Carlos Hernandez: Eight Ways of Looking at Cormac McCarthy's The Road

(Spoiler Alert — This review may spoil things for some readers who miss the point of sections one and two, which argue that The Road is not a fiction, but an epic poem, and is therefore much less about plot — and hence much less vulnerable to spoilers that can spoil plots — than traditional fiction. Therefore, do not continue reading if you do not want to spoil the almost-nonexistent plot for yourself, or if you are prone to missing points.)

1.

The Road is not a novel. It is a poem. I don’t mean that as a compliment, just as a description of the genre. The Road is a nigh-plotless description of the little successes and the little failures and mostly the little events left to a father and son who claw an existence as best they can out of a post-apocalyptic American landscape. It’s focus is on language, immediacy, cosmic nihilism and love. It is written in prose, but it is a poem. A prose-poem.

2.

The Road is a specific type of poem; it is an epic. More specifically, it is an anti-epic.

The traditional epic is about the foundation of a nation, the creation of an identity, an ethos, a people. It speaks of long journeys and endless dangers and of monstrosities so fantastic they enthrall as much as they terrify. It tells of heroes who recite their genealogies before every battle and carry the history of the world on their shields.

This is an anti-epic, a long journey recounting of the last tubercular wheezings of a moribund nation, through the vantage of two of its last survivors. It is the slow dissolution of everything American. The only things left to eat are canned food — supplies are rapidly dwindling — or scavenged grains and fruit — quickly rotting; and the nuclear winter doesn’t seem to allow for new growth — or other Americans. And their numbers are dwindling and rotting too.

3.

The first time I tried to read The Road, it was just before bed after a long day. I read the first page and went to sleep. The next time I picked up the book I read 30 pages, thought it slightly derivative, and didn’t know if I would pick it up again. The next time I picked up the book I finished it in four hours.

It is, if nothing else, compelling.

4.

We never learn the nature of the apocalypse. We hear bombs (nuclear? must be) go off in the distance and see the father decide to fill his bathtub with water. We do not know if America was wrongly bombed or justly bombed or if the bomb was a kind of nuclear suicide, a harikiri meant to atone for — what? American excess? The War on Terror? Everything?

This is why the book is not science fiction: it offers no explanation, no backstory, no setting. Science fiction is, primarily, a genre of setting. The Road is literary fiction that borrows — sparsely — from a genre to write a poem about a father’s love for his son.

And it is the poorer for it. Without the rationale, there is no rationale. There is only allusion, allegory, inference: literary tropes that depend on plot to play the straight-man to their antics.

5.

There is no news in The Road. No discovery. The father sacrifices everything — even, at the end, himself — for the son. But this is what we believe fathers should do for their sons. This is what many fathers have done for their sons. Fathers who don’t sacrifice for their sons are thought of as lesser fathers.

What there is is comfort. How good it is for the father to protect and procure for and sacrifice everything for the son. How we dream we would do the same. How we fear we might not. But never fear — a father protecting his son is natural, inborn, instinctual. You would do the same for your son. Don’t worry.

6.

The son in The Road is not a character. He is a father’s fantasy son. He is the kind of son a father imagines when the father is a new father and he is holding his infant son in his arms and he is imagining the terribleness of the world and how he must protect this small, shapeless, helpless, cooing mass in his hands from the infinite supply of dangers the world so gleefully proffers. Even as he makes himself soft for his son, the father steels himself against the world and says “I will kill everyone and everything before I let a single hair be shorn from the head of my son.”

Or die trying. The father knows the world. And having a child has aged him. He knows danger now in a way he never knew as a young man, back when he was strong, belligerent, casually vicious. He knows he is mortal, he will die. Of old age, slowly thinning, stooping, losing strength? No. He will die for something. Like his beautiful new son.

7.

There is a Deus ex Machina in The Road that rescues the son, because the son cannot die. He is not allowed to die. There is every reason to believe, in this world, he would die without the father: become, perhaps, the next meal of one of the vicious nomadic armies that ravage the ravaged landscape. Or worse: become such an army’s newest catamite. Or some combination thereof.

These things are not allowed. The boy must live. This is the novel’s greatest indulgence: that the father’s sacrifice be not in vain. However unlikely, the son must live.

8.

It is a good book. It is incomplete, a kind of paean to fatherly love, a valentine McCarthy writes to his own son, to whom the book is dedicated. It is written in a commaless rush of breathless language, quietly precise and desperately afraid. It is written by a man who knows words and guns and flora, who knows the terror of life and the terror of nonlife. It is a good book.

In a world with more books and more readers, it would still be a good book. But it would not win the Pulitzer. The Pulitzer would go to a more complete book, more realized, less sentimental. A book with more than one incarnated character. That did a better job of hiding its wires, of nuancing its one-trick allegory.

But The Road has won in this world. It’s hard to begrudge it, to sully its many virtues. And yet. I pray a better, more deserving book was overlooked this year. Happens all the time: a good book wins, while a great book lies unfeted, unremarked. Until much later.

But if there was a better book, I didn’t read it.