This seemed like an appropriate decision for two reason: 1) my yin and I had just spent a month on the road ourselves; and 2) I found an unmarked, possibly unread copy in the local thrift store for the impossibly reasonable price of 50 cents.
(not this one)
But this is beside the point.
The point is that McCarthy (not this one) had been popping up on my radar time and again over the preceding months, stretching back in one way or another all the way to the Coen brothers' adaptation of No Country For Old Men. But the combination of my graduate studies and thrift-only book purchase policy had kept the writer relegated to the "Wish List" category of my Amazon account, which essentially functions as a shorthand for all the various books and musics that are recommended by friends and colleagues.
This is also beside the point.
And boring.
The point is that The Road held my attention in a way that few novels do, largely because of the way it repeats certain images (the road, the rain, the gray) and layers them atop one another like some sedimentary rock formation:
The difference, however, is that McCarthy's world has no sunsets, ambers or orange; his is a world of monochromatic minimalism, and The Road uses the journey of father and son as a means to exploring the canyons of the mind, the detritus of a world hobbling its way forward after an unspecified Armageddon leaves few good men "to carry the fire."
The tale is deceptively simple, and it's been interesting to gauge others' interpretations. The book jacket, for example, argues that the "father and his son... are sustained by love." My brother, on the other hand, read it as a genre piece, comparing it (unfavorably) to survivalist fantasy and zombie novels. Inexplicably, the front cover quotes the San Francisco Chronicle who apparently called the book a "tale of survival and the miracle of goodness."
(Did all of us read the same book?)
I suppose that's one of the dangers of criticism and review: every work ultimately becomes a reflection of the reader. This truism becomes all the more apparent with a novel like The Road. The plot is brutal and unrelenting, replete with starvation, cannibalism and the ever-looming threat of the child's rape. Such heavy subject matter requires that the reader exercise creative interpretation lest the entire work be lost to closed shutters and self-inflicted nooses.
The bright spots, such as they are, revolve around discovering hidden stores of food whose presence does as much to re-traumatize as it does to sustain. To the father, they represent the pre-Armageddon world, a world his son has never known and will never know. They are reminders that the seeds of destruction were sewn in a time of plenitude, and that the fecund past was ultimately the progenitor of the barren present:
"The frailty of everything revealed at last. Old and troubling issues revolved into nothingness and night. The last instance of a thing takes the class with it. Turns out the light and it gone. Look around you. Ever is a long time. But the boy knew what he knew. That ever is no time at all." (28)
The eloquence of the above passage is indicative of the book as a whole, but McCarthy parses out the poetry judiciously. In this way, the novel's structure comes to resemble the stores of foodstuffs, clean water, and medicine they man and his son encounter along the road. The meditations disrupt the narrative progression, and the reader wants to linger in them just a little longer. The words themselves come to function as an oasis, increasing their dramatic impact and providing sustenance to the reader.
The man, however, is tormented by his inner dialogue even more than he is by the decimated landscapes. Language becomes executioner:
"He tried to think of something to say but he could not. He’d had this feeling before, beyond the numbness and the dull despair. The world shrinking down about a raw core of parsible entities. The names of things slowly following those things into oblivion. Colors. The names of birds. Things to eat. Finally the names of things one believed to be true. More fragile than he would have thought. How much was gone already? The sacred idiom shorn of its referents and so of its reality. Drawing down like something trying to preserve heat. In time to wink out forever." (88-89)
The Road also points a finger at language's great conspirator – memory. Language is to word as memory is to image; both fall short of the Truth, and the seeming innocuousness of the latter finally gives rise to the malignancy of the former. For the father, this process is given form by the recollections of his deceased wife:
"Memory of her crossing the lawn toward the house in the early morning in a thin rose gown that clung to her breasts. He thought each memory recalled must do some violence to its origins. As in a party game. Say the word and pass it on. So be sparing. What you alter in the remembering has yet a reality, known or not." (131)
To me, this is what the novel boils down to: the attempt to reconcile the apparent eternity of word and image with the inescapable fact that we – the containers of these words and images, the owners of language and memory – are doomed to our own mortality. The Road is truly impressive to stage the intersection of these ideas, using the father-son trope to explore the genealogy of signification: the patriarch of language, the orphan of memory.
Finally, there is the ending. Without trudging into the unpleasant world of spoilers, suffice to say that The Road ends only slightly less grimly than it begins. Destination and disillusionment are reached, and – surprise – there is a sliver of silver lining around the cloud of the novel. Although I found this predictability somewhat irksome, it would have been even more unsatisfying if the novel had submitted totally to its dark tendencies.
This seems to be the trouble with tales premised upon the end of the world: there are only two possible endings. Either the reader is left with an uncertain, irrational optimism for the characters after the story's conclusion, or the reader is left with a certain dismalness that forestalls any hopeful resolution. Given these limited options, The Road chooses, poetically, the former:
"He got up and walked out to the road. The black shape of it running from dark to dark. Then a distant low rumble. Not thunder. You could feel it under your feet. A sound without cognate and so without description. Something imponderable shifting out there in the dark. The earth itself contracting with the cold. It did not come again. What time of year? What age the child? He walked out into the road and stood. The silence. The salitter drying from the earth. The mudstained shapes of flooded cities burned to the waterline. At a crossroads a ground set with dolmen stones where the spoken bones of oracles lay moldering. No sound but the wind. What will you say? A little man spoke these lines? He sharpened a quill with his small pen knife to scribe these things in sloe or lampblack? At some reckonable and entabled moment? He is coming to steal my eyes. To seal my mouth with dirt." (261)
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