{"id":1460,"date":"2009-03-28T00:05:40","date_gmt":"2009-03-28T04:05:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/?p=1460"},"modified":"2018-01-11T19:39:18","modified_gmt":"2018-01-11T23:39:18","slug":"cormac-mccarthys-the-road","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/2009\/03\/28\/cormac-mccarthys-the-road\/","title":{"rendered":"Cormac McCarthy: The Road<\/em>"},"content":{"rendered":"

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The Road<\/strong><\/em> <\/span>
\nby Cormac McCarthy (2006)<\/span>
\n Vintage (2007) <\/span>
\n241 pp<\/span><\/p>\n

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\"the-road1\"<\/p>\n

[fusion_dropcap boxed=”no” boxed_radius=”” class=”” id=”” color=”#003366″]I[\/fusion_dropcap] first read The Road<\/em> shortly after it came out and shortly after my first son was born. It struck me so profoundly that on the day the Pulitzer Prize was announced I was in such a state of anxiety that one would have thought I had written the book.\u00a0Honestly, I don’t care<\/em> who wins the Pulitzer, but that year I wanted it to win.\u00a0It won, I think, against the odds (it had\u00a0<warning: <\/strong>potentially alienating bias<\/em>> <\/strong>already been nabbed by Oprah). I know that some of the reason this book touched me so much was because I was (I still am) very touched and overcome by my relationship with my son (sons now). It’s something I never expected and cannot explain. Yet somehow, in a bleak — some say depressing — post-apocalyptic novel, McCarthy communicated a father-son relationship incredibly well.\u00a0No doubt McCarthy’s relationship with his recently born son\u00a0informed his writing. This review might seem heavy on that perspective, so I’m interested in how others responded to this book.<\/p>\n

In the first sentence, McCarthy shows the father-son relationship:<\/p>\n

When he awoke 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.\u00a0Like the onset of some cold glaucoma dimming away the world.\u00a0His hand rose and fell softly with each precious breath.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

That was not sentimental. That was not sentimental. It’s what I still do every night.\u00a0And I’m not living on the side of a road in the cold.\u00a0I also like this opener because with such conciseness we get a sense for the repetitious passage of time.\u00a0The verb tense shows that this is not one particular night but rather any number of nights, perhaps every night, for a while now.<\/p>\n

The world is gray, and ash falls in the place of snow. Something awful has happened — what, we’re never told, and it doesn’t matter because that’s not the point.\u00a0We have few details, but we know that it happened shortly after the son was born, so this son knows no other world.\u00a0The father and son have been travelling because the father knows they\u00a0could not survive\u00a0another winter where they were.\u00a0So they set off south across the United States and apparently into Mexico, looking for the sea, using the road, hoping to make it to a warmer climate.<\/p>\n

The father sees little hope in the world.\u00a0He has lost faith. Though they are travelling to a warmer climate, he has no idea what they will find there, if anything, and he knows they could die in any number of ways during their course.\u00a0However, he maintains a pretense for the son, who is trusting and good natured.\u00a0His son’s demeanor is\u00a0dangerous, actually, since the son often wants to help those they meet on the road.\u00a0The father would sooner have nothing to do with others; he’s seen what could happen.\u00a0I found the father’s pretenses to be particularly touching and insightful. Despite his own lack of hope, he wants his son to have hope.\u00a0Somehow, this expresses a deep, desperate faith in humanity that the father can’t help but cling too for his son’s sake — it would be too painful otherwise.<\/p>\n

That the father has lost hope and faith is completely understandable, however.\u00a0Though not nearly as violent as McCarthy’s magnum opus\u00a0Blood Meridian<\/em> (I haven’t yet managed to get through Blood Meridian<\/em>, in fact, because of the violence, though I found it brilliant), The Road <\/em>is still a violent book. And\u00a0as in Blood Meridian<\/em> and No Country for Old Men<\/em>, the violence is sudden and McCarthy is\u00a0almost as disinterested and descriptive as a detailed crime report, not romanticizing\u00a0violence by any means, but not shying away from a matter-of-fact description, say, <warning:<\/strong> violent image<\/em>><\/strong> of a beheaded infant roasting on a spit. It is this world the father sees all around him, and it is difficult for him to reconcile the ugliness of this world with the beauty he sees in his son. How can the two coexist?<\/p>\n

And what is the point? Why seek to\u00a0perpetuate existence in such a world? The father knows that the son’s fate is potentially going to be worse than death. That’s why he carries a pistol with two bullets, one for his son and one for him should they be captured by the marauding cannibals.\u00a0If brought to that point, could he do it?<\/p>\n

I think McCarthy’s prose style, which I admire greatly, found its best substance here. Always laconic, always complex while seeming simple, here the form fits its function: it mimics existence in an intense but mundane thousand mile walk on a road.\u00a0The book is broken up into many small sections, each running for half a page to a few pages at most.\u00a0Again, I think this form mimics the tension they feel and what must have been a fairly laconic, bare essentials existence.<\/p>\n

Yet in all of this simpleness, there is a layer of complexity and\u00a0linguistic virtuosity. Though he most often uses blunt Anglo-Saxon words (which, again, I find fitting in this book), he’s the type of writer you should read to study for the verbal section of the GRE.\u00a0Here are a few: granitic, collet, chifforobe, discalced, macadam, woad, tang (of a shovel), bolus, knurled, isocline, patteran). McCarthy also knows how to use ordinary words in new, but obvious ways. James Wood said McCarthy was almost Shakespearean in his capacity to use old words in new ways. For example, when using a pair of binoculars, the father “glasses” the land (could be new just to me). And in the next paragraph, sands are coagulate and a fire is feral.<\/p>\n

They stood on the far shore of a river and called to him.\u00a0Tattered gods slouching in their rags across the waste.\u00a0Trekking the dried floor of a mineral sea where it lay cracked and broken like a fallen plate. Paths of feral fire in the coagulate sands.\u00a0The figures faded in the distance.\u00a0He woke and lay in the dark.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I also like the above passage because it shows the almost pre-civilization view of the world and the gods. There are several eerie places where one gets the sense that this is a ravaged world ruled by gods more like ghosts, haunting but almost not there.\u00a0This paragraph also contains another of McCarthy’s references to a W.B. Yeats poem. Assuming, as I’m sure he does,\u00a0McCarthy knows Yeats’s philosophies — what all the gyres mean — and used some of it in structuring this book, it is a fascinatingly ambiguous venture into hope and despair.<\/p>\n

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