Child of God by Cormac McCarthy

He came up flailing and sputtering and began to thrash his way toward the line of willows that marked the submerged creek bank. He could not swim, but how would you drown him? His wrath seemed to buoy him up. Some halt in the way of things seems to work here. Se him. You could say that he's sustained by his fellow men, like you. Has people the shore with them calling to him. A race that gives suck to the maimed and the crazed, that wants their wrong blood in its history and will have it. But they want this man's life. He has heard them in the night seeking him with lanterns and cries of execration. How then is he borne up? Or rather, why will not these waters take him?

Child of God begins with Lester Ballard, a no-account rustic of Sevier County, Tennessee, being dispossessed of his land and house. He starts a fight with the auctioneer--the first violent moment in a book full of them--but it's no use. From that point on, Lester is set free into exile, wandering the woods and mountains of the Great Smokies with just his rifle. He's condemned and little-liked, but for a while, he doesn't seem much worse than any of the "characters" who get told about in backwoods stories, or the dumpkeeper who names his daughters after words he finds in a medical textbook: Urethra, Cerebella, and Hernia Sue. But when Lester discovers a pair of lovers in a car on top of the mountain, having mysteriously died mid-coitus, he discovers that there is a certain kind of woman who cannot deny his sexual advances (unlike Hernia Sue) and he goes on a killing spree, taking the corpses of the women he kills back to a remote cave where he defiles them.

Child of God is a gross book. It seems pointedly designed to poke at our last taboos, like necrophilia. Lester, as he draws further away from society and further into himself, becomes only more foul: he makes no distinction between adult women and young girls; he starts wearing their dresses and fashions wigs for himself out of their scalps, etc., etc. Like many of McCarthy's other books, the focus here is on human violence and depravity: where they come from, how they're possible, etc., etc. In other novels, McCarthy seems to me to recognize a kind of mystic evil that comes from outside of human nature--think of Ed Todd, lamenting at the end of No Country for Old Men, what the world is slouching toward, or of course the symbolically or perhaps literally immortal figure of the Judge--but here McCarthy pointedly notes that Ballard is a "child of God, just like you or I." Ballard's depravity is set in the context of other violence, other audacities, including the story of the proto-Klan "Whitecappers" that the Sevier County sheriff proudly reminisces on having run off. This, McCarthy says, is human nature--or at least one version of it.

For such a nasty book, it can be very funny. I'm still laughing at "Hernia Sue." And one of the best moments comes toward the end, when Ballard, having been caught by the sheriff and forced to lead him and his posse to the location of the bodies, wriggles away down a hole in the cave and leaves the posse unsure about how to get back to the surface. Ballard himself gets lost and nearly dies, makes his way out, turns himself in at the hospital, gets locked up in the asylum, dies, and has his remains inspected by medical students "like those haruspices of hold perhaps saw monsters worse to come in their configurations." But if the students find anything monstrous or unusual inside the brain of this necrophiliac serial killer, they don't say.

Outer Dark by Cormac McCarthy

She slept through the first wan auguries of dawn, gently washed with river fog while martins came and went among the arches. Slept into the first heat of the day and woke to see toy birds with sesame eyes regarding her from their clay nests overhead. She rose and went to the river and washed her face and dried it with her hair. When she had gathered up the bundle of her belongings she emerged from beneath the bridge and set forth along the road gain. Emaciate and blinking with the wind among her rags she looked like something replevied by grim miracle from the ground and sent with tattered windings and halt corporeality into the agony of sunlight. Butterflies attended her and birds dusting in the road did not fly up when she passed. She hummed to herself as she went some child's song from an old dead time.

In a remote Appalachian cabin, a woman named Rinthy bears her brother's child. Her brother, Culla, takes the infant out to the forest and leaves it, telling Rinthy that it died. But the infant is saved by a passing tinker, whom Rinthy sets out to track down, first for her child's body, and then, learning the truth, the living child. Culla sets out after Rinthy, but he'll never find her again: their paths have diverged permanently. He wanders around the mountains, taking odd jobs where he can find them, narrowly avoiding the judgment of posses who find his shiftlessness suspicious. He's followed closely by three sinister men known only as "the Trio," who seem to be murdering those who cross Culla's path.

The Trio are the most Cormacesque element in Outer Dark. Anyone who's read Blood Meridian or The Road will see in them a kind of trial run at the frightening figures of those novels. It's tempting to see them as a kind of precursor to the Judge in Blood Meridian, but I don't think that's quite right. The Judge is a gnostic, an amoral killer, but the Trio are explicitly depicted as a kind of vengeful force, perhaps even a kind of justice. What's interesting about them is that the justice doesn't seem to be very well targeted: Culla first meets them face-to-face after escaping a horrible ferry accident that kills two other men and a horse. He meets the Trio at a campfire--where they are eating a meal of suspiciously unidentifiable meat--where they clearly suspect that Culla has killed the two men. They see his new boots and think them stolen, and in this they're partially right: he stole them, not from the ferryman or his client, but a rich squire--who, ironically, was later killed by the Trio! They know that Culla is guilty, but he's not quite guilty of what they say he is. Does that matter? And if the Trio is set on dispensing justice upon Culla, why is it that they kill everyone who comes into Culla's path but him?

There's a suggestion here, I think, especially when you consider the Biblical allusion of the title, of the idea of original sin, a fundamental evil that moves miasmically through existence and poisons everything. Culla's original sin is the impregnation of his sister and his attempted killing of the infant, and this poisons his path. Everyone he comes into contact with it is, in a sense, killed for it; but he himself will be punished for something else. And if original sin is something that's passed from one generation to another, it makes sense that the infant gets it worse--in a scene that prefigures the most horrifying moments of The Road, and which I will decline to describe.

Reading McCarthy's Southern Gothic novels, written before his move to the Southwest, reveal how much of Faulkner is in him. The flyblown language, the literal darkness of the primitive landscape, these seemed to me to be directly inspired by Faulkner's Mississippi. McCarthy's Appalachia is a primitive place--I think the word he'd use is atavistic--but the archaic language works here especially because it highlights a kind of timelessness to the narrative of sin and perdition. Blood Meridian and the Texas novels do that, too, but I also think they only makes sense in their historical context; they're novels of a particular kind of violence and conflict produced by the American frontier. Outer Dark, by contrast, has the out-of-time quality of a fable. It's a minor McCarthy, for sure, but I found a lot to appreciate in it.

Stella Maris by Cormac McCarthy

How old was your brother?

Twenty-one.

Didnt he have girlfriends?

He tried. It never came to anything. I wasnt jealous. I wanted him to see other girls. I wanted him to see the truth of his situation.

That he was in love with you.

Yes. Bone of his bone. Too bad. We were like the last on earth. We could choose to join the beliefs and practices of the millions of dead beneath our feet or we could begin again. Did he really have to think about it? Why should I have no one? Why should he? I told him that I'd no way even to know if there was justice in my heart if I had no one to love and love me. You cannot credit yourself with a truth that has no resonance. Where is the reflection of your worth? And who will speak for you when you are dead?

Alicia Western is an outlier: a brilliant mathematician, a musician of genius--though not top ten in the world, sadly--and beautiful to boot. But her life is wrecked: bereft at the apparent loss of her brother, lying in a coma in France, she returns to Stella Maris, a mental institution in Wisconsin where she's committed herself twice before. It seems unlikely that it will be able to give her what she's looking for, even if she knew what that was. Stella Maris takes the form of a long dialogue between Alicia and a doctor at the institution.

Some of the things she tells him we know already, if we've read The Passenger, the "first" of the two companion novels McCarthy released last year: Alicia has a mathematical mind that rivals only that of super-genius Alexander Grothendieck, her idol; greater than even her brother, who is also a kind of genius. We know that she is in love with her brother, and feels no compunction about the incest taboo. We know that she is harried by visions of a Vaudevillian dwarf she calls the Thalidomide Kid and his band of performers. If we have read The Passenger, we know some things also that Alicia and Dr. Cohen do not yet know: that Alicia will commit suicide, that Bobby will wake up from his coma. But Stella Maris signals to the reader how badly Alicia's voice--clever, cruel, desperate--was missing from that other novel. We hear more about the mathematics that Bobby, turned deep sea salvager, only touches on, and we learn the depth of Alicia's despair.

All that math stuff, is there something to it, or is it only the rendition of a dilettante and wordcel? It certainly doesn't have the ring of mathematical perception that, say, Benjamin Labatut's When We Cease to Understand the World does, but as a dilettante of a much higher order I suppose it's not for me to say. (Does it keep McCarthy up at night to think his are the second and third best books of the past few years to feature Grothendieck?) For McCarthy, who recently wrote about the theory that language developed as a kind of parasite--a claim repeated by Alicia in Stella Maris--math is a way of searching for the elusive heart of reality, purer than words, and yet Alicia seems unconvinced that numbers are any more "real" than words.

After Godel, all mathematicians must face the reality that even mathematics cannot describe the world with accuracy and wholeness; what Stella Maris suggests, in typical McCarthy fashion, is that this is perhaps a lesser horror than what we would find if we were able to see and describe the world. Alicia tells Dr. Cohen of her childhood vision of "the Archatron," a malicious figure who lives in a realer world behind gates of falsehoods. (To call this gnostic, like much of McCarthy's worldview, is a cliche that remains frustratingly accurate.) She insists over and over that the Kid has his own kind of reality and does not emerge from within her; does he come from somewhere like the Archatron's realm?

It strikes me that Stella Maris is, on some level, about the relationship between genius and non-genius. McCarthy's spent the last couple decades hanging out among professional atom-smashers in New Mexico, and presumably he knows a thing or two about geniuses and what they are like. Alicia's knowledge is like a curse, partially because she perceives more than others, and partially because she understands the limits of her own perception better than anyone else can. She returns to Stella Maris looking for someone, perhaps, to talk to, and though Dr. Cohen is insightful and articulate--McCarthy does well to give him a life of his own, and make him something more than a Socratic prompter, though not much more--they both he will never wholly understand what he has to tell him. It's the reason she lusts for her brother; he's the only person in the world that shares her intellectual atmosphere. When they are together, she reasons, they have moved into a place beyond taboo, beyond society. The fact that he is a little less genius than she may account for his reluctance to follow her into that place. Though Stella Maris has not been all that well received, it seems to me that making Alicia's genius believable is no small authorial feat.

On its own, Stella Maris is--well, not bad, but unsatisfying. It's slight, underdone; constricted by the need to remain in dialogue. Sometimes, when Alicia stops talking like Alicia and starts talking like Cormac, the seams show. But at the same time, it's almost impossible to imagine it being incorporated into The Passenger without making it unbalanced or redundant. In the end, the double novel seems to have been the right choice. The Passenger speaks to Stella Maris and Stella Maris speaks back to The Passenger. I said I think that we'd be grappling with The Passenger for a long time, and while I can't say that I think Stella Maris is a great novel, I don't think it'll be jettisoned, because together the two books seem more to me than the sum of their wholes.

The Passenger by Cormac McCarthy

The Kid turned and faced him.

What you want me to believe, said Western, is that you came here to help her in some way.

Help her in what way? She's dead.

When she was alive.

Jesus. How do I know? You see a figure drifting off the screen and you pick up the phone. How do you know that the call of the coletit from the bracken is not really the lamentations of the damned? The world's a deceptive place. A lot of thing that you see are not really there anymore. Just the after-image in the eye. So to speak.

What did she know?

She knew that in the end you really cant know. You cant get a hold of the world. You can only draw a picture. Whether it's a bull on the wall of a cave or a partial differential equation it's the same thing. Jesus.

Bobby Western has been a lot of things. Right now he's a salvage diver, plumbing the depths of the Gulf of Mexico to ransack wrecks and tinker with pipelines. Once upon a time he was a student of physics, a mathematical whizkid who received his genius from his father, a Manhattan Project engineer, and who was yet in the shadow of his even more brilliant sister, Alicia. After that, he was a race car driver, a profession that put him in a coma. When he emerged from this coma, Bobby discovered that Alicia--his greatest love, his soulmate in perhaps the most literal sense--had committed suicide. The Passenger's companion novel, Stella Maris, is her story; this is Bobby's, although Alicia is here too, in the form of italicized flashbacks in which she faces her own hallucinatory attendants: a crude, disfigured figure called the Thalidomide Kid and a troop of Vaudevillean goblins.

When The Passenger begins, Bobby has been sent to scout a plane crash in the Gulf, the kind with moldering corpses inside. There's no sign of entry on the plane, but the black box is missing, and one of the passengers seems to be, too. Bobby makes a few quick investigations, finding little; but shortly after he finds himself the subject of a mysterious investigation: he's menaced by agents of unknown affiliation, his apartment is ransacked, his car and bank account are seized with no explanation, his fellow diver is killed under mysterious circumstances. Are Bobby's pursuers connected with the crashed plane? Or are their interests related to Bobby's father, who worked at Oak Ridge and Los Alamos, helping to usher the world into an age of atomic cataclysm?

The Passenger's refusal to bring these mysteries to a satisfying conclusion seemed like an affront to me personally. Maybe there are answers in Stella Maris, but I doubt it. So one must think of the plane crash as a symbol: a symbol, perhaps, of Bobby, who survives his wreck and his coma but emerges into a world that is missing its most important soul, and which refuses now to make any sense. Alicia, perhaps, is the passenger of the title, whose significance is reduced in death to a mere absence, and whom Bobby spends the entire book fretting that he will forget. (For what its worth, in the post-Game of Thrones era, sibling incest seems too anodyne to be shocking, even a kind of literary cliche.) Amd the forces of grief and despair that pursue him can not even be named, much less mollified.

And yet, I found Bobby's dives to be some of the most interesting and engrossing parts of the novel. Much has been made of McCarthy's newfound interest in physics and mathematics, apparently gathered from his friendship with quark-discoverer Murry Gell-Mann and a connection with the research department at the University of New Mexico. But McCarthy's interests haven't changed, it seems to me; he's still the Gnostic, terrified by the world's indifference and unknowability. Mathematics is, like diving, another way of plumbing the deaths, searching for a truth that will not be made known. As the Thalidomide Kid tells Bobby--who sees him also, like a kind of dispensation--"Whether it's a bull on the wall of a cave or a partial differential equation it's the same thing."

The Passenger is an awfully strange book, even for McCarthy. On one level it's sort of an espionage novel, a classic noir of the man who got into deep. But in practice it's mostly talky, composed of a dozen or so lengthy conversations: with down-and-outs from New Orleans to Knoxville, with Bobby's shrewd private investigator, with his fellow divers, with a friend of Alicia's from the period of her commitment. One of Bobby's interlocutors is a trans escort named Debussy Fields (LOL) who is touchingly and sympathetically drawn in a way I really would not have expected McCarthy to have in him. But all these conversations, all these parts--diver driver mathematician apparition--have difficulty cohering. The Paassenger could only be a late period work. It reminds me of those late Shakespeare plays in which he stopped bothering trying to make sense to anybody but himself.

But it's a Cormac book, no doubt, and who else is going to give you a book like that? Who else is going to give you those sentences? The language is plainspoken and hushed, with fewer forays into the OED, but the rhythm of those words is unmistakable, inimitable. And though the mathematics, it seems to me, betrays a dilettante's eye, they give a new language, perhaps even a better one, to ideas that have troubled McCarthy's books for a long time. We've had a long time to live with books like Blood Meridian, even The Road. Something tells me that we'll have to live with this one a little longer to really see it as it is.

Suttree by Cormac McCarthy

He crossed in the twilight a pitchgreen wood grown murk with ferns, with rank and steaming plants. An owl flew, bow winged and soundless. He came upon the bones of a horse, the polished ribcradle standing among the ferns pale and greenly phosphorescent and the wedgeshaped skull grinning in the grass. In these silent sunless galleries he'd come to feel that another went before him and each glade he entered seemed just quit by a figure who'd been sitting there and risen and gone on. Some doublegoer, some othersuttree eluded him in these woods and he feared that should that figure fail to rise and steal away and were he therefore to come to himself in this obscure wood he'd be neither mended nor made whole but rather set mindless to dodder drooling with his ghosty clone from sun to sun across a hostile hemisphere forever.

Cornelius Suttree lives in a houseboat on the Tennessee River. He makes a hand-to-mouth living fishing in the river and selling the fish to shops in Knoxville. The rest of the time he spends drinking with the down-and-out denizens of the river flats, mostly black but not all, getting drunk in whorehouses and pool halls. He goes by "Bud" or "Sut," and his patrician first name is a sign of a life he's forsaken, which McCarthy scrupulously avoids detailing but of which he offers tantalizing flashes: a visit from an uncle, or a horrifying scene where Suttree learns the young child we didn't even know he had has died. (His former, I guess, mother-in-law expels him from the funeral by nearly biting his finger off.) Relatives who appear to compel Suttree back into a life of good standing are brushed off; Suttree remains on the river.

Some have compared Suttree to Huckleberry Finn, which is true in the sense that both are set in the South and on a river. But in Huck Finn, the river, which moves ceaselessly toward the slave port of New Orleans, is the unstoppable forward motion of narrative; in Suttree the river is a place where the idea of life as progress is forsaken. The novel floats, too, through cycles of feast and famine, summer plenty and winter freeze, but there's no recognizable through line that would enable Suttree to grow or change or achieve anything. Suttree is haunted by a fear of death that suggests the life he's chosen is a recognition of the absurdity of striving in the face of death, or the unfeeling nature of the cosmos. (I'm guessing nobody told McCarthy that the French Broad River, where Suttree travels for a spell, is one of the oldest rivers in the world, because you have to think that would have made it in here, along with words like atavistic and arcane.)

This is the first of McCarthy's novels set in the South that I've read. He's so associated with the Southwest these days people forget his Southern Gothic phase, but I have to say, Suttree really struck a chord with me in its depiction of the South. There's a very specific sensation I associate with the North Carolina summer made of up heat, wild greenery, and droning insects, but also boiling concrete and gravel, that McCarthy's overcooked language can really capture. Suttree's Knoxville is a grotesque wasteland where condoms and dead animals and, huh, "jissom" can be found floating down the river. Its physicality is almost body-like, but in a way I can't quite explain, it felt accurate to me. I've always said that you have to take McCarthy's language as partly tongue-in-cheek, and the ironic detachment necessary to appreciate it seemed part and parcel with the way Suttree and his friends live lightly on the earth.

Suttree is also the funniest of all the McCarthy novels I've read. (Although All the Pretty Horses has its moments.) Novels like Blood Meridian and The Road are so grim and self-serious you wouldn't think McCarthy even has a sense of humor, but he does. In Suttree it's represented by a character named Harrogate, a pipsqueak kid who ends up in the workhouse with Suttree after getting caught copulating with a farmer's watermelons. (A real line from the book is, "Somebody has been fuckin my watermelons.") Harrogate is a schemer--trying to dynamite his way into a bank vault from the caves beneath Knoxville, or plugging up every payphone in the city and lifting the quarters--and a kind of picaresque version of Suttree himself, who never had a normal life to haunt him in his days of floating on the river.

I loved Suttree. For a book that's often disgusting and violent and terrifying, I kind of wanted to curl up and live in it. When McCarthy's really on, his words take on a kind of dadaist character, more about feeling than sense, and like the river itself, it's a pleasure to let them float past.

Cities of the Plain by Cormac McCarthy

The wind outside and the cold in the room were like those winter nights on the north Texas plains when he was a child in his grandfathers house.  When the storms blew down from the north and the prairie land about the house stood white in the sudden lightning and the house shook in the thunderclaps.  On just such nights and just such morning in the year he'd gotten his first colt he'd wrap himself in his blanket and go out and cross to the barn, leaning into the wind, the first drops of rain slapping at him hard as pebbles, moving down the long barn bay like some shrouded refugee among the sudden slats of light that stood staccato out of the parted board walls, moving through those serried and electric prosceniums where they flared white and fugitive across the barn row on row until he reached the stall where the little horse stood waiting and unlatched the door and sat in the straw with his arms around its neck till it stopped trembling.

In the third book of Cormac McCarthy's "Border Trilogy," John Grady Cole, the protagonist of All the Pretty Horses, and Billy Parham, the protagonist of The Crossing, are working as cowboys at a ranch outside Alamogordo.  It's a crossover episode!  Both men, isolated and long-suffering as they are, like being cowboys.  But it's a life that might not be long for this world; the federal government wants to turn the land they graze on into a military installation (today's White Sands Missile Range, probably).  In the middle of the century, cowboys are a dying breed.  One character, I forget who, remarks that the war changed everything.

It's not clear how the war changed cowboying, but it does remind me of the terrific ending of--which?--I think The Crossing, with its reference to the Trinity nuclear bomb test.  And it aligns with McCarthy's notions of history, all of which he believes was written at the beginning of time, down to the life and death of a single man.  For McCarthy, the arc of history is the same as entropy, it bends toward destruction and chaos.

The end is hastened by John Grady's falling in love with a Mexican prostitute.  Their love poses its difficulties: she's fifteen, but that's nothing compared to the fact that she lives over the border in Juarez and is kept by a madman pimp who is also in love with her.  Oh, and she has epilepsy, but she hasn't told John Grady that.  It all unfolds in a recognizably violent fashion, remarkably recorded but with very few surprises.

At one point, Billy says:"I damn sure dont know what Mexico.  I think it's in your head.  Mexico."  Which of course, is true.  Both Billy and John Grady, despite fluent Spanish and extensive experience in the country to their south, understand Mexico as a kind of reflection of their own inner darkness.  That's because McCarthy thinks about it as a reflection of their own inner darkness as well.  Going to Mexico, especially in The Crossing, is something like the descent into hell in Greek epics.  It's easy to excuse the way McCarthy exoticizes Mexico because he does that to America too, in a different way.  After all, it's under a Texas overpass that the long epilogue takes place, in which an aged Billy meets a wise beggar who tells him about a mysterious dream.

I can accommodate that, but did I need another Mexican waif to fall in love with?  I certainly didn't need her to be fifteen years old.  Her age, her illness, all add up to extreme vulnerability and powerlessness, mark her for violence and death, make her the center of male rage, whether Eduardo's in keeping her or John Grady's in defending her.  Her relationship with John Grady seems borrowed from his love for Alejandra in All the Pretty Horses, but with more mythology and more blood.  In McCarthy's books, tragedy repeats itself as even darker tragedy.

The most well-wrought relationships in Cities of the Plain are between men.  Between John Grady and Billy, outcasts and pilgrims who end up finding each other, and the other cowboys, who are mostly of the same stock.  McCarthy has an ear for their language that sits in lovely tension alongside the mythopoetic gibberish he likes so much.  (I don't mean that as an insult--I like that stuff, even when it's gibberish.)  His belief in an irrevocable destiny, as violent as it is, ennobles these plainspoken cowboys.

The Crossing by Cormac McCarthy

You will see.  It is difficult even for brothers to travel together on such a voyage.  The road has its own reasons and no two travelers will have the same understanding of those reasons.  If indeed they come to an understanding of them at all.  Listen to the corridos of this country.  They will tell you.  Then you see in your own life what is the cost of things.  Perhaps it is true and nothing is hidden.  Yet many do not wish to see what lies before them in plain sight.  You will see.  The shape of the road is the road.  There is not some other road that wears that shape but only the one.  And every voyage begun upon it will be completed.

Cormac McCarthy's The Crossing opens with a vagrant Native American--an Indian, in the language of young Billy Parham, the young rancher's son who is the novel's protagonist--coming upon Billy and his brother Boyd out in the wilderness around their New Mexico home.  He demands under threat that Billy and Boyd steal food from their parents and bring it to him, which they do.  That is to say that it begins more or less like Great Expectations.

But the Indian never returns.  He never comes back to pay his respects or to menace further; when Billy's parents are murdered by horse thieves there's no intimation that it's the Indian who's responsible.  He comes on the page and plays his part and then leaves.  Don't look for coincidences, McCarthy seems to say; don't expect the shapeliness of a literary story, even as one of the themes of the book is the way that we use stories to shape our knowledge about the world which is essentially unknowable.

The Crossing is really three separate crossings.  In the first, Billy traps a pregnant shewolf that has been terrorizing his family's cattle and resolves to bring her, muzzled in a homemade strap, back to her home in the mountains of Mexico.  But she ends up being taken hostage by a traveling feria and made to fight dogs.  Billy, unable to secure her freedom, ends up shooting her.  It's a Ned Stark-level surprise, because to this point it seems as if the thrust of the novel is about Billy and the wolf, but just like the opening episode with the Indian, McCarthy enjoys dashing our narrative expectations.  The second crossing is when Billy returns with his brother Boyd to Mexico in order to hunt down the horses that have been stolen from his family's farm when his parents were murdered--an event that Boyd stayed home to witness, hardening him and making him alien to Billy, whose priority is protecting him.  The third is when Billy returns to Mexico to find Boyd, who has been shot in the chest and run off with a young Mexican girl.

Each of these plays like a dreamscape, or a nightmare.  The Parhams' adventures in Mexico are episodic and lyrical, containing hundreds of characters who may appear for no more than a page or two.  There's a blind man whose explanation for his blindness is straight out of a more baroquely violent McCarthy novel like The Road or Blood Meridian, the primadonna of a traveling theater company, a band of gypsies towing a downed airplane.  It reads something like a cross between Dante and Don Quixote.  Oh, and most of the dialogue is in untranslated Spanish. 

I've found that reading McCarthy is more fun when you approach it with a sense of humor.  It keeps you from rolling your eyes when he writes sentences like, "Dreams of that malignant lesser god come pale and naked and alien to slaughter all his kin and rout them from their house."  Paradoxically, I think it makes me more receptive when McCarthy is most profound, when he deals with his major theme, which is the essential unknowability of the universe:

Finally he asked him why this was such a blessing and the blind man did not answer and did not answer and then at last he said that because what can be touched falls into dust there can be no mistaking these things for the real.  At best they are only tracings of what the real has been.  Perhaps they are not even that.  Perhaps they are no more than obstacles to be negotiated in the ultimate sightlessness of the world.

Stories, for McCarthy, are also "tracings of the real," as the corrido ballads which strike Billy as being about his missing brother's courageous and tragic exploits.  As someone explains to him, the stories are older than his brother, but his brother has become a part of them, and that is a kind of truth that is as real as any other we might trust in.  That is, not very real at all, but whatever reality is we don't have access to it.  McCarthy's at his best--and his scariest--when thinking about these things.

The book ends with Billy alone in an abandoned building back in New Mexico.  He shoos away a dog, and wakes up to a false dawn before the real one and weeps.  I could be wrong but my guess is that this is meant to be the Trinity Test, the testing of a nuclear bomb in the New Mexico desert months before it was used on Japan.  It's as ominous an ending as any of McCarthy's novels has, a suggestion of the grandeur of evil beyond the reckoning of any individual human being, and a foreshadowing of a novel like The Road. 

All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy

The old man shaped his mouth how to answer.  Finally he said that among men there was no such communion as among horses and the notion that men can be understood at all was probably an illusion.  Rawlins asked him in bad spanish if there was a heaven for horses but he shook his head and said that a horse had no need of heaven.  Finally John Grady asked him if it were not true that should all horses vanish from the face of the earth the soul of the horse would not also perish for there would be nothing out of which to replenish it but the old man said that it was pointless to speak of there being no horses in the world for God would not permit such a thing.

John Grady Cole is a sixteen year old rancher, living and working on his grandfather's ranch is all that he's ever known.  When his grandfather dies, leaving the ranch to his mother, who insists on selling it, he is unmoored, alienated from his former life, and sets out with his friend Lacey Rawlins across the Mexican border looking for work and a new life.  They are accompanied by a young stranger, calling himself Jimmy Blevins--probably a fake name, taken from a popular radio show host--who seems to be another runaway, but who is more anxious and immature than John Grady and Rawlins, and less capable.

The Mexican landscape these men--boys, really--explore is beautifully and carefully portrayed by McCarthy.  It's a mysterious, unfamiliar land, only a day's ride from their Texas home but culturally and spiritually distant.  It offers luxury and satisfaction, as on the hacienda where John Grady finds work as an expert in horses, but also the threat of violence and death.  Like in all of McCarthy's works, these twin evils are part of the unknowable, unchanging nature of the universe:

In history there are no control groups.  There is no one to tell us what might have been.  We weep over the might have been, but there is no might have been.  There never was.  It is supposed to be true that those who do not know history are condemned to repeat it.  I don't believe knowing can save us.  What is constant in history is greed and foolishness and a love of blood and this is a thing that even God--who knows all that can be known--seems powerless to change.

(How's that for a reflection on the week of Trump's election?)  And yet All the Pretty Horses is, surprisingly for McCarthy, a conventional kind of love story.  John Grady falls in love with the beautiful Alejandra, the daughter of the rich haciendado who employs him.  They can't be together, of course, and McCarthy's paratactic style, like the love child of Ernest Hemingway and Raymond Carver, is surprisingly well-suited to capturing the bittersweetness of this well-worn story:

They stood on the platform and she put her face against his shoulder and he spoke to her but she did not answer.  The train came huffing in from the south and stood steaming and shuddering with the coach windows curving away down the track like great dominoes smoldering in the dark and he could not but compare this arrival to that one twenty-four hours ago and she touched the silver chain at her throat and turned away and bent to pick up the suitcase and then leaned and kissed him one last time her face all wet and then she was gone.  He watched her go as if he himself were in some dream.  All along the platform families and lovers were greeting one another.  He saw a man with a little girl in his arms and he whirled her around and she was laughing and when she saw his face she stopped laughing.  He did not see how he could stand there until the train pulled out but stand he did and when it was gone he turned and walked back out into the street.

In fact, McCarthy's idiosyncratic style--which is perfectly attuned, here, to the numbness of loss--struggles sometimes with the sturm und drang of his moral philosophy.  Sometimes, he reaches too far, and ends up sounding silly, like a parody of himself:

The browsing horses jerked their heads up.  It was no sound they'd ever heard before.  In the gray twilight those retchings seemed to echo like the calls of some rude provisional species loosed upon that waste.  Something imperfect and malformed lodged in the heart of being.  A thing smirking deep in the eyes of grace itself like a gorgon in an autumn pool.

A Gorgon in an Autumn Pool--the new album by Necromancer, in stores Friday.

But McCarthy is more versatile than he gets credit for.  The arguments between Rawlins and Jimmy Blevins, whose childishness is written with glee, are funny and charming.  Elsewhere, as in the long stretch where John Grady must navigate the dangers of a Mexican prison, or a character's assassination at the hands of rural police, McCarthy is as chilling and unsettling as his reputation suggests.  Mostly, All the Pretty Horses succeeds because, unlike the apocalyptic dreamscapes of Blood Meridian and The Road, it's a small, believable, human story.

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. 

All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy

Rawlins sucked on the cigarette.  They sat for a long time.  Finally he pitched the stub of the cigarette into the fire.  I'm goin to bed, he said.


Yeah, said John Grady.  I guess that's a good idea.


They spread their soogans and he pulled off his boots and stood them beside him and stretched out in his blankets.  The fire had burned to coals and he lay looking up at the stars in their places and the hot belt of matter that ran the chord of the dark vault overhead and he put his hands on the ground at either side of him and pressed them against the earth and in that coldly burning canopy of black he slowly turned dead center to the world, all of it taut and trembling and moving enormous and alive under his hands.


Well damn.  I didn't know what to think when I started this, and I'm forever grateful to the friends who gave it to me.  I'd read The Road, and knew how lyrical and cold and beautiful Cormac McCarthy's writing can be, but damn.  He loves something about bleak landscapes, or they bring out the best in his style, which is so spare most of the time that it just knocks you dead in passages like this.  John Grady's just fallen for the daughter of the hacendado who owns the ranch he's started working on in nowhere, Mexico, but instead of lovestruck ramblings he feels the earth 'taut and trembling and moving enormous and alive under his hands.'

It's like Cormac McCarthy uses his protagonists to express something about the ideal of real manhood, and this time the ideal involves stoicism, extreme self-reliance, and riding horseback into Mexico with a rifle and no absolutely no plan.  This may be my new favorite book (I think I say that too often), just because of the lyrical, dark beauty that comes out of an empty, scrub-desert landscape and follows a man and his horse.  If you need me I'll be in Mexico.

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.

Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates

Could a man ride home in the rear smoker, primly adjusting his pants at the knees to protect their crease and rattling his evening paper into a narrow panel to give his neighbor elbow room? Could a man sit meekly massaging his headache and allowing himself to be surrounded by the chatter of beaten, amiable husks of men who sat and swayed and played bridge in a stagnant smell of newsprint and tobacco and bad breath and overheated radiators?

Hell, no. The way for a man to ride was erect and out in the open, out in the loud iron passageway where the wind whipped his necktie, standing with his feet set wide apart on the shuddering, clangoring floor-plates, taking deep pulls from a pinched cigarette until its burning end was a needle of fire and quivering paper ash and then snapping it straight as a bullet into the roaring speed of the roadbed, while the suburban towns wheeled slowly along the pink and gray dust of seven o'clock. And when he came to his own station the way for a man to alight was to swing down the iron steps and leap before the train had stopped, to land running and slow down to an easy, athletic stride as he made for his parked automobile.

Revolutionary Road is a desperately sad book, and sadder for its realism: Here is the story of Frank and April Wheeler, a young, good-looking couple with small children living a plain life in the Connecticut suburbs outside of New York City. Frank and April are bright and well-educated, and both yearn for something more than a life as excruciatingly ordinary as the one they have, and rightfully so: Yates' depiction of the suburbs is almost paralyzing in its dullness. And yet at the same time, Frank and April are so cavalier and spiteful about their surroundings, even when trying not to be, they come across childish, and their aspirations lead them to quarrel and ultimately into tragedy.

What is horrifying about Revolutionary Road is that Frank and April are more everyman and everywoman than they suspect; or at the very least everyman-or-woman-who-might-pick-up-this-novel. Their suspicions of suburban life walk a narrow line between legitimacy and egoism, falling alternately into one realm or the other and exposing how similar the two can be. To indict Frank and April is to indict anyone who has entertained, as Frank and April do, the notion of pulling up stakes and moving to Europe (and admit it--haven't you?).

Frank and April decide to do exactly that, jobs and children be damned, and we must wonder whether they would have gone through with it if not for a single event that complicates things mightily (and which I shall not reveal). The scuttling of this plan leads to the widening of the already apparent rift between the two, to the escapism of adultery, and finally serves to cast a light on the futility, emptiness, and frustration that characterize suburban life. The final act is unbearably gruesome, but grimly appropriate.

I didn't love Revolutionary Road; it was too bleak for me. I can handle a book like The Road, which is horrifying and grotesque but takes place in a world that seems far removed from our own, but the world which we do inhabit has only become more like Revolutionary Road in the past fifty years. Yikes.

N.B.: Christopher Hitchens' recent review for the Atlantic Monthly is excellent.

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.

Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy

Then about the meridian of that day we come upon the judge on his rock there in that wilderness by his single self. Aye and there was no rock, just the one. Irving said he'd brung it with him. I said that it was a merestone for to mark him out of nothing at all. He had with him that selfsame rifle you see with him now, all mounted in german silver and the name that he'd give it set with silver wire under the checkpiece in latin: Et in Arcadia ego. A reference to the lethal in it.

Et in Arcadia ego: "And I am even in Arcadia." That is to say that I, Death, am present everywhere--even in utopia.

I have read three of his books now (this one, The Road, and No Country for Old Men) and I can say with assurance that no one, horror writer or otherwise, writes books as terrifying as Cormac McCarthy. The Road was a post-apocalytpic tale of of a man and his son set out in a barren wasteland, No Country a tale of violence strewn across the Texas-Mexico border in 1980. Blood Meridian is much like that--even set in the same place--but 130 years ago. The plot is simple to describe: An unnamed teenager called "the kid" heads out West and joins up with a group of scalphunters under John Joel Glanton. Glanton and his associates are historical figures, and McCarthy uses as his principle source a book called My Confession by Samuel Chamberlain, a firsthand account of the travails of the Glanton gang.

Chamberlain's book describes the principle villain of Blood Meridian, Judge Holden--usually just called "the judge"--this way:

The second in command [. . .] was a man of gigantic size called ‘Judge’ Holden of Texas. [. . .] He stood six feet six in his moccasins, had a large fleshy frame, a dull tallow face destitute of hair and all expression. His desires was blood and women. [. . .] Holden was by far the best educated man in northern Mexico; he conversed with all in their own language, spoke in several Indian lingos, at a fandango would take the Harp or Guitar from the hands of the musicians and charm all with his wonderful performance, and out-waltz any poblano of the ball. He was ‘plum centre’ with rifle or revolver, a daring horseman, acquainted with the nature of all the strange plants and their botanical names, great in Geology and Mineralogy, in short another Admirable Crichton, and with all an arrant coward. (Chamberlain 271-72)

McCarthy's judge is that and more; he is a mysterious cipher devoted to violence and destruction. He is extremely intelligent, forever sketching and taking notes of local flora and fauna in his notebook, but wherever he goes, children end up disappearing and are found later assaulted and mutilated. The quote I opened the post with is his creation myth, in a way; it describes how the Glanton gang came upon him out in the desert one day, sitting on a rock--the only rock--just waiting for them. As they are out of gunpowder, he leads them on a multi-day trek to gather guano and sulfur from the mouth of a volcano to make some just in time to massacre a pursuant band of Indians.

Noted critic Harold Bloom called the judge "the most frightening figure in all of American literature." Is that true? It might well be. Blood Meridian didn't quite terrify me in the way that The Road did with its undending bleakness and its refusal to offer any glimmer of hope, but the judge very well might be the most terrifying character that I can think of. He is the unstoppable force, hyper-intelligent, hyper-amoral, and assuredly immortal; when he and the kid butt horns there can be no doubt that the conflict will end in the judge's favor. Let's say that in rereading The Road, I wouldn't be surprise to find the seven-foot hairless likeness of the judge staggering through that terrible wilderness.

As to which is better, this or The Road, I have not decided. I think that The Road will stay with me longer because of its sheer terror, but it may be that Blood Meridian is the deeper, more complete book. To call it, as some have, a "Gnostic" novel, is to barely scratch its complex commentary on the intersections of knowledge, humanity, and destruction, while The Road--and to a much more extreme extent, No Country--seem content to look upon their respective horrors more as observers than commentators.

No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy

THAT is no country for old men. The young
In one another's arms, birds in the trees
- Those dying generations - at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.

--Sailing to Byzantium, Wm. Butler Yeats

I told Nathan I wouldn't see the Coen Brothers' film No Country for Old Men until I had read the book, which I did in a couple of days during my vacation to Cancun. It didn't take long at all, maybe two or three total hours, but a lot of that has to do with McCarthy's unique style. No Country contains a lot of paratactical sentences with very few quotation marks ("Chigurh did this and did this and did this and did this and did this"). The result is stark, much starker than The Road, which was comparatively intricate and detailed, and gives No Country a style which I have not seen successfully replicated in any novel. But also it makes the reading go very fast, sometimes to the point where I would read a page in thirty seconds and then realize that my brain had not had enough time to absorb what I had read, and I would have to go on and read it again.

In No Country for Old Men, we get the story of Llewellyn Moss, a rather ordinary young Texan with a wife named Carla Jean who happens to chance upon the result of a drug deal gone wrong while hunting in the desert. There are bodies everywhere, and abandoned vehicles, and a big bag of cocaine and a shitload of cash in a suitcase. Moss, in a rather nonplussed way, takes the money, but this sets of a chain of events in which Moss is hunted down by a cold and ruthless professional killer named Anton Chigurh who uses an air-powered steergun (it shoots out a tab which punctures a cow's skull and then pulls it back in lightning-quick) to kill his victims. Chigurh is the kind of villain that thiller writers try to create every time they write a thriller but rarely succeed: emotionless, austere, living both simultaneously outside of the law and in accordance to a strict interior moral code. The italicized monologues of aging Sheriff Bell, who relates his own horror at the deterioration of the county which he protects, are woven throughout.

In fact, No Country is a thriller through and through, but avoids the platitudes that so often come together to make good triumph over evil before the credits roll: the plucky hero cannot out-clever the professional killer; he doesn't play some cheap psychological trick (I'm looking at you, Vincent D'Onofrio) that goads the killer into violating his own methodicalness or let his guard down. The most important death and ostensibly the book's climax happens "off-screen;" what traditional thriller would be content with not allowing the reader/viewer to see that moment? And most importantly, there is no intimation that, even if Moss is able to beat Chigurh--which I will not say if he does or not--that this would mean anything, because even Chigurh, as fascinating and unique as he is, is simply a cog in a faceless, evil, all-consuming machine. The insinuation of the title is that even if you can prevent single crimes and tragedies, you cannot prevent humankind from succumbing more and more to its primeval urges; that is why Bell becomes so alienated and disillusioned. If The Road is a book about the way that humankind carries hope when hope makes no sense, No Country for Old Men is a book that screams, "Hope is lost," and in that way might even be more depressing.

I did like this book, but after The Road it was a little disappointing. I think I will read Blood Meridian, a more traditional Western.

The Road / No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy

Partly because of Chris has already reviewed The Road, partly because I'm lazy, and partly because they're both by the same author, I'm going to combine my reviews of The Road and No Country for Old Men.

The Road has become pretty ubiquittous, pretty impressive for one of the most depressing books I've ever read. It tells the story of a man and his son struggling to survive in a post-nuclear(?) world. The imagery is stark, the prose is poetic and spare, and the characters are mostly unnamed, except for one old man who occurs near the middle and lies about his name anyway.

The theme of man against forces he can't possibly defeat is repeated in No Country for Old Men, a novel that is, at points, nearly as depressing as The Road, but with a bit more light at the end of the tunnel. Alternating between chapters told in third person and chapters narrated by an aging sheriff unfortunate enough to run up against an almost supernaturally skilled killer, it's a strange mixture of philosophical treatise, adventure story, and dark (very dark) comedy.

Both books are set, ostensibly, in the West, although the setting plays less of a part in The Road than it does in No Country. I hesitate to say much more about the plot of No Country because if anyone here is planning to either read the book or watch the upcoming film, I don't want to spoil it. I'd highly recommend both books, just don't read them late at night after a big tragedy.

2007 Tournament of Books Winner: The Road

A month ago Nathan linked us to The Morning News' 2007 Tournament of Books, in which books from 2006 were pitted against each other in a no-holds barred battle. The final match pitted what I pegged as the pre-tourney favorite and the last book I read, The Road, against Absurdistan by Gary Shteyngart, which was eliminated in the first round but brought back by reader demand.

As I predicted, The Road creamed the competition, 15-2. The two dissenters are two of the clownier figures of popular culture, Colin Meloy and Sasha Frere-Jones. Now, I'm a big fan of the Decemberists, but Meloy tends to come off a bit ridiculous in his more literary pursuits, and his review for the Tournament of Books for the match between The Lay of the Land and English, August was a long and painful extended metaphor. Frere-Jones is a music columnist for the New Yorker who embarrassed himself last year by foaming at the mouth over Stephin Merritt's nonexistent racism. Also, he gets an unfair shot in at Jonathan Safran Foer--I don't care who you are, if Everything is Illuminated didn't affect you, you must have been reading it with a flashlight inside your ass. Totally unsubstantiated claim: If his name were Gabriel Garcia Foer, everyone would think Illuminated is a masterpiece.

So, The Road wins. Some of the commenters intimated that The Road is a classic-type novel, something that will be remembered for years and years as one of the lynchpin novels of our time. That's certainly possible; I'm not sure how I feel about it myself but I can say without a doubt that I have never read anything like it and hope to never read anything like it again. I can't comment on Absurdistan, but something tells me that it's not quite up to the challenge of The Road.

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.