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The Road

200px-The-road.jpgOn vacation last week I managed to lose a book that I have been nibbling on for about a year now (I Should Be Extremely Happy in Your Company: A Novel of Lewis and Clark) but had finally been nearing the end. That was annoying. I was enjoying it OK, but the fact that it was taking me so long was evidence that it was a bit of a struggle. It was a kind of vicious cycle because the variety of narrators (Lewis, Clark, Sacagawea) made it a bit hard to follow at times, especially since I was reading it only occasionally and in small chunks. So after losing that one, I picked up The Road by Cormac McCarthy. It's one that I had been looking forward to reading since I enjoyed The Border Trilogy and several of his other novels. Lisa read The Road in a weekend a month or two ago. Like Lisa, I really enjoyed The Road, following in a mostly-understated way the relationship between a father and son who are "on the road" in a post-apocalyptic setting. It turned out that our friend Greg who we were visiting had recently read it too, and our discussion centered on the geography. Lisa assumed that it was set in the west. I knew that it was in the south because of the "See Rock City" sign that is mentioned. Greg new it was in the south and recognized the description of one particular setting as Gatlinburg. From the Wikipedia entry:

The journey passes through towns and cities whose names are known but never named. The travelers apparently set out on their journey north of Knoxville, Tennessee, crossing the Tennessee River at that city. They notice sunken boats under the bridge there, a nod to McCarthy's novel Suttree, in which the protagonist lives in a houseboat community in that location. They continue through Gatlinburg, Tennessee, across the Great Smoky Mountains - probably over Newfound Gap (elevation 5,048 ft above sea level; see below) - and through the Piedmont region of North Carolina. From there, they proceed southeastward to the coast, perhaps that of South Carolina or Georgia. One rare specific geographical indication in the book is a barn bearing the painted legend "See Rock City". One published book review (that of the novelist William Kennedy, entitled "Left Behind", the cover review in The New York Times Book Review for October 8, 2006), apparently not realizing how many barns in the upper South recommend seeing Rock City, has relied on the reference to infer that the route in The Road must pass through Chattanooga, Tennessee, but this is clearly impossible ("The pass at the watershed was five thousand feet and it was going to be very cold," The Road, p. 25).

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