I've been meaning to read The Road (Cormac McCarthy, 2007) for years, but had been put off by other readers' comments that it was unrelentingly joyless and despairing. But I've read a few too many light romances recently, to the point where I was starting to not enjoy them, so I decided now was the time to tackle a dark classic.
Those other readers are right that there is no hope of hope in this gritty post-apocalyptic story of a father and son searching for a place to call home. The nature of the disaster is never specified, and that's at least part of why it can work-- is there any disaster, even a nuclear one, that would cause the absolute destruction of all plant and animal life and yet leave humans alive? There is no food to eat at all, outside of finding caches of pre-apocalypse food in half-rotting houses, or cannibalism. The man and the boy (they are never named) travel several hundred miles south in the course of the novel, and there is nothing anywhere other than desolation and coldness and ash.
But there are also plenty of good reasons to read it. The relationship between the father and son is tender and sweet and beautifully rendered, but not cloyingly so--they often argue and disagree. McCarthy may be describing a bleak, dead world, but the language he uses is beautiful, sometimes even brilliant (and also sometimes self-conscious and pretentious). You can't help but keep turning the pages, because you want to know what is going to happen to these two characters.
And there are also many things to think about. For one, there is the moment when the man is standing in a crumbling library holding a ruined book, and he is surprised to realize that all art is "predicated on a world to come" --on there being a context, or even just someone there, to appreciate it. "The space which these things occupied was itself an expectation." True?
For another, the man and the boy frequently speak of themselves as "the good guys," and they are looking for the other good guys, but when they (rarely) encounter someone new, the man is too damaged and cynical to even begin a conversation. At what point does fear cease being a useful survival tool and become an endlessly self-reinforcing feedback loop?
But ultimately, I'm not sure if this novel will hold up over the long-term. If we survive our current mess, a hundred years from now I can imagine a university course on "Post-Apocalyptic Fiction 1950-2030" that would include The Day of the Triffids, The Stand, The Broken Earth trilogy, Station Eleven, The Hunger Games (read it before you sneer), and lord knows what else. Will this novel be there?
*scratches head* *thinks* *thinks some more*
Well, yes. Of course it will. But it is not without faults. There is a tacked-on ending that feels false (you wonder if his publisher made him add it). And by the end, the boy has become irritating in his unrelenting purity of heart--did McCarthy take that too far? And over-arching it all, there is what reviewer David Edelstein called McCarthy's obsession with "the end of the Age of Good Men (which never existed, but don't tell him that)." When I read that, I thought, yes! that's it exactly. In that context, the novel could easily be called The Last Good Man, and you could hand it to your class and let them have at it. There are plenty of single moms out there who would argue vociferously that it's not the women who disappear into the night.
So: definitely worth reading, but don't tackle it if you're already in a depressed or despairing mood. It's thought-provoking, if nothing else. And I kind of wish I could take that class.
(This is a slightly expanded version of the review I posted on Goodreads)
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