Fiskadoro by Denis Johnson

Being different from other men sometimes sent him walking far down the beach, down among the huge green flies and the stink that rose off the garbage pit and the hooting gulls that never seemed to mind the stink or eat any of the flies. Belinda's ashes would be thrown away here after her body was burned.

The gulls argued with him as he came too close to their nests in the weedy sand near the pit. They rose in flocks, their shadows whirling all around him on the beach. Farther upshore he always saw them walking in little groups, ignoring each other, wise and smug, looking at nothing. They reminded him of Mr. Cheung.

More than once he saw others here, also different from other men: ghosts who had appeared out to sea--from the shipwrecks, from the End of the World, from the plagues, from the cold time, from the kill-me--drowned sailors and frozen children, young maidens bleeding down their legs, sick old men and women and cancer-wasted fishwives who seems to wander hopelessly near the place of their burning; but all of them were smiling and no longer touched with pain.

Some decades ago we all thought the end of the world would be quick. A bomb would go off, and the explosion, or its immediate aftermath, would split time into a before and an after. We don't think about the apocalypse much in these terms anymore, because our possible apocalypses have been replaced with a near-certain one, one which will be slow coming. Though it will be no less transformative, it will be leisurely enough to allow some of us to ignore it. And yet the threat of the other kind of apocalypse may be no less real than it used to be, certainly no less than in 1985, when Denis Johnson wrote the post-nuclear apocalypse novel Fiskadoro.

Society in Fiskadoro, such as it is, clings to the Florida Keys. In Miami, ashy skeletons are still sitting in their cars, but Key West, now called Twicetown because the two bombs that fell on it both proved to be duds, is a thriving center of what one might call enterprise. People's shanties are cobbled together from whatever they can find, from carseats and old church pews, and what work there is seems to mostly be limited to subsistence fishing boats. Many people speak a kind of Spanish-English patois that makes the book seem like the closest thing out there to Riddley Walker. Civilization may have survived in its more developed forms in Cuba; the citizens of Twicetown get Cuban radio stations. Into this life Fiskadoro is born, a son of an ordinary fisherman, who cries when his father is killed and who wants Anthony Cheung, who plays with the Miami Symphony Orchestra--a ragtag group of amateur musicians who have appropriated the name in a gesture of desperation for civilization--to teach him out to play the clarinet.

Fiskadoro is a book about remembering and forgetting. Mr. Cheung and his associates gather weekly to be read to from the few books that remain, including a child's book on dinosaurs and, apparently, The Sun Also Rises. They grasp after the knowledge that will keep them connected to a past which has disappeared, but the knowledge itself is partial and flimsy: "The dinosaur tracks in England all went west to east," Mr. Cheung recounts. But "[by] what light was this fact called 'knowledge'? Wasn't it just one more inexplicable thing to mystify them, didn't it subtract from what they knew rather than add to it?" When the society barters for a book about the bombing of Nagasaki, a book which can at last tell them how they got to where they are, the reading causes consternation and disbelief, even a vague conviction that reading it alone has brought the hurricane that rages outside--to know about apocalypse is to invite it again. Mr. Cheung's Grandmother Wright is one of the few people who can truly remember the "before" times; she spends much of her day reminiscing privately about her experiences as a girl during the Fall of Saigon and her escape by helicopter--a set of carefully drawn memories which seem as if they were lifted out of another of Johnson's novels, like Tree of Smoke.

But if Grandma Wright is the past and Mr. Cheung a baffled, uneasy present, Fiskadoro is the future. One day he wanders off from his home on the old Key West army base and is taken in by a group of "swamp-men" who practice a form of Islam and believe Fiskadoro to possess the soul of another teenager who drowned. They inflict on him a ritual circumcision--which they call a "subincision," and which he must do himself, with a sharpened rock--that leaves him without the ability to generate new memories. When he returns to Twicetown, he remembers no one, but he has become an expert clarinetist: "He has forgotten how not to play," Mr. Cheung notes. Fiskadoro represents a hope for the future that lies in forgetting the past; unlike Mr. Cheung, he has unshackled himself from the need to know what has happened before:

He'd been assured by Martin and Martin's companion Sammy that Fiskadoro's memory would come back to him in a while--though they didn't seem to think he'd ever remember his past--but, for now, each time the boy witnessed the sunrise he saw it for the first time.

There was something to be envied in that. In a world where nothing was familiar, everything was new. And if you can't recall the previous steps in your journey, won't you assume you've just been standing still? If you can't remember living yesterday, then isn't your life only one day long?

The thought gives Mr. Cheung panic, but the novel suggests that there is a kind of hopefulness in the innocence of Fiskadoro. A belief, perhaps, that saving the world lies not in remembering the past, Santayana-like, but in forgetting it, and embracing the eternal present. In this light, one begins to see the cobbled-together, resourceful nature of the society that has grown up around Fiskadoro as something beautiful. The novel ends with an image of great ambiguity: a white shape on the horizon that may be a ship from Cuba coming to "save" them, or perhaps even another explosion, marking a new kind of destruction. But Fiskadoro suggests that whatever happens, it won't be another line in the sand that divides the before from the after, but another turn in a constant renewing.

On the Beach by Nevil Shute

He stood up and poured himself a drink.  "You know," he said, "now that I've got used to the idea, I think I'd rather have it this way.  We've all got to die one day, some sooner and some later.  The trouble always has been that you're never ready, because you don't know when it's coming.  Well, now we do know, and there's nothing to be done about it.  I kind of like that.  I kind of like the thought that I'll be fit and well up till the end of August and then--home.  I'd rather have it that way than go on as a sick man from when I'm seventy to when I'm ninety."

Dwight Towers is an American naval officer in command of a nuclear submarine, the U.S.S. Scorpion, on an extended mission with the Australian navy.  The Scorpion has to work closely with the Australians because it's the only U.S. submarine left, and the Australians are the only navy: nuclear war has ravaged almost all of the northern hemisphere, as far as anyone can tell, and poisonous radioactive wind is creeping farther and farther down into the Southern hemisphere where it kills everyone it reaches.  For Towers and others in the area around Melbourne, the southernmost major city in the world, the world's end comes as a slow ebbing away of communication: they lose communication with Montevideo, then Cape Town, then northern Australian cities like Darwin and Cairns.  Towers' wife and children in Connecticut are almost certainly dead, just as he'll be in about six months.

On the Beach tackles similar existential fears as Dr. Bloodmoney and Station Eleven: what will the world be like after widespread disaster?  Dick and St. John Mandel both imagine that mass death will create a kind of sea change in human culture, including a return to pre-technological practices and structures.  But what's scary about On the Beach is that it believes that, in the face of human extinction, almost nothing will change at all.  People in Melbourne still go to work; they go to church.  People shop and plant gardens and have dinner parties.  Of course, it's more like Children of Men than it is those novels, because what is facing these characters is not new birth but certain destruction, but the contrast there is instructive, too.  Here, extinction brings not violence, not new religion, but repression and denial.

On the Beach seems like such a product of its time.  It's an artifact not just of the nuclear paranoia of the 50's (it was written in 1957), but the bourgeois variety of repression that's so recognizable from mid-century fiction.  Release does come in strange and subtle--but sometimes explosive--ways: Towers' romantic interest, a young Melburnian named Moira Davidson, drinks and drinks and drinks, but even she ends up enrolling in a typing-and-shorthand course.  Submarine science officer John Osborne chases his dream of being a grand prix auto driver, and the races he enters are wild bloodbaths that kill driver after driver, an expression of a sublimated death wish.  But release never overcomes the will to keep things going as normal: Towers not only refuses to sleep with Moira out of loyalty to his certainly dead wife, he persists in imagining that when the radiation sickness takes him, he'll be going "home" to Connecticut, even going so far as to buy gifts for his children.  His Australian hosts, the Holmeses, are busy planting next year's tulip bulbs; the Mrs. Holmes reacts with violent denial when her husband tries to show her exactly what they'll need to do to euthanize their infant daughter when the time comes.

Other apocalyptic novels are scary and showy, but I'm not sure I've read one as bleak as this one.  Little by little, optimism and denial turn out to be misplaced: the Scorpion sails all the way to Seattle to check out a mysterious radio signal that turns out to be a busted window frame rocking on a panel of buttons.  A scientist's insistence that the radioactive wind will dissipate before reaching the southern latitudes proves, as expected to be wishful thinking, and it's hard not to think about the many deniers of climate disaster who are with us today.  We're just not wired for apocalyptic thinking, Shute says, not really, and few human qualities are as strong as inertia.  Not that it matters; there's nothing to do.  But unlike Dick and St. John Mandel, both of whom seem to believe that disaster might at least free us from our bourgeois attachments, Shute thinks we're likely to whimper into the grave.  That's what makes it maybe the scariest post-apocalyptic novel of all.

Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel

"I still think you invented the parallel-universe theory," she said, but one of the few things that August didn't know about her was that sometimes when she looked at her collection of pictures she tried to imagine and place herself in that other, shadow life.  You walk into a room and flip a switch and the room fills with light.  You leave your garbage in cans on the curb, and a truck comes and transports it to some invisible place.  When you're in danger, you call for the police.  Hot water pours from faucets.   Lift a receiver or press a button on a telephone, and you can speak to anyone.  All of the information in the world is on the Internet, and the Internet is all around you, drifting through the air like pollen on a summer breeze.  There is money, slip[s of paper that can be traded for anything: houses, boats, perfect teeth.  There are dentists.  She tried to imagine this life playing out somewhere at the present moment.  Some parallel Kirsten in an air-conditioned room, waking from an unsettling dream of walking through an empty landscape.

As a child, Kirsten Raymonde is a a child actor appearing in a production of King Lear.  She watches the lead actor, a film star named Arthur Leander, have a heart attack and die on stage.  This human-sized tragedy is soon overshadowed by a colossal one: an epidemic called the Georgia Flu decimates the world's population--actually, much more than decimates, killing 99% of people--and soon the world as we know it has disappeared.  Twenty or so years later, Kirsten becomes part of a Traveling Symphony who wanders the shores of Michigan playing music and performing Shakespeare for the small communities that remain.

The Traveling Symphony is an attempt to salvage something of the old world.  Audiences seem to respond to Shakespeare specifically, because it reminds them of the long thread of tradition and history that in many other ways seems to have been completely severed.  In a parallel plotline, another man, residing in the airport to which is plane had been diverted those two decades ago, builds a Museum of Civilization in the glass cases of a food kiosk, full of cell phones and iPads.  I didn't intend it, but it made an interesting companion piece to Philip K. Dick's Dr. Bloodmoney, which is also about the way civilization might remake itself in the face of nuclear disaster.  For Dick, what is held onto most desperately is not Shakespeare or orchestral music but something more like a midcentury version of the glass cases of the Museum of Civilization: radio, cigarettes, VFW halls.

But the collapse of civilization also means, among the survivors, darker impulses go unchecked by the social order.  "Ferals" wander through the woods, and Kirsten herself has two knives tattooed on her wrist to memorialize two men she has had to kill.  The Symphony encounters a "prophet" who collects wives and rules his small community by violence, and when one of his pre-teen "wives" stows away with them, they find themselves stalked by his malevolence.  The prophet, spoiler alert, in a "twist" I really hated, is actually the actor Arthur Leander's son, who was on a plane en route to Toronto for his father's funeral when it was diverted.  Like Kirsten, his worldview is informed by a series of comic books written by Arthur's first wife Miranda about a brilliant scientist who lives in a satellite, estranged from his home.  (Symbolism time!)

I'm sad to say I just didn't buy the prophet at all.  Besides the hokey "we're all connected" nature of the timeline, it's never clear exactly what animates him, beyond malice and greed.  His mother, Leander's second wife, is intensely religious in a way that rubs off on her son, Tyler.  They both insist on believing that "things happen for a reason," and it's a short jump from there to the belief that those who survived the Georgia Flu are in some way blessed.  This felt like a missed opportunity, to me, to explore the self-serving elements of modern Calvinism that encourage people to imagine their luck or privilege as a kind of divine providence.  But even a zealot would be forced to acknowledge it's true of all survivors, so the prophet Tyler's exclusionary violence don't really make sense.  Nor is it clear what exactly the nature of his "prophecy" is.  In the place of a coherent theology that responds to the end of the world Mandel offers a collection of "cult" markers drawn from pop culture sources: the multiple wives, a smattering of Revelation, marking acolytes by scarification.  None of this followers seem to be true believers, and who can blame them?  There's not really a belief here.

That was one of my two major misgivings about Station Eleven.  The other one is this: only about a quarter of the narrative takes place after the collapse of civilization.  The rest of it is the story of Arthur Leander's life, told in flashback.  The conflicts of these sections--intrusive paparazzi, serial divorce, the difference between Leander's life as a star and his childhood in small town British Columbia--seem so divorced from the post-apocalyptic sections that it's hard to believe the plotlines really "tie together," as the novel seems to want.   Worse, it makes the novel seem fatally uninterested in its own story, as if, like the audience of the Traveling Symphony, it wants to luxuriate in the past instead of living in the present.  Brent said something about modern science fiction being "ashamed of science fiction," and that's not too far off here: Station Eleven often seems like a jejune realist novel about bourgeois dissatisfaction posing as a sci-fi adventure. 

The Road by Cormac McCarthy

Then they set out along the blacktop in the gun-metal light, shuffling through the ash, each the other's world entire. 

Nobody wants to be here and nobody wants to leave. 


Other Fifty Bookers Reviews of The Road
*Where Chris says it will never be made into a movie, lolz (2007)
*Where Brook says she will need a McCarthy break (2009)
*Where Carlton doesn't see what all the fuss is about (2010)
*Where Brent compares it to No Country for Old Men (2013)



I'm pretty late to the party, but for a reason - I saw the movie not realizing that it was a book; once I found out I decided to wait a few years so the more dramatic and terrible scenes were out of my head. The cruelty of humanity scenes definitely stayed in my mind, but the ending was actually fuzzy. There's not too much to say about the book: there's a man, there's a boy, there's an apocalypse. It won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize and was turned into a movie. It is grey, grey, grey. 

The Road is an incredibly difficult book for a few reasons. 

First, I think if I were a parent, I wouldn't be able to read this novel. As a non-parent I am tormented by the choices that are being made, by the care that's being provided, by the questions that are being asked. I can't imagine picking up this up as a parent and finishing it. 

Second, there aren't any answers. The story details the daily life of a father and son in some kind of post-apocalyptical world, and this world is never explained. Cormac McCarthy counters that it doesn't matter, but if you are a reader who needs answers and explanations...you will not get them. I like knowing the motivation of why the world is the way it is, but I suppose McCarthy is right to the extent that it doesn't matter. So what if it's global warming or volcano or nuclear disaster? In any of those cases the reaction can only be "ok...so what do we do now?"

Third, like everything else in this text, the point of view is maddeningly elusive. It begins with SUCH an objective third person(1) that when it occasionally switches to second (2) or first (3) it's startling and unsettling. It happens only a handful of times in the novel, but each time stands out SO much that I'm ready to start scouring the academic parts of the internet.  

(1) When he woke in the woods in the dark and the cold of the night he'd reach out to touch the child sleeping beside him...His hand rose and fell softly with each precious breath. He pushed away the plastic tarpaulin and raised himself in the stinking robes and blankets and looked toward the east for any light but there was none.
(2) Like the great pendulum in its rotunda scribing through the long day movements of the universe of which you may say it knows nothing and yet know it must.
(3) He lay listening to the water drip in the woods...If only my heart were stone.

It is not an overstatement to say that it is one of the most depressing books of all time. Even the most depressing books (The Bluest Eye, for example) has some kind of redemption - even if it's not the character we want getting what is owed to them, someone survives, someone makes it, someone gets SOMETHING out of the shit that is handed to them. I don't think it's a spoiler alert to say that a Pulitzer Prize novel doesn't end with unicorns eating rainbow burritos. 

I went to a brilliant conference on teaching Holocaust literature, and one session was about how to handle the idiot kids who say things like, "Why didn't the Jews do x, y, or z? I would have." We were told real stories to share with students at the beginning to show kids: this was not a time of making better choices, this was a time of making IMPOSSIBLE choices that needed to be made anyway. This book, featuring a holocaust of humanity, is that impossible choice. What is the point of surviving? How do you kill yourself when you were 'lucky' enough to survive? What is the point of your child surviving in this ugly world that is left? How do you kill your child to spare them?

I did not, at any point, entertain the idea of what I would do if I were in The Man's place or The Boy's place. How do you turn to cannibalism? How do you let yourself and your child starve to death? It's pointless to play Let's Pretend because no one knows deep inside what their actions would be. So we watch theirs, from a distance, like the narrator, and I think it's set up in such a way that it's almost impossible to pass judgement. 

If you're in the mood to kind of hate everyone forever, this is the book for you. It's not a good time, it's not satisfying, it's not beautiful. It is GOOD in the way that good medicine is GOOD for you even if you hate every moment. I finished the novel in two days, not because it was so compelling, but because I knew I couldn't leave it unfinished and I wanted it over as quickly as possible. 

Riddley Walker by Russell Hoban

Note: I wrote this review a month ago, and saved it so that I wouldn't spoil anything for Brent. Any similarities between our reviews means that he cribbed off of me, and not the other way around.

On my naming day when I come 12 I gone front spear and kilt a wyld boar he parbly ben the las wyld pig on the Bundel Downs any how there hadnt ben none for a long time befor him nor I aint looking to see none agen. He dint make the groun shake nor nothing like that when he come on to my spear he wernt all that big plus he lookit poorly. He done the reqwyrt he ternt and stood and clattert his teef and made his rush and there we wer then. Him on 1 end of the spear kicking his life out and me on the other end watching him dy. I said, 'Your tern now my tern later.'

Sweet baby Jesus, I love Riddley Walker. I'm not really in the habit of re-reading books, but when I saw that the AV Club was doing their monthly book club on Riddley Walker in April, I encourage Brent to read this with me.

I am happy to report that it is as awesome as I remember. Riddley Walker is set approximately 2700 years in the future, in an England having advanced roughly to the Iron Age after a nuclear war that occurred around present day. England, now called Inland, is ruled by a shadowy government called the Ram, and order is maintained by the Pry Mincer and Wes Mincer (derivatives of prime minister and westminster) who maintain a traveling puppet show that tells and re-tells the culture's central myth, the Eusa Story. The Eusa Story is cobbled together from disparate parts; while it tells a broken version of the nuclear war that ruined society, it is also mixed with the story of St. Eustace, as well as government propaganda. Like most religious texts, various versions of it are told, and it is interpreted in wildly different ways.

When his father dies in a bizarre accident, Riddley becomes his community's conexion man, responsible for interpreting everyday events as well as telling the significance of the traveling Eusa show. Shortly after his initiation into this role, Riddley is drawn into a conflict between those who wish to seek the sort of knowledge that brought civilization to ruin and those who would stop them.

I have been thinking on Riddley Walker for a few days now, and it is a difficult book to characterize simply. It seems to me that it is ultimately a story about knowledge--what it is, how it is gathered, and what it is worth. In 2700 years language would surely have evolved into something much different from English, but the strange, broken idiom that Riddley speaks is representative of the perverse, askew version of Western culture and religion in which he lives. Knowledge, like language, has not been lost, but shifted, changed, twisted. Early in the book, Riddley is told the story of "Why the Dog Wont Show its Eyes," about how man and woman received the "1st knowing":

The man and woman seen the fire shyning in the dogs eyes. The man throwit meat to the dog and the dog come into them by the fire. Brung its eyes in our of the nite and then they all lookit at the nite to gether. The man and the woman seen the nite in the dogs eyes and thats when they got the 1st knowing of it. They knowit the nite the same as the dog knowit.

There seems to be a distinction being made between the "1st knowing," a sort of primal understanding of things represented by their shapes, and more advanced forms of knowledge. To understand the shape of something is to know it instinctively, to be able to feel it in three dimensions. In the legend, the man and woman become more "clevver," gaining the sort of knowledge that is represented by numbers instead of shapes, and they lose the 1st knowing.

Hoban presents this progression of knowledge without judgment. On the one hand, it is easy to lament the way that man has lost this primal knowledge, and it is easy also to sympathize with Riddley when he encounters the remnants of twentieth-century era machinery:

How cud any 1 not want to get that shyning Power back from time to time back way back? How cud any 1 not want to be like them what had boats in the air and picters on the wind? How cud any 1 not want to see them shyning weals turning?

And indeed it seems that progress is inevitable; Riddley is unable to stop the Pry Mincer of Inland in rediscovering the secret ingredients that create gunpowder, and it is unclear as to whether or not he should. Riddley is set deep in this conflict, but he seems to be on different sides at different times, desperate to act but unsure what for or what against.

There is much that I would like to talk about but am unable to touch upon. Riddley Walker is a complex book that rewards revisiting, and I think that it would take many more times re-reading to fully understand it. Even so, I recommend it highly--this is one of my absolute favorite books.

The Road by Cormac McCarthy

The Road is set in a post-apocalyptic world of the not-too-distant future. There are two main characters in this book: an adult male and his young son. We never get their names. McCarthy refers to them as "the man" or "he" and "the boy." This lends a cold, sterile feel to the novel. We follow the two characters as they make their way down the road, heading roughly South and toward the coast. They have no real destination in mind, but they keep moving. Life is beyond bleak and the only way the two survive the day-to-day hardships is by relying on each other.

I liked this book, but I don't see what all the fuss is about.

The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins

"Katniss, it's just hunting. You're the best hunter I know," says Gale.
"It's not just hunting. They're armed. They think."
"So do you. And you've had more practice. Real practice," he says. "You know how to kill."
"Not people," I say.
"How different can it be, really?" says Gale grimly.
The awful thing is that if I can forget they're people, it will be no different at all.

Katniss Everdeen lives in District 12 of Panem, the dictatorship that rose from the ashes of the United States. The Capitol of Panem is surrounded by 12 districts, which it rules with an iron fist, a "fist" that obliterated the revolutionary District 13. District 12 mines coal, and seems to would no doubt at one time been called Apalachia. As a reminder of its power, the Capitol hold the annual Hunger Games. Two teenagers are chosen from each district to fight to the death in a place referred to as "the arena." The last man or woman standing gets to live out the rest of his or her life in relative luxury. Katniss little sister is chosen during this draft, but Katniss volunteers to go in her stead. The other teenager "reaped" from District 12 is Peeta Mellark, who has a bit of history with Katniss. Of course, this is someone who Katniss must view with a kill-or-be-killed mentality.

This book is equal parts: Running Man, Survivor, and Lord of the Flies, with just a dash of teenage romance. The relationship between Katniss, Peeta, and her "friend" from District 12, Gale fits into the YA fiction model. That is to say, it is not very interesting, nor noteworthy. The action that takes place within the arena, however, is worth mentioning. The book is incredibly violent. Blood is nearly its own character. Children are impaled, stung to death, and eaten alive -- not by other contestants, cannibalism is one of the few no-nos in the Hunger Games.

The novel reads quickly, in large part because there are no flourishes to Collins prose. It is fairly straight forward and to the point. Most of the plot moves rapidly, mimicking the pace of its characters as they attempt to outrun and outsmart each other. The second half slows down a bit, with Katniss trying to nurse Peeta back to health. I am sure that Collins was trying to make a statement about the effects of violence and war on children, but there was not enough psychological development of her characters for this to be effective. There were some minor plot points that I simply had to look over. For example, these "games" were supposedly televised to the entire country of Panem, but at no point does Katniss mention seeing a camera. There were other similar plot devises that while annoying did not have a huge effect on my enjoyment of the book.

For YA fiction, this was pretty good.

The Road by Cormac McCarthy

Rich dreams now that he was loathe to wake from. Things no longer known in the world. The cold drove him forth to mend the fire. Memory of her crossing the lawn toward the house in the early morning in a thin rose gown that clung to her breasts. He thought each memory recalled must do some violence to its origins. As in a party game. Say the word and pass it on. So be sparing. What you alter in the remembering has yet a reality, known or not.

While plenty of my more bookish friends have recommended that I check out Cormac McCarthy's writing, the blurbs on the back covers of novels like Blood Meridian and No Country For Old Men have kept me away. I was gifted The Road by my boyfriend over Christmas, however, and settled in with McCarthy on the couch while Jamie battled through his own post-apocalyptic world in Fall Out Three.

The Road is a bleak narrative that follows a father and son through an austere, post-apocalyptic landscape to the ocean where they have gone to escape the cold that they know will eventually contribute to their impending deaths. The road that they travel on is dangerous territory where no one can be trusted and even fragile-looking old men are probably bait to lure you in for an ambush. Our two men characters say that they are "the good guys" and that they are "carrying the fire"--hanging on to human decency the best they can when all the father's motivation to do so has dried up, with the one strong exception being salvaging his son from the spiritual wreckage. The one thing that is perhaps more frightening than the idea of turning to cannibalism for survival or pursuing survival when death is more appealing, is the idea of raising a child and trying to preserve their innocence in the middle of a place that can be described as hellish at best. We know very little of the father's life before the terror started because he knows that to tell his son about the way things were before would be to tell him at the same time about what he will never know or experience. After all, a good day for the son is where they find canned peaches and don't have to starve that day or they see a living dog. It would be almost cruel to tell him about a good day when the world was normal when there are days he has to crouch in hiding with a gun waiting to see whether or not he will have to kill himself to keep from anyone else doing the same job.

While I understand the literary significance of McCarthy's novel and the magnitude of his talent, I probably won't be picking up another one of his books for some time. I think that it is important that we all acknowledge our inner darkness and I haven't met anyone interesting that wasn't just a little sick and twisted in their own right, but McCarthy is too disturbing for me to revisit without time away, I think. I kept waiting for that moment that would liberate the father and son from their situation, even if only for a while, but that moment never really came.

If we're going to be honest here, I'm also a little frustrated with the complete lack of information about his personal life on the internet besides the bare bones. Maybe it's voyeuristic but I like to know about the authors I read so I can have some frame of reference for why so many of them seem so tormented. I guess that goes back to being sick and twisted, though.

The Road by Cormac McCarthy

The boy sat tottering. The man watched him that he not topple into the flames. He kicked holes in the sand for the boy's hips and shoulders where he would sleep and he sat holding him while he tousled his hair before the fire to dry it. All of this like some ancient anointing. So be it. Evoke the forms. Where you've nothing else construct ceremonies out of the air and breathe upon them.

Holy shit, this is one book that's never going to be made into a movie. The guy at the library told me this was the most depressing book I'd ever read, and he was right. Cormac McCarthy's critically acclaimed novel The Road is about a nameless man and his nameless son some years after some sort of disaster that has covered the skies of the earth in ash and killed everything but some humans, who survive by foraging for canned food and eating each other. The man and boy are trekking south because the world is getting colder, and they know that they can't survive another winter wherever they are.

The thing about The Road that makes it so different from other post-apocalyptic literature like Oryx and Crake is that it is extremely short on the specifics. Whereas Margaret Atwood composed a complex social history for her eradication of the human species, McCarthy--who before this book was best known for writing Westerns--never explains what caused the events that precede the book, though the description of it is similar to the depictions of nuclear winter that became popular in the 70's and 80's. It doesn't even give a name to its characters. That's because The Road isn't a book about our society and its problems; it's about the deeper character of the human spirit/mind and its will to survive in the bleakest of odds. The man and the boy fight to live, though daily they struggle with the question of why it is exactly they want to survive, and whether or not death might be better than the road. It is human nature, distilled to its essence; all the rest is "ceremonies" constructed "out of the air."

For some reason--probably in light of accusations that her choices are often too maudlin and shallow--Oprah just recently chose The Road for her book club. What kind of response this will cause I can't imagine, but the idea of middle-aged ladies reading this super-depressing novel en masse is delightful. I may even let my mother borrow my copy.