I was going to do an ‘In the style of’ post about Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, but when I chanced upon Jacob Lambert’s version at The Millions, which not only has five parts but is also really funny, I realised what folly it would be to try and compete. However, I am still really wedded to the idea. For me, The Road is all about McCarthy’s writing style, apocalyptic messages to profligate humanity notwithstanding. It’s the no-space, no-hyphen compound words; and the resolute renouncement of apostrophes in contractions; and the mysterious non-appearance of inverted commas; and all the hair tousling. So I’m just going to herd you on over to Lambert’s parody by way of a choice quote.

Now this is the river, he said, indicating a random mapcrease. We follow the road here along the eastern slope of the mountains. These are our roads, the black lines here. See these roads? The boy seemed confused. What’s the matter, the man said.

I thought it was singular. You know. “The Road.”

The man’s eyes went wide. Where did you get those?

Get what?

The quotation marks.

The boy looked at his feet. Ive. Ive been saving them, Papa.

Well you can’t just use them like that. He took the boy’s face in his hands, more roughly than intended. Everything is precious. Everything. Do you understand?

The boy looked a little bit frightened. Yes Papa. I wont ever use them again. I promise.

The last time I read a book that made me cry, well, I never said I wanted to read a book that would make me cry, did I, what I said was I wanted to read a book about a place where everyone can hear what other people think and so you never have time alone, everyone knows everything about you, and you can hear what animals think (and what dogs have to say isn’t very interesting, they want to poo and eat all the time).

I guess in some ways, what I wanted was what I got, cuz The Knife of Never Letting Go is about a place called Prentisstown where there aren’t any women, the whole populashun is made up of men, and they can all hear each other’s thoughts in a loud jangly Noise that crawls across the book’s pages in funny fonts that I’d try to show you if I knew how. There are only 147 people in Prentisstown and they’re all waiting for some reason for young Todd Hewitt, the last of the kids, to become a man.

Cuz there’s a secret hiding, even in the Noise of the town, that Todd knows is dangerous cuz one day Ben and Cillian, the only family he knows, tell him to get out of Prentisstown and Todd’s shocked, he hadn’t even known there was anywhere else but Prentisstown in the world, and so off he goes with his dog Manchee (‘Poo, Todd. Poo. Poo’).

But being able to hear other people’s thoughts is just a type of power, and we all know that where there’s power there’s someone who wants all of it, so before long the people of Prentisstown are searching for him, searching through all of a world we find out is just a new version of the one we know, and there’s preshus few places to hide when people know what your thoughts sounds like, have heard them every day of your life since you were born.

I love this book. I love the way the writer uses the Noise to show the best and worst parts of everybody, from the keening love of a child whose Noise just says daddy daddy daddy to the clamour of the Noise of hundreds of men drowning in sorrow and regret and confushun and remorse, and best of all I love the heartbreaking and thoughtless loyalty of Manchee and I love the way secrets become so powerfully difficult in Noise and yet The Knife of Never Letting Go is about hope, it’s about how tho’ we as individuals and as humanity have made mistakes how it’s worth every terrible fight to fix them.

And then there’s the cliffhanger, which is something else.

Scorpio: The internet holds a fraction less charm for you this week; your forty-eighth favourite literary blogger has derelicted her posting duty, and only a mid-week apology appears in its usual concentric — Ikea ‘Gustav’ desk, black Apple MacBook screen, Mozilla Firefox, Google Reader — hull. ‘Can you employ ‘concentric’  when speaking of rectangular shapes,’ you ponder.

Even while you excogitate this mystery of meaning, you are not certain whether to be fatigued or merely bored by the insipid excuses she offers. Despite her vow that the swift pace of her life has resulted in such muddle-headedness that she has today mistaken both a plain notebook and a collection of Le Fanu stories for her diary, ‘Fie ‘pon her,’ you think, ‘Blogs are for posting.’

But while you may feel irritated to a minor degree for this transgression, you may also take comfort in the fact that the internet will surely fail. So buck up, rehearse your rendition of a favourite sonnet, and rejoice in the knowledge that strawberry ice-cream, at least, has survived to this golden age.

How I felt about Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer, somewhat in the style of said book:

This is a book I didn’t read for a long time, because sometimes it gives me extremely heavy boots thinking about books that lots of other people have read and I haven’t read yet, and on top of that, it’s a book about a so, so sad thing in recent Western history that is very confusing and distressing. Anyway, I finally got around to reading it, and I really liked it, and it definitely wasn’t shiitake like I was scared it would be. Actually, you need a big place inside you to store this book. That’s how much I liked it.

This is a book about a boy called Oskar Schell, who is extremely clever and endearing — that is, if you like smart kids who have no friends — and whose family has suffered a lot, including when Oskar’s father died when the planes crashed into the World Trade Center. One day, Oskar finds a key in an envelope that has BLACK written on it, and this makes him EXTREMELY DEPRESSED VERY EXCITED INCREDIBLY DETERMINED, since he thinks it has something to do with his dad. So he tries to find out which of the 162 million locks in New York City the key opens, and along the way he meets people like Mr. Black, who was born on January 1, 1901, and has a bibliographical index with cards and a one-word biography (“Henry Kissinger: war!” “Tom Cruise: money!”) for tens of thousands of people.

Another thing that Jonathan Safran Foer does with this book is talk about the impulse of documentation that comes from love, and how it helps people process things and also, how much people love words and pictures. It’s also about doing things even though they hurt us. Oskar has a scrapbook titled Stuff That Happened to Me and it looks like this:

Oskar’s grandfather can’t speak and he has to also write a lot, and he has plenty of notebooks that have just one word or phrase on them, like this:

‘Oh, my God!’ screamed Estelle. ‘I am sure that this is the most televisual book I have ever read.’
‘Well,’ Ignatius J. Reilly said, three stolen hot dogs in hand, ‘I am sure that I am simultaneously the most vivid and incorrigible character you will ever come across in all of American literature. Indeed, I have been decorated for it.’
‘I have often wanted to slap you across the face, Ignatius. You are psychotic in the extreme.’
Ignatius sighed. The earflaps of his hat were folded up to facilitate his hearing. He arose from his chair, which would not depart from his elephantine body. It took an effort with both his hands to ease it from his frame. The seat looked rather different in shape when he set it down.
‘Have you read Boethius?’ Ignatius belched. ‘I am a staunch believer in Boethius. I cannot abide these new philosophers, the ignorance of whom astounds me. When I perceive the bookstore arrangements of those abortions they call books, the filth they impart to the masses, I feel sick. In fact, my valve is giving me considerable trouble now.’
Estelle paused. ‘What’s a valve?’
‘You are a maniac!’ Ignatius screamed, his voice choked with saliva and fury. ‘Get away from me! You little understand the respect due a personage of my immense intelligence, height and breadth! I would not be surprised if you were not even a human being; a phony whose molecules rejoice at the thoughts of other incompetents! I am certain that you revere film stars, those carriers of mange! You enemy of Pragmatism and Morality! False proponent of American ‘art’! Cataclysmic affront to Hroswitha’s wisdom! That Fortuna should let me spin so low as this!’
‘Oo-wee. I think I got siphlus from dat man,’ said Jones, who was sweeping the floor.