Cormac McCarthy was one of the greatest American writers of fiction. During his life, he published 12 novels. Over the course of this year, I have been reading one of those novels each month, in publishing order, and reflecting on the experience here. Welcome to Cormac McMonthly.
I haven’t got the same fondness for Halloween that I used to.
Sure, it’s still my favourite of the “special days” on the calendar, but now that I’ve got children of my own, a marriage, and a home, my appetite for spooktacular entertainment has vastly dwindled. If I so chose, I could easily keep myself awake nights with musings on real-world scenarios more terrifying than ghoulies or goblins. But I’m usually too exhausted at the end of the day to lay awake for long.
Occasionally, though, a greater-than-baseline measure of fear finds its way into me.
A couple of nights after finishing The Road, I was awakened at precisely 4:30 in the morning by a deeply unsettling dream. In it, I was in the basement of a large old house, and had just discovered a previously-unknown sub-basement. When I opened the door to the sub-basement, a stairwell was revealed, but it seemed to lead both up and down at once. Behind it, I saw bright, strangely-coloured flashes like a strobe light or a lightning storm.
Suddenly my son appeared, and wandered toward the stairwell, excited to explore the newly-revealed layer of this house. But as he entered, the stairwell pulled him away into its depths like a whirlpool, and I was helpless to intervene.
And then I woke up.
Later that morning, at the breakfast table, I and the members of my family discussed the dreams we’d had the night before, as we sometimes do. When I said that my dream was really scary, my son, who is four years old, became intensely interested. He knows it’s rare for me to have scary dreams, and scary things fascinate him.
He clutched my sleeve as I relayed the contents of my dream, his eyes wide. Once I’d finished, he waited for more, apparently unsatisfied. After a few seconds, he asked whether a monster appeared at any point. I told him no, there weren’t any monsters in my dream.
“So in your dream, I just went up the stairs?”
“Yeah. Well, kind of.”
“And that was scary?”
“For me it was. It was really scary.”
“That’s not scary.”
“It was scary for me because I couldn’t get you. You were gone.”
“…I would have been scared if the door opened and there was a monster.”
The Road is, arguably, Cormac McCarthy’s most famous book. It deserves to be. It is everything you’ve heard about it, and more.
It is the first McCarthy book I ever read, as an undergrad a lifetime ago, and it left an indelible imprint on my brain. When I created a Goodreads account at some point years later, I hastily assigned a five-star review to The Road as part of my effort to help the Goodreads algorithm determine other books I might like.
Also, this is an utterly unlikable book. It is soul-shredding, and harrowing. It is as brutal as any collection of words McCarthy ever put his name to.
But it’s also tender. Deeply intimate.
It is as excruciating and as breathtaking as life itself, in representative amounts.
Though my re-read of The Road took place in October, it is a November book, through and through. Cold and dreary, an indeterminate slog. A tunnel so long, you eventually forget the assumption that tunnels generally have light at the end.
And of course, reading it as a tired and haggard man approaching forty with a young son only four, it hit very differently for me than it did nearly 20 years ago.
There are two central characters in The Road: the man, and the boy. But they are really two halves of the same whole for almost the entirety of the narrative.
As they trudge through gray snow and ash, and then more gray snow and ash, occasionally taking refuge in some half-collapsed meager shelter, they never stray far from one another. Neither can afford to.
There are beautiful, heartfelt moments of bonding between the man and the boy. The boy goes for a swim in water they both know is far too cold for that. He uses turns of phrase that he’s picked up along the way, much to the surprise and delight of his father. These are such keenly observed exchanges, they can only have come from Ol’ Cormie’s lived experience with his own son.
For most of the narrative, though, the boy is scared. Really scared, as he mentions numerous times. The reasons for his fear are obvious, and elemental. This post-apocalyptic world is inhospitable. His father has trained him, rightly so, to be on the lookout at all times. To be prepared to use a pistol (in which only one bullet remains). To trust nobody, and to never take chances. Often throughout their grim pilgrimage, these precautions prove to be life-saving.
The man is scared. His reasons are the same as the boy’s, and then some. His fears are unanswerable questions. Can he provide for his son, given the desperation of their circumstances? Will the illness inside him bring his life to a premature end? And if so, where would that leave his son?
So much more dreadful to contemplate (and I can barely bring myself to type these words): Will he have the courage to end his son’s life prematurely if their situation demands it? Better that, surely, than to send his son alone out into the darkness…
As a post-apocalypse road trip, The Road is a repetitive, draining read. Canned foods are found, and consumed. Starvation sets in. Strangers are encountered rarely, and warily. There is very little charity of any kind. There are far too many mentions of cannibalism for comfort.
As a meditation on the nature of the father-son relationship, The Road is a revelation. (Apologies to mothers and daughters everywhere, but I have no experience performing either of those roles. I suspect they are vastly different than the father-son continuum in many key ways.) And of course, I could never have recognized this book’s true nature when my chief concerns were getting laid, finding weed, and writing essays.
I thought I knew what to expect, returning to The Road. And in some ways, I was right. But I did not expect to find such a recognizable expanse stretching out into all that gray, ashen wilderness.
Questions arose. Ones I have asked myself countless times.
Why carry on?
What’s at the end of this journey?
Am I sure that I’m one of the good guys?
What, if anything, distinguishes me from the bad guys?
How can I ensure he has a better life than I’ve had?
What does he think of me?
When will he decide he no longer needs me, and how will I prepare my heart for that?
In the end, the man does die, as all men do. His son mourns, but is soon found, and given a new chance at life. Here, a new and different heartbreak presents itself. And this one stings even more.
A well-armed, well-stocked family had been tracking the man and the boy, toward the man’s disgraceful, ignoble end. For how long, we don’t know. It is made apparent immediately that this family can provide a far better chance at survival for the boy than the man could.
And not only survival. Perhaps something close to flourishing, if this gray, ashen world will allow such a thing.
The man did everything in his power to keep the boy close. The boy ate the food the man provided, constructed a worldview for himself within the parameters established by the man. Because of the man’s influence on him, the boy had a set of principles in his head, an idea of what was possible. A great deal of fear. A great deal of uncertainty.
And as soon as the man died, and the boy was forced to go out on his own, the possibility space for the boy brightened, and expanded. The boy contradicted his father’s dying wish, to never take a chance.
In taking a chance, in defying his father, the boy finds salvation.
And his father will never know.
But he would be glad, if he could know.
What similar limits am I placing on my son, in the name of attempting to shape him into a capable, virtuous person? How am I unknowingly failing him, in the name of love? What will he do when he finds out? He and I are fortunate to live in a world in which I feel okay dearly hoping he outlives me, unlike the characters in this novel. I only hope that his memories of me are dear.
So.
That’s The Road. You’re not the same after you’ve read this one.
Given its bleak, heartbreaking nature, why subject oneself to it?
I’ll say this: In the days since finishing it again, I’ve felt an even stronger than usual desire to keep my kids close. To hold them in my arms. To listen to them closely as they recount their daily discoveries. Both of them. My son and my daughter.
I thought I’d already been doing those things to the fullest extent of my abilities. But I see now how much more space for them I yet have in my heart.
And they do have my whole heart. They always have.
Cormac McMonthly
January: The Orchard Keeper (1965)
February: Outer Dark (1968)
March: Child of God (1973)
May: Blood Meridian, or, The Evening Redness in the West (1985)
June: All the Pretty Horses (1992)
July: The Crossing (1994)
August: Cities of the Plain (1998)
September: No Country for Old Men (2005)
Once, when the internet was young, I found out somehow about a web site whose purpose, I think, was simply to collect horrible images - photographs - and display them like curios for anyone who wanted to peer in. It triggered my curiosity. I went to the web site and looked at a couple of frames. The details aren't important, and the whole experience lasted maybe 15 seconds. Two of the images were so horrifying that I will never forget them. I never again conducted such a reckless experiment. The details aren't important. What matters is that those images infected me. They are pasted in my imagination as indelibly as a tattoo. Decades later I can still see them clearly. I wish I hadn't. There are things you can't unsee.
Years later I picked up The Road, the only book of McCarthy's I have read. I feel the same way about The Road as I do about that website. It's not what happened in the story that really got to me, though what happened was memorably disturbing; it was the depth of the despair. The skies, the forests, the campfire, the sailboat on the shore: all now part of my internal landscape. I wish I hadn't read that book, and I occasionally find myself in conversations in which I warn people away from it. It has occurred to me in the years since that it is literally the only book I've ever read that I wish I hadn't. There are some things you can't unread.
I appreciate your commentary on McCarthy's work. It's useful to know that there is some kind of return route from the deep cave into which McCarthy leads his readers. Maybe I will revisit just the last chapter, and look again. Even if I don't, there is something in knowing that there are other people who have visited that place and not returned empty handed.
This is a wonderful piece, Jayson! Very nice work (and great idea for a series on McCarthy).
The Road was my first McCarthy novel as well, and I’m grateful that it opened my eyes to his work.
Coincidentally, I started my Substack just days before his death, so my first post-launch piece was a tribute to that work in honour of his memory.
In particular, the paragraph where McCarthy uses the impossibly obscure term “salitter”--translating roughly to “essence of God”--is one of my favourites in all of prose. “The salitter drying from the earth”... the tonal resonance is perfection!