The Road by Cormac McCarthy (review)

b o o k R e v ie w s The Road. By Cormac McCarthy. New York: Knopf, 2006. 241 pages, $24-00/$ 14-95. Reviewed by David Cremean Black Hills State University, Spearfish, SD With The Road, Cormac McCarthy leaves, at least for a time, the West that has been the setting for most of his novels, moving back to the homeland of the majority of his childhood and earlier adult years, the southern United States— that is, what was the southern United States until just a few years before the novel’s main timeline begins. McCarthy nevertheless maintains strong ties to the West. He continues to live near Santa Fe, New Mexico, where he is an unpaid sort of writer-in-residence at the Santa Fe Institute. And as he told Oprah Winfrey in the unprecedented television interview he granted her, the idea for the novel came to him while he and his young son were in a hotel in his former hometown of El Paso, Texas. Despite its nonwestem setting, The Road represents the end of the West in every way (the American West, as well as Western civilization) and simultane­ ously the rebirth of a vast “frontier,” in the Tumerian and other more recent senses of that word. The landscape is hellish: almost solely, fire provides non­ blackened colors beneath a dark, dun sky. Though McCarthy leaves the cause of the earth-wide destruction open to question, it almost certainly was caused by either meteors or a nuclear holocaust, given details describing the severity of the prevailing “winter” and the flash of light. Each of McCarthy’s ten novels published thus far features protagonists among elemental conditions. From “Uncle Ather” and John Wesley Rattner of his debut, The Orchard Keeper (1994), on through Llewelyn Moss and Sheriff Ed Tom Bell in No Country for Old Men (2005), McCarthy’s leading men can be viewed as “frontiersmen,” whether in the South or the West. The same holds true for the nameless father and son in this Pulitzer-Prize-winning novel. Much like Norman Maclean’s A River Runs Through It (1976) can be read as a manual detailing how to flyfish, The Road can be read as a manual in survivalism . As other reviewers have noted, Ernest Hemingway, particularly in the two “Big Two-Hearted River” stories, casts a long shadow over this novel in numer­ ous ways. However, no earlier reviewers have actually suggested what is perhaps the major theme the similarities call to mind: the ritualistic behaviors of Nick Adams and the father that in each case seem to lead to grace. Much of the earliest criticism of McCarthy’s writing argued it was nihilis­ tic; in fact, Vereen Bell’s The Achievement of Cormac McCarthy (1988), the first book written about the author, took that position. Mark Busby, in his review of The Road for Southwestern American Literature, still makes such a claim. However, McCarthy’s biographically verifiable mysticism, itself arguably the main spiritual current in western American literature, is easily mistaken for nihilism. And the author’s own words recommending ecumenical prayer on W e s t e r n A m e r ic a n L i t e r a t u r e S p r in g 2 0 0 8 Oprah and several past instances in which he has referred to spiritual concerns indicate he absolutely is not a nihilistic author. Most important, his admittedly ambiguous published writings also reveal a strong sense of the mystical/spiritual , and The Road proves no exception: at its end, we are told that the son prays to his father. The son and father are also “good guys,” in their own parlance, carriers “of the fire,” among the number of Eastern religious concepts in the novel (here, Hindi, and harkening back to numerous other McCarthy writings). The title itself suggests The Tao, or “way,” of Taoism. And the novel’s final paragraph focuses on the trout that no longer inhabit the world; like so many vanished life forms, they “hummed of mystery” (241). This hum resonates with the Hindu Aum or Om, as, it bears noting, does character Black’s frequent...