An edited version of this review first appeared in the April, 2008, edition of Touchstone
As I read The Road, I kept imagining two people sitting on a darkened stage with the ruins of the world around them, one saying “everything is gone,” and the other asking “what is left?” McCarthy is probably best known for All the Pretty Horses, and for his unflinching commitment to portrayals of human depravity. Among those who have read McCarthy’s other work, his newest novel is either the best work of an aging American master or the betrayal of an existential vision so severe that he is easily in the running for authoring the most violent novel in the American canon (Blood Meridian). I believe it is an aging McCarthy’s answer to the question “what is left?” that has provoked conflicting responses from his readers and that most deserves our attention in this Pulitzer Prize-winning book.
Taking place in what appears to be a nuclear winter following a global disaster, The Road follows a man and his son fleeing south through the smoldering remains of the world for reasons unknown to us, and possibly unknown to them. Everything about the novel is stark, and yet McCarthy consistently achieves rich descriptions of a dead world using the combination of a sparse, muscular style and a truly evocative vocabulary. In fact, one of the wonderful harmonies of the book is the marriage of McCarthy’s writing style with his setting. In his Border Trilogy, the deserts of the southwest provided a similar landscape, but in The Road McCarthy’s style finds its true home, and the phrases practically detonate on the page. His characters find a bottle of water, and McCarthy describes this mundane object–“The water was so clear. He held it to the light. A single bit of sediment coiling slowly in the jar on some hydraulic axis.” And again, as he imagines the dead inhabitants of a town–“Ten thousand dreams ensepulchred within their crozzled hearts.” This last phrase, say it slowly, showcases McCarthy’s feeling for meter and rhythm. Many times in The Road he slips easily from prose into a kind of poetry.
The Road is not an easy book to read. It is unrelentingly dark and often searing in its descriptions of the violence and depravity that the remnant of the human race engages in. McCarthy rarely dwells on these horrors, but as father and son make their way south we are treated to glimpses and intimations of the very worst things that human beings do to each other. The depravity in McCarthy’s book, however skillfully rendered, would be nothing but an exercise in excess if it did not allow him to portray an alternative vision that derives much of its power and beauty from the contrast. The relationship between father and son in The Road is, I believe, McCarthy’s best creation in any of his books. In the midst of a nearly unbearable outer darkness, McCarthy gives his readers refuge in the profoundly simple exchanges between a father and a son that have repeated since time began.
The desolation of a post-Apocalyptic world is the perfect space for McCarthy to explore questions that would only be complicated or obscured by any other setting. Whether we like it or not, the complexity of modern life often requires a kind of moral calculus from us as we weight the different variables appropriately and come to a range of morally acceptable options. In The Road, McCarthy brutally dissects these sorts of decisions, and one gets the feeling that his choice of setting is in a way utilitarian, allowing him to ask complex questions that are nevertheless stark in their moral content. Questions such as–Is one allowed to let another human being starve in order to feed one’s child? Is it wrong to kill a person if by that act you spare them from a certain and more horrible death? Is suicide acceptable when you do it to preserve food and therefore life? Is suicide acceptable when life is, by any standard, not worth living? What is life for? These are the sort of questions that crowd McCarthy’s world, questions that his characters are forced to answer without the luxury of equivocation, in a world stripped of the materials that modern people use to fashion cover for their compromises.
