drove toward the lake on Howard Street, the snow hit like a wall. Newscasts forewarned catastrophe. Once I'd found parking, I marched toward my apartment head-down to keep the snow out of my eyes. Drifts were already filling the courtyard of my building. My wife and I took shelter in our apartment reading Laura Ingalls Wilder's The Long Winter while the wind shook our windows and the sky flashed lightning.

All told, Chicago received 20.9 inches of snowfall. Chicago Public Schools canceled school for the first time in twelve years, and then did so for a second day while giant snow eaters cleared roads. I spent forty-five minutes digging out my car (which was buried up to the windows), twice.

I had finished Cormac McCarthy's The Road a few weeks earlier. Apocalyptic scenarios were on my mind. And then there I was, in the middle of the biggest snowstorm to hit Chicago since 1967. The city shut down. Maybe this was a glimpse of the end.

But I think not. In fact, I think this is a backward way of thinking. See, the next day, when the sky cleared to let the bitter cold sunlight illumine the shining city, Cindy and I went for a walk. We pulled on snow boots and muffled ourselves in scarves, and we struck out to cut a trail toward (of course) Dunkin Donuts. What I saw were traces of sled tracks, a recent immigrant family from Africa digging out their minivan, a tired buy behind the counter pouring coffee, parents exploring the snowscape with their toddlers. This wasn't the apocalypse. That came later.

Review :: The Power and the Glory :: Graham Greene

In the last few weeks Cindy has read two novels about what happens when the world falls apart: The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood and The Road by Cormac McCarthy. She enjoyed both, I think. At the very least she's inspired me to give each book a read.

Her reading has also made me reappraise the book I've been reading, Graham Greene's The Power and the Glory. Like a good novel should, The Power and the Glory tells a good story--the story of the last priest in a province of revolutionary Mexico in where all the church have been forcibly shut down. The priest is all too human, crippled by alcohol and by fear, both yearning for and cowering from his inevitable capture by the red-shirt authorities. Greene writes beautifully. And, as one might expect of a Graham Greene novel, the hard question of faith--why believe?--emerges subtly in the texture of characters and events. The story is worth reading as a story.