The Road

I want to say up front this was a mistake to read in September, alone, with the light already going gray by six. McCarthy doesn’t name what happened to the world, some unspecified fire that’s left ash falling permanently and nothing green anywhere, and the man and his son walk a road toward a coast that may or may not offer anything better. No quotation marks, barely any punctuation past periods, most characters unnamed. Just the man, the boy, the road.

The prose is the whole argument of the book. Long stretches of plain declarative sentences, cataloguing what’s left, and then every so often McCarthy lets one sentence stretch out and turn strange and beautiful in a way that hits harder for how sparse everything around it is. I found myself reading passages twice, not because they were hard to follow but because the rhythm was worth sitting in a second time. That’s a trick that only works if you’ve earned the reader’s patience first, and he has.

What the book’s actually about, under the ash, is what a person keeps doing for another person when there’s no argument left for hope. The father tells the boy they’re “carrying the fire,” which isn’t explained, just repeated, and it comes to mean something like decency, or maybe just refusing cannibalism in a world where plenty of the survivors haven’t. There are scenes with other people on the road that are about as bleak as anything I’ve read, and McCarthy doesn’t flinch from them or explain them away. The boy keeps asking if they’re the good guys. The father keeps saying yes. Neither of them is fully sure what that means anymore, and the book doesn’t pretend to know either.

It’s short, under 300 pages, and dense enough that it doesn’t feel short. I got through it in two sittings up here, which for me is fast, and then sat with the stove cold for a while after finishing it because I didn’t want to do anything that felt like an ordinary evening yet.

I’d call it close to perfect at what it’s trying to do. The only reason it’s not an unqualified favorite is that a book this relentless doesn’t invite rereading the way some others do. I’ll come back to it eventually. Not next season.