The Road (review)

NEW APPALACHIAN BOOKS Reviews Cormac McCarthy. The Road. New York: Knopf, 2006. 256 pages. Hardback in dust jacket. $24.00 "Where men can't live godsfare no better. " Cormac McCarthy Cormac McCarthy has established a literary oeuvre such that each new work is judged not only for the story it tells but in relation to the body of work that precedes it. His literary style is marked by two outstanding traits: first is the unique poetic lyricism of his language and second is his ability to tell the untold tale with a style whereby major aspects of plot development are revealed by their absence. In his books, especially in his earlier works, there are passages which are outstanding for their sheer lyrical beauty. These passages hit some neuroaesthetic circuit in the brain and create the same type of experience as standing in front of a work of art in a museum. He writes with unexpectedly imagistic prose that comes at you intense with literary creativity. This made him a writer's writer, for many years widely acclaimed by the literati but unrecognized by the public at large. After his fourth book he moved from East Tennessee to Texas and shifted the setting of his books to that terrain. He then produced Blood Meridian which, along with Suttree are masterworks in realizing his ability to write with deeply moving lyrical beauty. With The Road he maintains his reputation as a consummate literary artist. In The Road there are passages which return to the style epitomized in his earlier books. In the very first passage in the book he describes a dream saying, they stood in a great stone room where lay a black and ancient lake. And on the far shore a creature that raised its dripping mouth from the rimstone pool and stared into the light with eyes dead white and sightless as the eggs of spiders. It swung its head low over the water as if to take the scent of what it could not see. Crouching there pale and naked and translucent, its alabaster bones cast up in shadow on the rocks behind it. Its bowels, its beating heart. The brain that pulsed in a dull glass bell. It swung its head from side to side and then 96 gave out a low moan and turned and lurched away and loped soundlessly into the dark. This beastly specter haunts the entire novel and reappears at the end as death takes its inexorable toll. Leaving key elements of the story untold, makes unusual demands upon the reader who gradually figures out what has happened. These untold parts become evident because, in many cases, they are major events in the lives of the characters and dramatically shape the flow of the book. Yet they are never mentioned or described in the text. In The Road the major event that determines the whole course of the book is one of these untold tales. It is an apocalyptic event: the earth is shrouded with perpetual clouds; ash is raining down from the sky; the ground is covered with ash; all the trees and plants are dead; there is no electricity, no gasoline, no automobiles, no agriculture, no animals; the earth is cold, the cities are deserted, and the population is decimated. The only food is what has been canned or preserved and the pickings are getting very slim. Yet he never describes the event. Was it nuclear? Was it volcanic? Was it meteors? What happened? You don't know, and you never find out. You can determine bits and pieces, there are clues. Perhaps, if you are a scientist, you can deduce from the descriptions of the weather and the conditions of the devastated landscape what type of catastrophe has happened. Nor does he give the names or the ages of any of the characters. There are only two main characters, an old man and his son. The boy is still playing with toys; the conversation between them is at a certain level. You know he is speaking to a boy, maybe about eight years old, just from the way they talk. The old man is constantly scavenging; he is trying to...