Weekly meditations from your humble messenger
Lonely
Planet
(The Road, 1/8/07)
By Nicholas Nicastro
Oscar
Wilde once said "One must have a heart of stone to read the death
of [Dickens's] Little Nell without laughing." Mirth may not be
the first impulse of anyone contemplating Cormac McCarthy's latest hellscape,
but it's probably the one most conducive to mental health. The Road
(Knopf, 241 pp.) is a novel with all the transformative power of a true
ordeal, so terrible and inevitable and deathly serious that to finish
it is to invite laughter.
To say McCarthy has written a post-apocalyptic
nightmare should provoke déjà vu. His acknowledged
classic, Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West (1985)
is a Boschian spectacle of human depravity, pitched against a kaleidoscope
of blasted southwest landscapes. That McCarthy is a prose stylist of
the first order is undeniable; no living writer I know of, with the
possible exception of William T. Vollmann, writes so evocatively of
natural spaces. McCarthy is also captivated by mortality in a way a
lover is, desperate to know every dimple and nook of his beloved's body.
He might as well have been describing about his own esthetic when, in
The Road, he writes of his unnamed protagonist, "He mistrusted
[pleasant dreams]. He said the right dreams for a man in peril were
dreams of peril and all else was the call of languor..."
As in Blood Meridian, McCarthy's
story is about a handful of figures, minimally characterized. The Man
and his son, The Boy, have survived a worldwide nuclear holocaust and
subsequent climatic crash that has left the earth a gray, lifeless husk.
The survivors—the ones who have not already committed suicide out
of despair—must eke out a kind of existence scavenging the dwindling
remains of the old world. "[The Man] had this feeling before,"
writes McCarthy, "beyond the numbness and the dull despair. The
world shrinking down about a core of parsible entities. The names of
things slowly following those things into oblivion. Colors. The names
of birds. Things to eat. Finally the names of things one believed to
be true."
If that wasn't enough, father and
son must avoid all contact with their fellow Americans, who by and large
have turned to barbarism: "By then all stores of food have given
out and murder was everywhere upon the land. The world soon to be largely
populated by men who would eat your children in front of your eyes and
the cities themselves held by cores of blackened looters who tunneled
among the ruins and crawled from the rubble white of tooth and eye,
carrying charred and anonymous tins of food in nylon nets like shoppers
in the commissaries of hell."
The Boy, who appears to be no older
than seven or eight, only knows the pre-war world through the stories
of his father. The latter derives his only existential purpose in keeping
his son alive. In search of warmth, he guides them south, toward what
was once the Gulf coast of the United States. The preponderance of the
book is an account of what they salvaged and what they ate on the way:
"The days sloughed past uncounted and uncalendared. Along the interstate
in the distance long lines of charred and rusting cars. The raw rims
of the wheels sitting in a stiff gray sludge of melted rubber, in blackened
rings of wire. The incinerate corpses shrunk to the size of a child
and propped on the bare springs of the seats. Ten thousand dreams ensepulchred
within their crozzled hearts." The overall impression is repetitive
yet harrowing; readers will likely learn far more than they thought
possible about how to derive nourishment from substances that aren't
food.
With its hard, spare elegance, McCarthy's
prose can't be faulted. Vivid as it is, though, The Road is not
particularly imaginative. This vision of nuclear winter, with its dreary
skies and drifts of ash, is exactly what anybody would predict of such
an eventuality. Yet one suspects that the real disaster would produce
more—and more bizarre—surprises. The most fertile swath of
modern Ukraine is the zone irradiated by the disaster at Chernobyl.
That McCarthy thinks prolific and resourceful species like crows and
gulls would actually go extinct in a world full of unburied corpses
typifies a larger failure of imagination. Without a doubt, nuclear armageddon
would put a crimp in human progress. One species' debacle, however,
is almost always another's bonanza.
Perhaps the most telling thing about
The Road, though, is that one of our most gifted novelists is
caught up in the same apocalyptic anxiety as most everyone else. The
suspicion seems widespread that we're either trapped on a speeding train
we can't stop, or standing on the tracks as something very big and very
bad approaches. The details may differ, but anyone can recognize his
or her own fears in how McCarthy describes civilization's final day:
"The clocks stopped at 1:17. A long shear of light and then a series
of low concussions. He got up and went to the window. What is it? she
said. He didn't answer. He went into the bathroom and threw the lightswitch
but the power was already gone. A dull rose glow in the windowglass.
He dropped to one knee and raised the lever to stop the tub and then
turned on both taps as far they would go. She was standing in the doorway
in her nightwear, clutching the jamb, cradling her belly in one hand.
What is it? she said. What is happening?"
©2007 Nicholas Nicastro
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