Cormac McCarthy - The Road

I'd never read any of Cormac McCarthy's books before tackling The Road, but I decided to pick it up after seeing it mentioned in 3 or 4 different places as the newest and arguably best work of one of America's greatest living authors. I don't read a ton of high-quality literary fiction, to be frank. I generally read books for shameless entertainment, for edification, or to give in to my fair share of intellectual peer pressure. The premise of the book (a father and son's long trek across an apocalyptic wasteland) and the provocative title were enough to get me to order it from Amazon, though, and with great curiosity I dove into the work of a new writer.

The Road is a short book, clocking in at 241 pages; I read it cover to cover in one day while traveling. In addition to being short, however, the book also has an ultra-stark and minimalist writing style. McCarthy eschews quotation marks altogether and sometimes ditches the apostrophes in contractions as well, but those are merely formatting anti-flourishes; the more jarring and arresting characteristics of the writing are its utter simplicity and immediacy. To illustrate, here's a brief passage from the first chapter of the book:

With the first gray light he rose and left the boy sleeping and walked out to the road and squatted and studied the country to the south. Barren, silent, godless. He thought the month was October but he wasnt sure. He hadnt kept a calendar for years. They were moving south. There'd be no surviving another winter here.

The story itself is just as immediate as the writing style, which gives the entire book a distinct unity of effect. While the narrative brushes over a few uneventful days here and there, it's essentially the chronicle of a few weeks of a father and son's journey across the dead post-apocalyptic wasteland of an unknown country. There's very little in-depth description of....anything, really, but McCarthy is neither lazy nor unimaginative; he's just smart enough to trust his readers to fill in the blanks. The sparseness of the writing also underscores the sparseness of the nuclear wasteland in a very real way.

The source of the devastating apocalypse is discussed only briefly as "a long shear of light and then a series of low concussions" glimpsed through a window, and the backgrounds of the characters receive only slightly more coverage. Again, the lack of superfluous detail serves to highlight what's immediately important in the tragically small family's life: What are we eating today? Will we make it through this frigid night, unable to light a fire for fear of being spotted and attacked by someone who would kill us for a can of beans? Are bands of marauders following our tracks? Will the next person we meet on the road greet us kindly or try to murder and eat us?

The book uses nothing but a few carriage returns between scenes instead of breaking the events up into traditional chapters, which further lets the events blend into one long dirge on survival. The reader can almost hear the lone reverb-drenched twang of a single dying guitar. If this isn't the world that the music of Godspeed You Black Emperor describes then I don't know what is; the opening monologue from 'The Dead Flag Blues' would be right at home in The Road:

The car's on fire. And there's no driver at the wheel. And the sewers are all muddied with a thousand lonely suicides. And a dark wind blows.

Cue lonely 6-string.

The bleakness of the setting and the situations in which the characters find themselves set the stage for a few bright moments, however, mainly through the stark contrast; after reading 30 pages about such a miserable, ash-covered world the reader feels a genuine swell of joy when even the smallest ray of light shines down on the father and his son. Not that they've actually seen the sun in years, mind you.

The father and son, whose names are never revealed, meet relatively few other humans in the course of their journey, but their interactions with the other near-extinct humans reveal volumes about them. The father's unconditional, unquestioning, unbreakable love for his son is made manifest time and again in the least uncertain terms possible, while his son's mixture of childlike innocence and heartbreaking weariness reveals all too much about the terrible state of the world around them. Ultimately this is a small story set in a huge, mean world, and by the time the duo reaches the end of their journey the reader is left as weary as the characters, a credit to McCarthy's writing and his ability to convey a great deal with a few words.

Rating: 4/5 Stars

Buy It!