Dave Schaafsma's Reviews > The Road

“What would you do if I died?
If you died I would want to die too.
So you could be with me?
Yes. So I could be with you.
Okay.” --McCarthy

4/6/18 Re-reading this for my spring 2o18 Climate Change class, and even knowing how it ends, I am wrecked, just devastated by this book, so horrific and so beautiful and moving. Sobbing as I do at the most intimate of losses, but feeling the intensity of any great passionate beauty, too. The beauty of a great book that helps you see what matters.

9/1/14 Original review, edited a bit in the light of my most recent reading.

An amazing book. So powerful, understated, majestic, moving. Just blew me away. Some one said this was a "dictionary" book, meaning that they had to look up words a lot, and yes, it is a book that loves language, some of it ancient and forgotten, maybe befitting the subject of loss, but McCarthy is always this blend of Faulknerian epic-loss-language and Hemingway's power-through-simplicity-language. Some of the cadences are Biblical, as in King James elevated language, as in The Grapes of Wrath and Cry, The Beloved Country. And the simple, devastating power of Of Mice and Men and The Old Man and the Sea. Books of allegorical significance and moral power.

In a way, this tale, set years after nuclear holocaust and environmental devastation, is a kind of guide for the apocalypse--any apocalypse, the Big One, your own or a loved one's death, the end of anything--with principle, with character, dignity and love; in this case, it is a father and son facing oblivion, moving forward, Pilgrim's Progress, "carrying the fire" against all odds, never giving up, and it is heartbreaking and devastating. You wonder, like them, whether you could or can go on. This simple, bleak tale has a kind of echo in it of Dylan Thomas's "Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night," where Thomas urges his own father to fight death and not just acquiesce to it, or give into it. The man in this story teaches his son to fight to stay alive and be one of the "good guys" (or, ethical) with any means available at their disposal. In this simple, bleak dystopian story, we are very possibly at the end of time, in an ash, Beckettian landscape, waiting for Godot, people reduced to their most animal selves. And yet, there are relationships that remain, with simple pleasures, enjoyed by fathers and sons. The find a can of Coke, they eat a can of peaches, they tell each stories, they draw pictures, they play a primitive flute they have made, the arts comforting and sustaining them when they need it.

Recently, we had the suicide of Robin Williams, someone we had come to believe we knew well through movies where he played characters urging us to laugh and seize the day, every day. But he was playing characters in movies, and we began, as we do, I suspect, to make the mistake of believing that the convincingly hopeful characters he played were internalized in his own soul. And maybe they were, for a time. Camus said, post-Hiroshima, post-Holocaust, that suicide was the only important philosophical question that remained, and McCarthy, aging as we all are, helps us contemplate this question, too, as we face or imagine facing devastation, death, that nuclear winter.

Throughout the book the man speaks to or reflects on his wife, years gone, who made another choice than he has, and given what they faced, she faced, a reasonable one, and one the man teaches his son to passionately resist, though in his quietest moments, he longs for it himself. When they encounter an old man, a kind of dark seer, on the road they speak of luck and what it can mean in such a time, and neither are sure what it even means anymore: Is it luckier to live or die in the face of the very end? The man has no hope, though:

“People were always getting ready for tomorrow. I didn't believe in that. Tomorrow wasn't getting ready for them. It didn't even know they were there.”

The old man says to the man, “There is no God and we are his prophets.”

But the boy believes in and his shaped by his belief in God. They are the good guys who draw the line at barbarity, even when it makes some sense to succumb to it.

Recently, in the Chicago area, I wept to read of another suicide, one of an 82 year old man whose wife was in hospice and living with his two aging children, developmentally disabled; the man first murdered the family everyone knew he had deeply loved, then killed himself. (I know, sorry, this is bleak). But no one in their neighborhood or family questioned his love for his family or even his choice. Who can blame this man, facing an inevitably harder end, his friends seemed to say. Not me, the father of two sons, one with severe autism and the other also now diagnosed autistic. I'm 61. What will happen to them when I am gone? Sam, 18, autistic, living during the week in a group home, comes here to my house every other weekend, and so many of the minimum wage folks he works with are caring and loving, but 3-4 years ago we took a young man to trial for pushing him down a flight of stairs, where he was knocked out and his arm badly broken. He can't speak to defend himself. What future does he have, and what future especially without a loving parent to help defend and speak for him? What does his "road" hold for him? Sometimes, in my worst moments, and thankfully they are few, I think we are Liam Neeson, in The Grey, facing the wolves of destruction in the Arctic (as Neeson himself did when he lost his wife to a skiing accident, facing his own emotional holocaust and nuclear winter), knife in hand, to the end.

I have heard this is McCarthy's most personal novel, and since he is a father, and dedicates the book to his own so John Francis McCarthy, I can guess this maybe this is true. I can imagine it as a letter to him, or to all fathers and sons, to help them face down their own terrible moments with grace and resourcefulness. In this book, the man is handy, he is always problem-solving, fixing what he has with the tools available to him, scavenging, finding food and water, reading and telling stories to his son with lessons he sometimes barely believes himself anymore. Whatever he does, McCarthy tells us the son watches his father, and learns. Without his son, there is only death, and he must to the end teach his son how to be handy, to be resourceful, to go on, to live, the best he can.

My own father, the weekend before he died on the operating table for his second bypass surgery, at 76, dropped down to slide under the chassis of my aging Chevy and check out my fading brakes, to the end urging me to care about my stuff, to do the right thing, mentoring me in the right way to live. That night he held one of his last great grandchildren in his arms; less than 48 hours later he was dead, which was still the most devastating moment of my life. Reading the father-son relationship that is at the heart of this book through my own loss makes it tender, gives it depth and rich sentiment. I mean, it is harsh, and bleak, this world the father and son live in, but the story is fundamentally sweet and moving. It's about what matters, as the best of books always are.

McCarthy urges me and us to go on, to be resourceful, to care for each other, and to care for the Earth we were given. There are images so terrible in this book that the man tries to shelter from his son, though the son sees them anyway, and we see them, too. Are they useful to see? I surely don't want some of them in my memory, but there they are, reminding me of past genocides and tragedies and prefiguring the ones surely yet to come on personal and global levels. Maybe it's useful to remind me of the "bad guys" who the man and boy meet on the road, who make the immoral, the wrong choices. What evil is humanly possible? But also, what good? What do we need to do to save the planet? Do we really want to? How long can we keep our heads in the sand, as humans with the power still to (maybe) reverse the environmental end? McCarthy teaches us how to live, and why it is so important: Because of love, and family, and the beauty of the planet.

“Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery.”--McCarthy

Camus suggests that we humans, post WWII--the Holocaust and Hiroshima, and Stalin, all of it- juts push that Myth of Sisyphus-boulder up that hill without any assurance of meaning beyond the doing of it. I can't go on; I'll go on, Samuel Becket has his narrator say at the end of The Unnameable, and that's what the man does and perhaps we should do in the worst of circumstances. McCarthy know his Beckett, but finally, McCarthy is not Beckett, as much as this tale owes to McCarthy's master; McCarthy gives us just a little more dignity and hope than Beckett, I think.

I think, too, in my darkest moments that I understand Robin Williams, facing Parkinson's disease, and that 82 year old man, seeing the bleak future for him and his wife and children. I am not and have never yet been suicidal, but I understand their choices. I understand Camus and Beckett on these important subjects. I may have to reread this tale again and again to keep me on the road the man took instead of the one his wife chose. After all, I have sons (and a daughter) to care for. Maybe I'm gonna hug my kids a little bit harder tonight.