On The Road

For a while when I was in my early twenties, Cormac McCarthy was pretty much the only writer who mattered to me. There was something about his prose--the visceral and lyrical qualities both at once on the page, the contrasting tautness and then flow of the lines--that took hold of me. His writing displayed the control of language that I admired in Faulkner and Joyce and Hemingway, but in a context that brought new dimensions of meaning. McCarthy possessed what seemed to me a new kind of authenticity, a way of looking at the world without flinching. That was what I wanted to do in my writing.

I squandered a graduate career in creative writing laboring under his shadow. No one has suffered the anxiety of influence greater than I did in those days. At a certain point, I knew that I had to get out.

This was just after the publication of Cities of the Plain, a novel that seemed to exaggerate the worst qualities of McCarthy's prose--the way his lyricism tended to the overwritten and the overwrought. I cut out McCarthy cold turkey, and I never looked back.

Until now.

Used bookstore, April 27, 2008: a copy of The Road sitting on the new arrivals shelf. I pick it up out of curiosity. I read the first line. I'm hooked.

* * *

It's not that McCarthy was ever a bad writer, but he did stagnate more and more as the Border Trilogy wore on. The work that I never lost respect for was Blood Meridian, which portrays human beings--men, really--at their absolute worst: depraved, violent, thoughtless. No book ever rattled me as much as this one.

The Road makes a good counterpoint to Blood Meridian. Both novels are set in waste lands that are partly natural and partly of human design, but ultimately the work of some detached and very distant neoplatonic god that communicates marginally through elemental symbols: blood, stars, desolate and leafless trees, the lay of the landscape and the way the sun sets on it. (Or, in the case of The Road, the way the sun sets behind the clouds that perpetually cover it.) The difference that separates the landscapes of these two novels--one set in the past, the other in the not-so-distant future--is the presence of something in The Road that never shows up in Blood Meridian, and it is something that is evident in the very first line of The Road:

"When he woke in the woods in the dark and the cold of the night he'd reach out to touch the child sleeping beside him."

In the desolation and ash of a post-apocalyptic landscape (where the only things alive seem to be a few ragged, dingy human beings subsisting on what canned goods--or what other human beings--they can find) there persists something that could only be described as a deep and enduring love--though McCarthy himself would never use such a sentimentally laden word for it. Here at the end of the world, though, this is what we have.

The novel that follows is tense, brutal, dismaying at times--and desparate throughout--but it never loses as its focus this core bond between father and son. The protagonist of Blood Meridian, known only as "the kid," never seems to know anything that remotely resembles this kind of bond with anyone. The child present here knows it as the central fact of his life in a place where even insects and fungi seem to be dead.

In general, McCarthy has, by comparison to some of his earlier work, wisely toned down the prose in this novel. Occasionally, a line might make the reader wince as it collapses under its own heavily descriptive syntax, but a few such lines can be tolerated. We get a lot of clipped sentence fragments, most often images of the landscape: "Barren, silent, godless." Or this line, with a Hemingway-esque barrage of nouns and modifiers, lacking a finite verb: "Ash moving over the road and the sagging hands of blind wire strung from the blackened lightpoles whining thinly in the wind." In a field the travelers see "The corrugate shapes of old harrowtroughs still faintly visible." A stretch of ruined city appears: "Everything as it once had been save faded and weathered." Eventually, the sea washes up: "Cold. Desolate. Birdless." In other instances, the sentences roll on without the hindrance of punctuation.

The overall effect of the description is sometimes stirring: who would have thoughts to describe "hands" of wire, a phrasing that reminds us of a vanished human presence?--and "corrugate" for the fields, which not only enables the reader to see the contours of the fields but also gives off the suggestion of a hard, unyielding quality to a once-fertile landscape? That landscape still bears a trace of human design though the people who once worked the land are well beneath it now. McCarthy's descriptions of landscape depend at once upon specificity (in terms of imagery) and vagueness (never is a particular stretch of road or a ruined city or town ever mentioned by name, though the travelers have with them a tattered roadmap and they themselves know the names of everything). This dynamic between the revealed and the withheld is one that urges on a mythical, legendary quality--this is someplace but it could be any place. The same notion applies with names; just as the kid in Blood Meridian is never identified by name, neither father nor son ever utters the name of the other in these pages.

In all, the style here is typical McCarthy--poetic and sometimes overly poetic, dominated by imagery--and yet the pace of this novel (the plot of which is not much more than typical dystopian/sci-fi fare) is brisk. This book is a quick, compelling, and easy read--what they typically call a "page-turner."

McCarthy resurrects for this novel the motifs that have become typical of his ouvre, and it is a good bet that many of the readers out there who have made this book a bestseller have skipped over the more complicated and esoteric allusions. Religious symbolism figures largely and frequently takes on a gnostic or neoplatonic flair: we get shadows, caves, flickering light, a mysterious God who chooses not to reveal himself in any very direct way. There is a running theatre motif as well that reinforces the notion of an acted-out fiction, a discrepency between appearances and reality. Together these factors develop the epistemological notion that the underlying truths of the world are somewhere inaccessible to anyone who walks this earth. We get a sense of characters who are part of the landscape but can only wonder at their role within it, characters who simultaneously know something and don't know it, "Like the great pendulum in its rotunda scribing through the long day movements of the universe of which you may say it knows nothing and yet know it must." The second-person address here implicates us as part of this universe, and it is this quality--this making readers aware that they inhabit the same world that McCarthy's characters do--that separates his work from cheap fantasy and makes reading it such a powerful and affecting experience.

Throughout the novel, the word "pilgrim" shows up on a regular basis to remind us that father and son here are not searching merely for material sustenance but for a deeper, more profound meaning as well. The book gives us a glimpse of this kind of meaning, the force that animates the world. Father and son find it in each other: the father "knew only that the child was his warrant. He said: If he is not the word of God God never spoke." (It is poignantly worth noting that McCarthy, who seems patently emotionless in the few interviews he has agreed to, dedicated the novel to his young son, John Francis.) The child here bears a crude but ingrained bent for the rhetorical, and by the end of the book we are led to believe that he is, if not the son of God, at least a prophet with a vague resemblance, ready to spread the word.

Ultimately, the future apocalypse of The Road only disguises allegorically the condition of the present: the persistence of evil in the world, the fragility of life, the bond of kin, the mystery of the created world. How McCarthy, who has taken us from the Old West to a future age, will reveal that world to us yet again remains to be seen.