Cormac Mccarthy’s The Road
“The passed through the city at noon of the day following. He kept the pistol to hand on the folded tarp on top of the cart. He kept the boy close to his side. The city was mostly burned. No sign of life. Cars in the street caked with ash, everything covered with ash and dust. Fossil tracks in the dried sludge. A corpse in the doorway dried to leather. Grimacing at the day. He pulled the boy closer. Just remember that the things you put into your head are there forever, he said. You might want to think about that.
You forget some things, don’t you?
Yes. You forget what you want to remember and you remember what you want to forget.”
Despite the overwrought blurb on the back of the book “with each book [he] expands the territory of American fiction” this is a good and possibly great book. Father and son pick their way through a postapocalyptic landscape and though the journey is unremittingly bleak, the tale holds you. And though I have lost my need for the ends of books, I did notice how bad this particular ending was. Every word perfect in its place until the last disjointed and disappointing paragraph. Still, this is some book, and so much better than the dreck of Country of Old Men, his last one, a third-rate James Crumley imitation. But that was one of the few false steps in a hell of a career. And this book bolsters once again the sense that came so bold out of his trilogy that here was Ernest Hemingway reborn.
It makes me so very happy to see old Papa appreciated instead of derided and dismissed. I meet less and less people who are willing to recognize his genius (Somebody actually said to me recently that Hem was only for teenage boys. I nearly wept). I have been aware of Hemingway’s ghost haunting McCarthy’s writing but the other ghost that haunts his work is Faulkner’s, and I’ve noticed an odd evolution in McCarthy’s novels. Maybe evolution isn’t the right word, as it implies a qualitative development from good to better. Let’s say a journey instead (I presume to think that McCarthy would like that). From Blood Meridian to The Crossing, Faulkner is ascendant, but in The Crossing (interesting, considering the title) Hemingway begins to dominate, until finally No Country For Old Men and The Road strike me as the most Hemingwayan of all of his novels. I wonder if this is intentional, and I also wonder if it reflects the temporal movement of McCarthy’s work from the 1800s into the future (Is the post-apocalyptic vision sci-fi or fantasy, or is it a genre of its own? (should The Road be in the sci-fi and fantasy section?))
I think you’re being a little hard on No Country For Old Men. I could never bring myself to call anything McCarty writes “third rate.” On his worst day he is so far above all of the hacks and scribblers out there (Jim Harrison is the only writer I can think of who comes close in doing justice to Hemingway’s legacy). Like you, I was disappointed, though. It does strike me as his weakest novel. However, at the same time, I wonder if my disappointment arose from the fact that I sat down to read it expecting another Blood Meridian. In No Country McCarthy does a fairly radical departure form his usual style, but I can see how it suited the story, the characters, and mood of the novel. It’s the only novel of his, that I’ve read, with extensive first person narratives and it sometimes seemed to me that the sheriff was actually narrating the entire thing even when it seemed to be the omniscient narrator we are familiar with in McCarthy’s work. I might call the novel a failed experiment, but I hope to Christ I’m ever able to fail as beautifully as McCarthy does.
I don’t recall being disappointed with the ending of The Road. Unfortunately, I also don’t have a copy on hand to take another look at it. What specifically did you find disappointing?
(I wish this thing had spell check. Please forgive any errors)
Comment by Kirt Vocals — December 8, 2006 @ 12:26 pm
Specifically the last paragraph, and that only. Will write more later.
Comment by aos — December 8, 2006 @ 1:00 pm
At the risk of being too easy to please, I agree with almost everything you say, and pretty well as vehemently regarding the great one’s loss in profile. I kind of think of Hemingway and Faulkner as the Beatles and Stones of modern American literature, the two touchstones, and the false dichotomy of having to choose only one of them. Both brilliant, and both necessary, and you are spot on seeing them both in Cormac.
Crossing was almost a homage in its various Hemingway motifs such as untranslated phrases of Spanish, the grass roots socialism, and so many other things that no longer inhabit my memory. I just remember at the time my mind cried out “I know this.”
As I said it is only the very last paragraph in The Road. Read it again and see what you think. It struck me as an afterthought or an attempt to summon an image of the lost world but somehow all the poetry to that point was no longer.
And I am particulary hard on County because if there is a genre I have read really a lot of it is that of hard guy, noirish fiction from parodies to straight up, classics to modern. It was another case of “I know this” but not the good kind.
Idea for a fun waster…if H and F are the Beatles and the Stones (reversed probably) then who is The Who, Pixies, etc….shall we map rocknroll onto modern fiction in English or is that too ludicrous for words?
I am going to look at my books at home as well. I know there are a few other “Hemingway’s” lurking there.
Comment by aos — December 8, 2006 @ 2:05 pm