The Road

The Road
Cormac McCarthy

By now, you’ve heard of this book. You’ve seen it on Oprah. You’ve read of its Pulitzer in the newspaper. You’ve heard your friends talking about it. And Slate’s book club talking about it. And maybe you’ve read some reviews. You will not come to this book with a clean palate.

At least that’s how I felt when I picked it up, in an airport bookstore on my way to a week’s worth of vacation (which for me means copious book consumption). While reading the back cover, the lady standing next to me points to it and says plainly, “You’ll love it. It’s excellent.”

And you know, I did love it. At least, I liked it greatly. A post-apocalyptic fable set in a nameless world after a nameless disaster and peopled by nameless characters, the story explores what happens when structure is gone. A man and his son scavenge through the wreckage for the basic (and extremely scarce) necessities of life, with absolutely no hope for the future, holding on only to their idea of their own “goodness.” Goodness is a major theme in this novel: What does it mean to be “the good guys”? With a very stripped down approach to dialogue, the man and his son ponder this and hold it as their only value. “Are we still the good guys?” the son asks after his father has made hard choices for their safety. In a system where survival is the absolute only thing you can hope for, rules for how to go about it are laid down based on this sense of good guys vs. bad guys. The young son is the moral center of the book, raising questions about retribution and compassion.

Despite the bleakness surrounding them, the relationship between the father and the son is redemptive. Their love for one another is what makes them the good guys, because they still hold human life as a value. The father concedes to the words of the mother (who takes her own life before the story begins) when she says he wouldn’t be alive without the boy. The boy gives him purpose. And being alive is still something to strive for (which should not be taken for granted in this context).

[Spoiler-ish alert]
In fact, the spine of the book is hope, and the characters’ relationship to hope. The questions that linger for me have to do with how hope is treated at the ending. When the father dies, the boy immediately finds a new family to be with. The family has a mother, father, son, and daughter. There’s a practical discrepency here between reality of the story and possibility of this ending: After witnessing the overwhelming hardship that the father and son endure on their journey, is it likely that a whole family could have found enough provisions to keep itself in tact? I kept asking myself, What’s the point of survival? To endure hardship in order to face nothing but more? How does hope fit into this?

I also began thinking about the appeal of the post-apocalypse story. Besides the desert island genre, it’s really the only context that gives authors the freedom to envision characters without society, and thus without societal rules. I find that desert island/post-apocalypse narratives usually find the authors falling into one of two camps: utopia or dystopia. While the world set out in The Road is certainly dystopic, I would suggest that the novel is ultimately utopic–at least in the sense of human goodness (for the subjectivity of the novel, not the faceless evils that happened before). Without the hope for any material comfort, the only remaining thing to hope for is human good will. And it’s here. In droves. It is tested, but it is here. Is that much hope disingenuous within the world he’s laid out? Maybe. But it makes it very easy to connect with this book.