The Road

Cormac McCarthy

There's a fantastic scene about halfway through The Road, Cormac McCarthy's brilliant new novel, that sketches out the entire situation in relatively few words, illuminating most of the novel's subtexts, conflicts, and thrusts in one small prayer that is not recognized as such by the character who's speaking it. It comes out of nowhere, and is magical-- a small miracle in the middle of a vast American wasteland.

Much the same could be said of The Road itself. For the first time in recorded history, the notoriously sparse output of Cormac McCarthy has included two books in the space of fifteen months. (For that matter, this is the first time there hasn't been at least twenty-four months between McCarthy novels-- and he only got that frequent with the Border trilogy.) In any case, this would be an embarrassment of riches, but it's all the better when the two books put out so close to one another are so good. No Country for Old Men was classic McCarthy, spare, ugly, and violent; The Road is something entirely different, and yet still classic McCarthy in many ways.

It is ostensibly a science fiction novel, but where genre is concerned, one would be hard-pressed to tell it from one of McCarthy's usual western survival thrillers. (And when you think about it, how many sci-fi novels have seemed rather like western survival thrillers?) We are in America somewhere, and we open about three hundred miles from the coast. What coast we do not know, although our main characters have to travel South to get there. Something devastating happened to America a number of years ago-- recent enough that a presumably middle-aged man has some memories of what life was like before, distant enough that a presumably preadolescent boy does not. These, father and son, are our two main characters, and McCarthy comes relatively close (with the exception of characters encountered in memory, the two have only direct contact with four others throughout the entire novel) to achieving the two-person narrative. The book is essentially plotless; it is the story of the father and son's journey to the coast.

McCarthy's somewhat odd turn towards readability continues, as well; we're used to the big, sweeping epic scope of a Cormac McCarthy novel. The Road is an entirely different animal altogether; it's almost a bedtime story. It reads like nobody's business-- fast and hard. Which is pretty amazing for a plotless novel. (Think of Stephen King releasing the story of Trashy's journey through the desert in The Stand as its own book, and you start to get the idea.) The entire thing is character-driven, and yet it is compulsively readable. You get to love these characters, and you get to do so quickly, despite the many reasons we have not to like them.

As well, the simplicity here is deceptive; there's a whole lot going on underneath the surface. McCarthy has, in fact, written another big, sweeping epic, with all the usual moral quandaries, shifting subtexts, and subtle characterization, he's just packed it all in a surprisingly small and easy-to-read box. This is a book that, twenty years from now, will have as many masters' theses written about it as Blood Meridian does now. It is, in fact, his best effort since that book. If you are already a Cormac McCarthy fan, you will want to queue up outside the bookstore on October 2nd, 2006; if you're not already a fan, this is just about the best book of McCarthy's you could possibly start with. Easily one of the finest novels of 2006.