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December 09, 2008
The Road by Cormac McCarthy
“He’d stop and lean on the cart and the boy would go on and then stop and look back and he would raise his weeping eyes and see him standing there in the road looking back at him from some unimaginable future, glowing in that waste like a tabernacle.”
-The Road by Cormac McCarthy
If you asked me two weeks ago, I would have told you that I don’t like Cormac McCarthy’s writing. I read the much-lauded All the Pretty Horses back when it was The Thing, but I found it overlong and boring. It was hard for me to take much note of—much less appreciate—McCarthy’s style, since he was using it in service to a story I couldn’t connect with. “Well,” I thought, “this McCarthy guy is not for me.” I moved on.
Then the Coen brothers made No Country for Old Men into a film, a film I enjoyed and connected with and appreciated on a lot of levels, something I attributed to the Coen brothers more than McCarthy—not that I’d read the book, mind you. I was basing my opinion on my experience of reading All the Tiresome Horses a decade ago, even though I am an English major who knows better than to judge things she hasn’t read.
Around the same time No Country for Old Men premiered, I became aware that McCarthy had written The Road, an apocalyptic novel—science fiction!—that went right ahead and won a Pulitzer.
“Ay,” I thought, “there’s the rub.”
I’ve avoided reading the book for a couple years now, but, finally, I decided that my status as a fan of the end of the world was in jeopardy. So while I was on the road this past weekend, I read The Road.
Wow, what a book.
At its most basic, this book isn’t anything anyone who is even slightly familiar with apocalyptic fiction hasn’t seen before. The story follows a father and son who are attempting to survive a foreign, barren, and dangerous landscape. In the reviews and discussions I’ve seen, there is some debate over what cataclysm has caused the situation the earth finds itself in at the outset of the novel, but I don’t understand what’s so unclear about it. On page 52 in my paperback, McCarthy writes, “The clocks stopped at 1:14. A long shear of light and then a series of low concussions.” Sounds like bombs to me. The repeated mention of how things had been and even seven-to-ten years later are continuing to burn is a clue. The fact that absolutely everything is dead is a clue. Could be a meteor, I suppose, but that would have to be one hell of a freaking meteor. If you saw the shear of light, I think you’d be hearing more than “a series of low concussions.” If you like the meteor theory, I won’t argue with you, because I think the parallel to a major theory of what killed the dinosaurs suits the novel’s themes, but my money’s still on the bombs.
Now that that’s clear, let’s talk about why I hated All the Pretty Horses but found this book riveting.
The end of the world is a plus here, no doubt. I also think McCarthy’s spare, bare-bones style is so well-suited to what he’s doing. The starkness of his language mirrors the starkness of the world he’s created and the hardness the main characters attempt to maintain in order to survive in it. Reading All the Pretty Horses, I found McCarthy’s lack of quotation marks and speech tags irritating and confusing. Here, it is less so, partly because there are so few characters, I think, but also because thoughts and speech and commentary are so intertwined that it hardly matters what’s what. The novel is built on dialog, stretches of clipped but warm conversation between father and son (think Hemingway at his best but with characters who love each other in a way that is selfless instead of selfish, which Papa wasn’t really into, which might be why he killed himself, but that’s another story). These passages keep the pace moving along through the long stretches where not much happens, providing a welcome respite to the horrors we see along the way, horrors that, to McCarthy’s credit, are devoid of drama and presented in the same spare, factual style, which makes the horror that much more horrifying.
Now a quibble: what the heck is with McCarthy and his deliberately consistent unconventional use of apostrophes? Finally in the middle of the book, I took time to stop reading and start scanning to figure out what rules he was using. What he does is he uses the apostrophe for all contractions except ones that negate (“can’t,” “don’t,” etc.). Is there anyone out there who can give me a theory as to why the benefits of this technique outweigh the fact that it took me out of the story enough that I stopped reading it to figure out what he was doing? Personally, I feel like it highlights the ways in which Cormac McCarthy is not e.e. cummings (and, Cormac, to be clear—you don’t come out on the good end of that one). That I could do without.
Still, again, wow. Riveting book. Highly recommended reading for anyone who is interested in life and death and what truly sustains us.
Books mentioned:
McCarthy, Cormac. All the Pretty Horses. NY: Knopf, 1992. (PB: 9780679744399)
-The Road. NY: Knopf, 2006. (HC: 9780307265432, PB: 9780307387899, Movie Tie-In PB: 9780307455291)
Posted by adrienne at December 9, 2008 10:57 AM
Comments
I commented on this at Facebook -- basically, that it's weird you're posting about this now, 'cause it's very next on my to-be-read pile, after having seen my husband's copy the other day.
We're puh-sychic friends.
Posted by: jules at December 10, 2008 01:27 PM
I'll be looking forward to hearing what you think of it. :)
Posted by: adrienne at December 10, 2008 09:25 PM
I couldn't read something where the author chose to do something that effing stupid with apostrophes. What an arrogant, self-centered prick.
Posted by: chuck at December 10, 2008 10:13 PM
I think you only took the time to figure out apostrophes because you're an English major. I guess I should read the book now that you endorsed it, I liked Mr. McCarthy when I saw him on Oprah but did not want to read the book because Oprah liked it and we have very different tastes, basically I read books to think, relax, or laugh, she recommends books that make suicide seem like a good option.
Posted by: tonderdo at December 10, 2008 10:59 PM
Chuck, At least he had a system. If he was all over the place with it, I would have been more annoyed, but I figure he at least went through a thought process and was consistent about it. Maybe it's one you can listen to. That way you won't have to worry about the apostrophes.
Tammy, This book does, in fact, make suicide seem like a good option. It's a running theme, in fact, although it seems not to endorse it in the end.
Posted by: adrienne at December 11, 2008 07:34 AM
I agree, if you're going to be flat freaking wrong, at least be consistently wrong. I probably would have to listen to it, I'll see if the LA county system has it somewhere.
Posted by: chuck at December 11, 2008 10:54 AM
I think it might give you some helpful ideas for your emergency kit.
Posted by: adrienne at December 11, 2008 12:37 PM
Yeah, like having an AP style guide up in there.
Posted by: chuck at December 11, 2008 02:42 PM
And some soap.
Posted by: adrienne at December 11, 2008 05:01 PM
Adrienne,
Came across your writing on the "The Road" while doing a bit of homework on the book and the movie ... having experienced both. Obviously many unanswered questions about the origin of the catastrophe and we'll never really know .. unless McCarthy slips it out over a drink.
The movie seems to suggest an environmentally caused 'nuclear winter', and hints at both natural or manmade. The book seems to lean towards a nuclear winter caused either by a meteor or nuclear war. Both could work.
However, to support your nuclear war theory, there is this quote from the book buried deep and without any other commentary from 'The Man' ...
... “On this road there are no godspoke men. They are gone and I am left and they have taken with them the world.”
Did "they" blow up the world?
Posted by: Mike at December 17, 2009 04:47 PM
I still haven't seen the movie. I'm not sure it's even been released in my area yet. Sigh. I will see it *one* of these days...
Posted by: adrienne at December 17, 2009 09:46 PM