The Road
Picador, 2006.

Cormac McCarthy has honed down his clipped, dialogue driven style to the curve and gleam of a deer rifle’s bullet, and has aimed it directly at a target roughly the size of a dime between the reader’s eyes. Bullets can be beautiful as a Brancusi sculpture if we look at them up close and they can be terrible as the Parsi’s Towers of Silence, blocking out moon and sun and casting long shadows if we hold them close to our eyes. This is what Cormac McCarthy has done with his two recent novels: No Country for Old Men, and now this parable of life in Nuclear Winter America, where everything that once meant something is gone and the only thing left is a father long on survival skills, but coughing his lungs out, bent over, hands on knees, and his beautiful son born after the bombs destroyed everything and set the dust in the air that keeps the sun away and sets a permanent chill over everything. The plots have become simple as the Book of Job, the philosophy as timeless as Ecclesiastes. In No Country for Old Man, there’s the initial entanglement with drug dealers, and an uncanny killer set loose like a plague of locusts on the West; the good guys, after doing everything humanly possible, manage to keep the inevitable at bay for the span of 200 pages, but the final verdict is bewilderment in the living, and abrupt certainties for the dead. The Road makes it even more plain: that part of human make-up that makes us act within the law and treat each other with dignity and respect, that smallest constellation of synapses that fire over and over in an arcane sequence that keeps us from being cannibals, or marching in squads through city and country searching out victims to rape, and villages to pillage, is–at best–conditional. And just like the classics that arose out of the long ago wars and rebellions and deaths of whole civilizations, Cormac McCarthy’s dark parables have now arisen from the moral uncertainties of the present time. They’re quick, clean cuts across the wrist, and The Road is his deepest cut to date.