Baby Got Books

The Road

I’m trying to think of a book I have read that has as bleak a moral and physical landscape as the one Cormac McCarthy creates in The Road. The only one that comes close is Blood Meridian. That’s also a Cormac McCarthy creation. No Country for Old Men might be in the ballpark. Also Cormac’s. So, even though I did my best to avoid reading reviews before I had tackled this for myself, I knew what I was getting into. (And, if you’re not as crazy as I am about McCarthy’s body of work, I don’t think I could recommend this book to you.)

Set in ~~the eighth year of the G. W. Bush presidency~~ an unspecified post-apocalyptic future time, probably in nuclear winter, The Road balances the sublimely tender relationship between a father (The Man) and his son (The Boy) against the ashen, inhumane world through which they travel. This world is nearly devoid of animal and human inhabitants, and those that have survived cause one to question the iron law of natural selection; they’re not exactly the best and the brightest. Existence in this novel is just short of pointless. In fact, it’s not clear why either of these characters exists in the world at all, except to be there for the other. That’s not the cheeriest message you could find in this holiday season, but you could surely do worse.

I think it’s probably fair to call McCarthy’s novels misanthropic, though that’s not quite the word I’m looking for. But strangely, I guess, the other hallmark of his writing, at least for me, is the genuine warmth and humanness between characters that McCarthy portrays via their speech. The cowboys’ repartee in all three of the Border Trilogy novels, but especially in The Crossing is, I think, some of the best and most memorable in American fiction; I would put it in Twain’s class. (I don’t have All the Pretty Horses in front of me, so I can’t quote it directly, but as I recall, one of the young cowpokes, Rawlins, I think, says by way of explanation, “You know what a blivet is, don’t you? A blivet is ten pounds of shit in an eight-pound sack.” That should really enter the lexicon. Exhibit A, George W. Bush is a blivet.) My fondness for the back and forth between the title character and Harrogate in Suttree is boundless. In The Road these kinds of conversations are completely stripped down and raw, but packed with emotional intensity.

What will stick with me from this book may not be the characters or the plot, but the circumstances under which I discovered them. When I read fiction these days I usually do it with a sporting event on in the background. The crazy juxtapositions of images from this novel and whatever was on the tv screen at the moment I happened to look up from the page were truly disorienting. The image of more-than-half-dead people attempting to escape a makeshift jail where they’re being held by cannibals, for instance, jangled up against the backdrop of a Broncos-Seahawks football game. (In the end, it was comforting to be able to move from the surrealism of the one to the banality of the other.) At one point I decided that maybe I didn’t really want to read a description of people roasting a prematurely born infant over a campfire at that particular moment, put the book down, and found my 3-year-old son beaming as he showed off a picture he had drawn of an auto carrier. (Quite good, if I do say.) The feeling I had at that moment was pretty close to the overriding emotion that comes forth again and again from The Man in this novel: I will do anything for you.

As I said, sublime.

Books, Fiction, Review | Dr J | December 14, 2006 4:12 pm

By DJ Cayenne, December 15, 2006 @ 11:02 am

Great post. I’ve been on the fence regarding this book for some time. I heard about the baby-on-the-spit bit early on, and I’m not sure I’m ready for that just now with lil’ Cayenne running around the house. Then again, Cormac rarely lets a guy down.
By angelle, June 11, 2007 @ 8:53 am

I loved this book. #1 favorite book I’ve read in a long time. It was my first McCarthy, so I had no expectations whatsoever. I loved how spare it was. It made the story so much more powerful. And it gave me hope. True hope. Rare a novel transcends into life like that I think. No matter how good it is.
By Hans Castorp, August 16, 2007 @ 11:10 am

First Cormac McCarthy book I’ve read. This book packs a wallop. Unbelievably harrowing and affecting. The uncommon language and dialogue took some getting used to but ultimately I loved this book and couldn’t put it down. The juxtaposition of the father-son relationship and the post-apocalyptic landscape was gripping. As a father of sons, it hit particularly close to home. Oprah’s comment that it is a love letter to McCarthy’s 8-year old son seems particularly apt. I didn’t he’d be able to end this book well but he did.