Cormac McCarthy's The Road

Spoilers alert!

Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, winner of the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, is the sort of miserable, wretched book you read all at once lest you have to pick it up again. It follows the journey of a nameless pair - father and son - through a landscape desolated by an apocalyptic event. I thought it might be an illustration of an“Life is a journey, not a destination” platitude, but the journey is horrible, full of terrorizing cannibals who harvest other humans for food, and the destination – a warm place by the sea – never materializes. The NYT review put it this way: “The Road would be pure misery if not for its stunning, savage beauty.”

What is that savage beauty?

In part, it's the urgent yet understated writing:

They began to come upon from time to time small ciarns of rock by the roadside. They were signs in gypsy language, lost patterans. The first he'd seen in some while, common in the north, leading out of the looted and exhausted cities, hopeless messages to loved ones lost and dead. By then all stores of food had 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 soft black talc blew through the streets like squid ink uncoiling along a sea floor and the cold swept down and the dark came early and the scavengers passing down the steep canyons with their torches trod silky holes in the drifted ash that closed behind them silently as eyes. Out on the roads the pilgrims sank down and fell over and died and the bleak and shrouded earth went trundling past the sun and returned again as trackless and as unremarked as the path of any nameless sisterworld in the ancient dark beyond. (180-181)

[Seriously, read that again. Amazing.]

It's also the love between father and son, “each the other's world entire.” The man tells the boy:

When your dreams are of some world that never was or of some world that will never be and you are happy again, then you will have given up. Do you understand? And you cant give up. I wont let you. (189)

At the end, coughing blood and nearing death, the father instructs the son to eat their last can of peaches. And the son, though he could use the nourishment, saves half for his father. (277)

It's a touching book, sure, and the recipient of adoring praise, but it wasn't worth it. To me, it was less of a testament about the sustaining power of love and more of a reminder to never live through an apocalypse. For all the wisdom McCarthy supposedly imparts, I felt about the book as the father felt about his awful existence: “Some part of him always wished it to be over.” (154)