Book Review: Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road”

Cormac McCarthy has long been described as this generation’s William Faulkner (it is not accidental that McCarthy’s first major editor had been Faulkner’s). In simple terms, that means he eschews conventional rules of grammar, and is difficult to read. In a broader sense, however, while McCarthy’s writing carries some of the same brutal weight of Faulkner’s best work, McCarthy is a unique voice in American literature, a true living classic. His recent novel, “The Road,” has a chance to be one of the most discussed and dissected novels of our day, although perhaps not for the usual reasons.

I have read a couple of McCarthy’s breakthrough novels, “All the Pretty Horses” and “The Crossing.” In both novels, the desolation of the bleak south Texas/northern Mexico landscape is matched by the spare yet richly textured prose and thin dialog. McCarthy has been fairly described as a most masculine writer, chronicling the exploits of dusty, hard men in fraught circumstances, who communicate in fragments of sentences. “The Road” follows in this vein, following the journey of “the man” and “his son” through a landscape for which the term “bleak” would bestow a sense of joy and comfort the setting does not deserve.

“The Road” has come to the attention of the average reader in part due to its somewhat inexplicable inclusion recently in Oprah’s Book Club, and as of today because it won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Ironically, I found the book on a rack in an airport last week, and, knowing nothing about it, bought it because of the author and before I noticed the Oprah seal of approval (which might have put me off buying the book, snob that I am). Oprah viewers, I’m sure, and others drawn to the novel because of its awards and the author’s pedigree are likely to be in for a shock. While ultimately deeply affecting, “The Road” is not an easy read. Oh, it is a fast read, as it is actually relatively short (I managed to get through it in about four hours), but rather than tricks of grammar, it is the subject matter that troubles the reader.

“The Road” takes place in somewhere in the southeastern United States at an indeterminate time following a nonspecified holocaust. Just about everything living thing on or in the earth has been annihilated. Those humans that remain (as it does not appear that any other form of life survived, save one dog glimpsed from afar for a moment) are reduced to terrifying bands of cannibalistic savages who roam the still-smoldering roads, or terrified individuals who stay in hiding away from the roads and who must go to scarcely imaginable measures to survive. Into this searing, seared landscape of endless ash and unrelenting gloom, the man and his son travel to the unnamed coast in search of … what? In the end, all that matters is that they cannot stay where they are, wherever it is they happen to be.

The author has stripped the land completely bare. Every place the reader would hope that the man and his boy would find something with life, something that represents hope, McCarthy takes it all away. The man of the story must be clever, determined and downright lucky at times in his efforts to provide food, shelter and clothing for himself and the boy, who constantly hover on the edge of starvation. McCarthy is also not above shocking the reader, in the brief glimpses one would take upon unexpectedly encountering the detritus of a car crash, with imagery that man, boy and reader all wish could be unseen immediately thereafter. The oppressiveness of the falling ashes, the cold, grey skies, the endless, hopeless hunt for food, and the constant fear of exposure to any other person eats away at the reader. Against this hideous tableau, a father lovingly looks after his son. Here is a sample from the first part of the book, starting with the very first words:

When he woke in the woods in the dark and the cold of the night he'd reach out to touch the child sleeping beside him. Nights dark beyond darkness and the days more gray each one than what had gone before. Like the onset of some cold glaucoma dimming away the world. His hand rose and fell softly with each precious breath. ...

When it was light enough to use the binoculars he glassed the valley blow. Everything paling away into the murk. The soft ash blowing in loose swirls over the blacktop. He studied what he could see. The segments of road down there among the dead trees. Looking for anything of color. Any movement. Any trace of standing smoke. He lowered the glasses and pulled down the cotton mask from his face and wiped his nose on the back of his wrist and then glassed the country again. Then he just sat there holding the binoculars and watching the ashen daylight congeal over the land. He knew only that the child was his warrant. He said: If he is not the word of God God never spoke.

When he got back the boy was still asleep. He pulled the blue plastic tarp off of him and folded it and carried it out to the grocery cart and packed it and came back with their plates and some cornmeal cakes in a plastic bag and a plastic bottle of syrup. He spread the small tarp they used for a table on the ground and laid everything out and he took the pistol from his belt and laid it on the cloth and then he just sat watching the boy sleep. He'd pulled away his mask in the night and it was buried somewhere in the blankets. He watched the boy and he looked out through the trees toward the road. This was not a safe place. They could be seen from the road now it was day. The boy turned in the blankets. Then he opened his eyes. Hi, Papa, he said.
I'm right here.
I know.

Remember “bleak?”

And yet the relationship between the father and son redeems both them and the story. The tender yet murderous determination the man shows in caring and providing for his son tugs every bit as firmly on the heartstrings as the richest, most lush Dickensian serial. The boy struggles to come to terms with his father’s fierce loyalty to him that includes a aggressive dismissal of any and all other beings that place themselves in his path. The boy, who cannot share his father’s memories of the world we know, innocently implores his father to intercede on behalf of the few others they encounter, and must learn to understand how the man, who will do anything for his son’s sake, will exhibit the worst forms of self-preservation when faced with other lonely stragglers.

It is too simple to label “The Road” as merely a fine novelist’s foray into science fiction, with a chilling view of what happens when man allows his inhumanity to rule. The barren world is too vividly conjured, the relationship too preciously rendered, for that analysis to hold. The richness of “The Road” is in how life is to be lived in the small, desperate spaces of a father’s heart, in the expression of the universal longing of every father to see his son grow and succeed. That the man’s quest to see his son survive is under circumstances blessedly far removed from anything we know, and hope never to know, only heightens the intensity of McCarthy's portrayal.

Notwithstanding Oprah’s pedigree and the approbation of the Pulitzer committee, “The Road” really is not for everyone. This is not a feel-good story unless the meter with which you evaluate human existence can be calibrated to find joy and hope in minute discoveries and victories that are usually undetectable in our everyday experience. The depth of the love between the man and his son, however, is undiminished by the death of the earth around them, and will linger profoundly even as the reader seeks out the real sun to escape the sadness and waste of so much of McCarthy's goulish, fallen world. Ultimately, although death is visited upon a horrifyingly large portion of the human race in "The Road," it cannot kill humanity.