The Road
by Cormac McCarthy
Knopf, 239 pp., $24
No one has ever accused Cormac McCarthy of portraying the black-hearted underbelly of human nature through rose-colored glasses. From his early novels, Outer Dark and Child of God, where characters cope with incest and necrophilia, through the sanguinous orgy of Blood Meridian to the psychopathic serial killings in last year’s No Country for Old Men, the reclusive writer has practically rubbed our noses in behavioral extremes.McCarthy takes us a step further into the abyss with The Road, set in a cold, dark, bleak, seasonless, postapocalyptic world where mere survival is the purpose of existence. It is the story of a nameless father and young son who make their way precariously through an obliterated, ash-covered, sunless countryside staying one step ahead of starvation, the elements, and roving packs of cannibalistic road agents. While the son has known no other reality but this, the father has recurrent flashbacks to civilization and perished love ones. “There were few nights lying in the dark that he did not envy the dead.” It is their unconditional filial bond and its concomitant but dim ray of hope that keep the pair pushing ahead, but to where?
McCarthy has abandoned the expansive southwest environs that have characterized his last five novels over the past two decades and, instead, has dropped us in a wasteland with virtually no presence of place. A one-off mention of the “broad piedmont plain” would suggest the Southeast as a setting for the skeletal forests, ransacked little towns, and metallic gray shoreline through which the characters trek. As in his previous book, the descriptions here are spare, and the language is laconic, a far cry from earlier novels wherein the narrative is lush and florid. In part an implied meditation on faith, the book is not unlike the heart-wrenching tales of Holocaust survivors who questioned the existence of God under horrifying circumstances. It is a solitary and elderly gentleman who philosophizes here that “where men can’t live gods fare no better.” And those seeking a metaphorical meaning in the book’s title need only heed the father’s observation as he approaches The Road one cold morning: “The black shape of it running from dark to dark.” You can take what you will from McCarthy’s half-full/half-empty vessel of an ending, but the journey to that point is anything but optimistic.
This article appears in September 15 • 2006.