The Road: Long, Winding, Dangerous

Nantucket

Pulitzer Prize winner Cormac McCarthy's new book, The Road, reminds me why I continue to practice writing. Not that I will be a McCarthy, but writing offers the opportunity to flesh out your point of view. And in The Road, McCarthy does it brilliantly.

McCarthy's gift in this book is his ability to take us to the edge of despair. And yet he doesn't allow the despair to prevail as the dominant emotion. Following the journey of a father and son trying to stay alive in a post-apochalyptic America, I became protective of the pair, alone in the dark at night with little or no food, filthy from days without clean clothes or shelter.

"We're one of the good guys," the father tells the boy as they push a rickety grocery cart with tattered belongings up and down what seem like endless hills. "We carry the light."

The story is written in the third person in such a way that you feel like a voyeur at some junctures. The two stay off the road, mostly, because it is too dangerous with marauders who not only kill on sight but have become cannibals as well. They forage through abandoned houses just like yours and mine in the cold daylight, the sun occluded by nuclear dust. There is 9/11 ash everywhere.


How McCarthy conjures up the details of an America that has been totally devastated is beyond me. For example, he spends two pages describing in exquisite detail father's search of a small Spanish sailing vessel, swollen from being partly underwater for a long time, while the boy sits on shore guarding their few belongings with the pistol. Naked except for a Noreaster and rubber boots which he found aboard, he combs the boat and, shivering in the waist deep water, McCarthy details the specifics of the search.

The father painstakingly sorts through and dissembles anything that will help them survive.Part of the bounty he brings back to shore includes rusty cans of food and a flaregun that saves their lives in the next deserted ( or mostly deserted ) town they pass through.



The Road is the kind of book that stays with you. The kind of book you may even dream about for a few nights after you're finished reading it.

Pick it up at the bookstore.

I promise it will not disappoint from either a literary standpoint with its beautiful language or as a moral tale of a father's ultimate love.

His love for his son, his hope for legacy, his willingness to believe in the future.

Uncertain, yes. But still. The future. Where there are still some good guys.

M.C.