The Road, by Cormac McCarthy

In The Road Cormac McCarthy pares down language into short paragraphs sequenced on the page as singular, independent blocks of text, the spaces between each paragraph designating gaps of time that may be seconds or hours or days or weeks. This is a significant change from his earlier writing. McCarthy’s prose in the first half of his career, up through Blood Meridian, was labyrinthine, Faulknerian in the extreme, reminiscent at points of Melville, Milton, Joyce. The language in this new novel is spare, cautious, stripped of subordination and of excess. Fragment sentences often serve in place of complete sentences. Especially in comparison to the McCarthy of Suttree and Blood Meridian, the change is shocking and dramatic. Yet No Country for Old Men, published last year, and of a piece with The Road, prepared us for it.

McCarthy’s novels have always concerned estrangement. From the sewers and liminal cesspools of Suttree to the necrophilia of Child of God to the existential depredations of American expansionism in Blood Meridian to the tamer and deceptively romantic travails of John Grady Cole in All the Pretty Horses and Billy Parham in The Crossing, McCarthy’s characters have wandered outside the margins of the modern world—dispossessed, abused, lost, alone. In last year’s No Country for Old Men, McCarthy explored the blasted wastelands of Southeast Texas, blasted not by droughts or sandstorm but by drug wars and murderous human dysfunctionality. McCarthy’s vision has always been bleak, sometimes bitter, sometimes verging on the nihilistic. No novelist has a bleaker vision. Even so, this latest novel is a disturbing surprise. It is dark and despairing even for McCarthy. Its darkness and despair come not out of the experiences of his imagined characters, but out of what he fears and envisions as the ultimate future of our human world.

The Road occurs in a post-apocalyptic world, six or seven or so years after a horrific disaster, probably a nuclear war, incinerates most of the human race. The Road is an environmental parable, an ecological novel where ecology no longer exists.

The main character in The Road is referred to simply as “the man.” His son is “the boy.” In the old life, we know they had names, but now since they are practically the only people left, or at least the only “good people,” there is no need to call them by anything personal. No one in the novel is called by any name, with the exception of one wandering old man, Eli, whom the boy and the man briefly befriend.

The title refers to the path the man and the boy follow as they make their way down from the mountains towards the southern coast. The novel is set in the Appalachians, where McCarthy grew up. Like the people, the mountains are not named, but there are enough geographical clues that we can identify them.

McCarthy describes the setting in whites and grays and blacks. The world is leached of color. The trees and other vegetation have died, and forest fires have swept through the mountains. The higher reaches of the mountains are still burning, but most of the rest of the world burned up long before the present time of the novel, and all that is left is ash, everywhere. This is a novel of ashes, shadows, darkness. The boy and the man wear masks to protect themselves from the ash. McCarthy has always been a master landscape artist. His abilities are especially evident in The Road, but here the landscape is desolation.

Wrack and ruin characterize The Road. We are constantly reminded of the lost human world. Empty houses, sheds, barns, cars, trains, stores, where humans once dwelled. They are vacant now, empty, except for occasional mummified corpses. Garbage, junk, all the lost possessions of the human race litter the pages of this novel. It is haunted by the constant memory of what was there before, the world before the apocalypse. The shell of that world is still partially there, empty houses and stores and other structures. Highways, bridges, railroad tracks are all still there and may still be there, as the man explains to the boy, for thousands of years to come. But the human world, the world that created those objects, is wholly gone.

The man spends a lot of time rummaging through vacant houses, looking for cans of food, anything that he and his boy can eat, but the finds are rare. Once he comes across an old soda machine scavenges an unopened Coke that he gives to the boy, who has never had a Coke, and who will never have one again. The novel is a story of constant starvation, and the man and the boy are on the verge of death from starvation more than once, only to run across an unexpected cache of food, once in a fallout shelter, on another occasion in a beached boat.

There are other humans abroad on the land. They appear as wraiths, stumbling along the road, or bands of refugees marching military style, or a small family group that locks up refugees in the basement and cannibalizes them one by one. These are the “bad men.” The boy often asks his father who the good and the bad men are. He’s worried by some of the acts his father has committed. The father kills a man who holds a knife to the boy’s throat, and he refuses to give aid to various people they pass. He refuses because he wants to ensure his son’s own survival, and they have nothing to share.

The boy and the man are headed towards the coast because they want to escape the freezing temperatures and snow of the mountains. But the cold weather follows them. The Road portrays the worst-case scenario of a nuclear winter calamity. Everything is dead and cold. One dog appears, briefly. There are no birds. All the trees are dead, shrubbery, grass, vegetation, everything is dead. The only living vegetation in the novel are some mushrooms the man discovers along the way. The man has no idea what he and the boy will do when they reach the coast. He doesn’t expect to be rescued, to find “good” people who will take him and the boy in. Every human being they run across is a danger, to be avoided. Moreover, the man is ill. He coughs often, hacking up blood, and over the course of the novel he weakens. He knows he is going to die, and the boy knows that too. The man knows the boy will outlive him, and at first he thinks about killing the child to save him from the horrors of the new world, but ultimately he knows he cannot kill the boy, even out of love. He loves the boy too much.

The novel is dedicated to McCarthy’s young son. Not surprisingly, then, The Road is about a father’s fierce love for his young son, whose survival he wants to ensure at all costs. The conversations between the boy and his father often seem a bit precious, but they are exactly the kinds of conversations a parent and a young child will have. Children are resentful, suspicious, anxious, insecure, loving, protective, fearful. The boy expresses all these emotions, more or less constantly. He is especially disturbed when his father enters a house that belonged to someone else, or when he takes possessions that belonged to the once living, or when he forces a thief who had taken all their possessions to strip naked. This is why he often asks his father whether they are still the “good guys” who “carry the fire.” The man assures the boy that they are still the good guys, but that most of the people they might meet in the world are not.

Some might find an underlying sentimentality in the novel, especially in the exchanges between the man and the boy. Children in most novels are better seen than heard. Few writers portray them realistically. McCarthy succeeds not only in portraying the boy in an utterly convincing way—both in his speech, mannerisms, and behavior—but also in how he interacts with his father. And McCarthy succeeds as well in conveying the man’s concern and love for his son. A parent will read this novel through the lens of his or her own children and his or her love for those children. Those who do not have children may not fully appreciate this aspect of the novel. What some may mistake for sentimentality is in fact love and tenderness—surprising yet wholly logical and natural emotions in this novel by Cormac McCarthy.

There is no wife or mother in the novel. She resides in the man’s memory, and at first he thinks of her often. In one of his memories they argue about her intention to kill herself. She sees only a horrible death for herself and the boy—she is sure they’ll both be raped, tortured, cannibalized--she doesn’t see the point of struggling on. She sees no future for herself or her family or the rest of the world. She also sees herself as another mouth to feed. Her death by suicide—in a scene that is implied but not described, she slits her wrists with sharp flints her husband has taught her how to use for that purpose—simplifies matters for the author, who has one less character to worry with, and for the boy and his father. It’s clear that the man loved his wife, but it’s clear too, as time goes on, that in the new world of gray dust and endless walking towards an empty ocean there is no place for her memory. In a wrenching, understated scene, the man takes out her photograph and, after looking at it a last time, places it face up on the road and walks on.

The Road is a novel written by a man who knows he will soon leave the world. The gray landscapes, the ashes, the corpses, the death, express McCarthy’s own sense of alienation from the modern world. He is losing the world, or he knows that he will soon lose it. He knows his son will survive him. The novel is his expression of love and hope for his son when the time comes that he must make his way in the world alone.

In another sense, the novel is McCarthy’s warning to the rest of us that our own recklessness, greed, carelessness, and haste may destroy the world. It gives little hope that we are capable of preventing the disaster he thinks will transpire.

It’s also a novel whose main character is convinced that there is no God, or at the least that God has deserted the world, and that there is no hope of salvation or redemption, only emptiness. Yet, despite all the despair and pessimism, The Road ends on a note of muted and perhaps short-term optimism.

It’s difficult to imagine that any author could produce another novel after writing this one. What could possibly follow The Road? McCarthy, in his early seventies, is old enough that this novel could be his last. One hopes he doesn’t stop here. One hopes that his horrific dream of a world without a future tense proves wrong. McCarthy, as The Road makes clear, does not believe he is wrong. One hopes, somewhere, for a glimmer of light in his dark vision of human eschatology.

Originally published in BlogCritics: http://blogcritics.org/archives/2006/10/18/063647.php.