Lysiane Gagnon reads George W. Bush-style "Manichaeism" into Cormac McCarthy's The Road (The Road to Simplistic Moralizing - Jan. 4), alleging that it features only "two kinds of people: 'good guys' and 'bad guys.' " Those are indeed terms that the father and his child use frequently, but the book largely concerns the erosion of morality (including the morality of the "good guys") in the face of desperate circumstances.
"Are we still the good guys?" the boy asks at one point - and as the book progresses, the question is not always easy to answer. The Road tells a simple story, but it's very far from being simplistic.
President, Broadview Press