The Road by Cormac McCarthy

My first encounter with McCarthy was Blood Meridian, which I read about two years ago for a fabulous class taught by Professor Bishop. It is one of the relatively few fictional works that have transcended the classroom and ended up on my bookshelf. Despite growing up in California, surrounding by the mythos of the Wild West, his take on the western landscape and man's violent drive toward the Pacific was intoxicating. I would say that I never understood the emotional forces, as divorced from the historical understanding of Manifest Destiny until I read Meridian.

With The Road, McCarthy further displays his ability to project the most basic human emotions against the most complicated moral and geographical backgrounds. He makes two wise choices, which allow his novel to accomplish the level of brilliance. The first is that he focuses the plot on two characters, narrowing the scope of an entire world down to the existence and relation of people who could be seen as opposites. These two characters are father and son, although they never receive those names from the author: they are the man, and the boy.

This is a device that I have enjoyed since I was very young. The first time it impressed me was in Nicolas Roeg's film Walkabout. I remember being stunned when the credits began to roll and I realized I had been moved to tears by nameless characters. Archetypes are generally considered the terrain of ancient and Classical era literature, but they are almost more powerful when placed in an era indoctrinated with the notion of individualism. It can serve to remind us that we are each a type of some kind, even if that type is only "father" or "son."

The second choice I find conducive to brilliance is the ambiguity of the past. The characters are wandering a wasteland. Indeed, the novel's synopsis refers to a post-apocalyptic landscape. Most approaches to apocalypse in popular culture these days are either strong socio-political statements about specific human faults, or a Dionysian reveling in such faults. Still others are funny. But they all give us explanations of not only what happened, but how it happened.

McCarthy doesn't stoop to this level. His interest is not what happened, but what continues to happen, and what connects the past to the present. Despite apocalypse, father-son love continues. It finds a form, even among trees covered with ash and a never-ending dust. His story is most moving not in its descriptions of decrepit automobiles, dilapidated homes, or abandoned gas stations. Nor in the protagonists' encounters with decaying corpses, blind drifters, or mutilated victims of some undefined band of "bad guys." It is in the perilous lives of the man and boy. These external elements only moved me when they threatened the continuation of the pair, either by separation or physical harm. Their love is impractical and desperately painful at times, but psychologically necessary, like so much of human emotion.

McCarthy doesn't skimp on the topographically descriptives, though. If I had stopped to find a dictionary every time he used a noun I had never heard before in order to set an outdoor scene, I would never have finished the damn thing. Although this could be frustrating to me at times, it was never repetitive and only served to enforce the authenticity of his world. As well as remind me to learn more tangible nouns, as opposed to these abstractions I'm well-versed in.

The Road is unrelenting. There are no chapter breaks, just larger spaces in between paragraphs. Like one might imagine a post-apocalyptic world, little is known and even less is stable, predictable, or happy. There are definite moments of sweetness, but they only tease you, glittering like embers threatening to go out at any moment. Despite knowing that fires always turn to embers and embers to ashes, I muscled through the psychological torment just so I could catch a few glimpses of light. Given the condition of his characters, I think McCarthy is trying to show the reader that this drive to find the smallest glints of happiness, despite the horror they reflect against, is what makes us human.