The Road

How do you keep the light, with shadows closing in?

Just saw that one of my favorite authors¹ passed away at the age of 89. Rest in peace.

I first heard about Cormac McCarthy in college from my friend Adam, who was griping about All The Pretty Horses. He had seen the movie adaptation starring Matt Damon and Penelope Cruz and was less than impressed with its fidelity to the book, I guess. I never saw the movie so I can’t pile on, but general consensus says it didn’t seem to understand its source material all that well.

The opposite was true of No Country For Old Men, which I actually saw before I’d ever read the book. (In fairness, McCarthy wrote it first as a screenplay before converting it to a book. Which makes sense.) Proof of McCarthy’s bulletproof writing? Several scenes of dialogue from the Coen Brothers’ eventual Oscar-winning adaptation of No Country For Old Men were ported over from the book, word-for-word. Getting to watch Javier Bardem and Josh Brolin and Tommy Lee Jones sink their teeth into McCarthy’s words was one of my most memorable moviegoing experiences.

I had gone to the movie alone, as Holly was either not feeling well or—more likely—not all that into the idea of a Western about a psychopath. When I came home, she asked how it was and I talked about how the entire experience was thrilling. I had sat in the theater, practically giddy the whole time. She asked if she should be worried that her husband felt elation about such a dark movie. My response was that the thrill was not the violence at all, but the masterful, top-of-their-game craft by everyone involved: the writing, the acting, the directing, the …uh…. cinematographing².

It’s not often you see a movie where all those things intersect at once. In fact, you’ll often hear about an Oscar-nominated actor rising above the source material or being the bright spot in an otherwise ho-hum³ movie. But a film where everyone is peaking at the same time? That’s transcendent. It’s the best Coen Brothers movie⁴ with a career-defining performance by villain Bardem, a top three performance from Tommy Lee Jones⁵, and one of cinematographer Roger Deakins’ best⁶ (if more understated than some of his more lauded work).

No Country, though, isn’t even my favorite McCarthy book.

That would be The Road.

“But it’s so dark.” “All it is is despair. A dirge.” “A book about a depressing apocalypse and cannibals and a dad that (spoiler) dies? Sounds like a real page-turner, Paul. Really?”

Yes. Really.

I read it the first time when I was frequently traveling for work. I toted it on planes and in hotel rooms, carrying around a pen to underline my favorite phrases, favorite sections. At one point, I started to feel like perhaps it would’ve been a better idea to underline the parts that I didn’t love, such was the volume of underlined words throughout my copy of the book.

McCarthy’s prose alone. Man…

But also its themes. For one, remembering.

The man—the unnamed main character in the book—clings tightly on to remembering and tries to instill the same in his son. McCarthy does a masterful job of weaving in little bits from their old, pre-apocalypse life, like his (spoiler: deceased) wife (the boy’s mother) and other fleeting memories. He's white-knuckle clutching to these.

Like in this conversation. (The father is speaking first.)

-Just remember that the things you put in your head are there forever, he said. You might want to think about that.
-You forget some things, dont you?
-Yes. You forget what you want to remember and you remember what you want to forget.

McCarthy then describes a day in the man's childhood, calling it "the day to shape the days upon." What a way to say “foundational” or what Pixar’s Inside Out calls “core memories”! Later, when they arrive at a beach after endless time wandering through forests and fields, the man recalls a dreamy morning, pre-catastrophe, on the beach, saying, "if (I) were God, (I) would have made the world just so and no different." Who can’t relate to that feeling of a moment or a memory being so achingly ideal?

Another thing I love about the book: there's this push/pull between faith and utter faithlessness, understandable given the perilous and impossible-to-comprehend times and the way the world had been flipped upside down. At times, he man invokes God—not unlike Job of the Bible—just to curse him. Other times, he views God more idealistically, like in one of my favorite lines in the whole book: "watching the ashen daylight congeal over the land, he knew only that the child was his warrant. He said: if he is not the word of God, God never spoke."

Ugh. That is so perfectly written it hurts.

If he is not the word of God, God never spoke. Sheesh.

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The theme I latched onto most, though, was the book’s tender, careful father/son relationship. It literally made me want to be a better father. Yes, the post-apocalyptic dirge with cannibalism and faithlessness….it really made me want to be a better parent. More than I can say for a lot of the parenting books that just make me feel worse.

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

Each is all the other has. The man is trying so hard to shield his son from—and shepherd him safely through—the cruelties and darkness of this post-apocalyptic world, even sometimes not knowing why. Here’s this life that feels "like the onset of some cold glaucoma dimming away the world⁷" where "nobody wants to be here and nobody wants to leave." He’s wrestling with his own worries and doubts and ability to keep his head, while trying to keep hope and humanity alive in his son. Some of my favorite conversations between the two of them are the father trying to reassure the son, while feeling all the fear himself. Parenting in a nutshell, for me.

Like:

(As the two of them see and hear trees falling in the nearby forest, as a result of the cataclysmic event): It's okay. All the trees in the world are going to fall sooner or later. But not on us.

-How do you know?

- I just know.

But then sometimes McCarthy shows us this amazing honesty, where the father reveals his cracks and we see that the son is not as shielded—from the harshness of the world and difficulty realities—as the man has hoped. (The father speaks first here.)

-You don't believe me.

- I don't know.

-Do you think I lie to you?

-No.

-But you think I might lie to you about dying.

-Yes.

-Okay. I might. But we're not dying.

-Okay.

And another conversation in the same vein, this time discussing cannibalism, which the book tells us might even be…widely practiced at this point. The two of them have multiple brushes with groups of cannibals, illustrating the possible depths of depravity when humans are pushed to their limits. (This time the boy speaks first.)

- We wouldn't ever eat anybody, would we?

- No. Of course not.

-Even if we were starving?

-We're starving now.

-You said we weren't.

-I said we weren't dying. I didn't say we weren't starving.

-But we wouldn't.

-No. We wouldn't.

-No matter what.

-No. No matter what.

-Because we're the good guys.

-Yes.

-And we're carrying the fire.

-And we're carrying the fire. Yes. 

I wrote a couplet in my song "Warmed By The Same Sun", that goes:

How do you keep the light, with shadows closing in?
Keep it safe inside you; let it shine out from within.

It was inspired "the fire” spoken of in the conversation above. I loved how the father book consistently taught his son, even in the most trying of times, to keep the fire, a stand-in for “stay/do/be good.”

What’s life, more than “keep the fire”? Not much, I’d say.

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One last McCarthy thing. I love and admire and hope to someday have the skills to emulate his comfort level with ambiguity.

He treats The Road like a play in a tiny black box theater, only providing just the bare minimum of what you need to get the story, to follow (and feel) along. The man and the boy never have names. The catastrophic event is never really described. You get a sense of what's happening in the details, rather than in some exposition dump or overwrought description of a mountain.

In one scene, the man uses the term "as the crow flies.” The the son asks about the idiom and, once he knows, asks if a crow could fly high enough to see the sun.

McCarthy doesn't say "from then on, nobody could see the sun", but rather reveals the details of this world where you can’t see the sun through the story.

Another time, the man refers to what used to be "states." The son asks what happened to them. The man doesn't know. And McCarthy leaves it at that, where another author might have given us a two-chapter detour into The Dissolution Of The States. Or had the father give some know-it-all expository monologue. But instead we get the question mark (or ellipses), just like the story’s characters do.

The book is just about this man and his son. THAT'S IT. Forget all the politics and the science and whatever other stuff. It's just these two, forging their way through this alien world, trying to “keep the fire.” McCarthy tells you what you need to know and no more, all the more impressive if you read some of his other work that is uber-descriptive. All The Pretty Horses, for instance, goes deep on, like, all the gear you need to put on a horse (saddle, latigo, reins, etc). His ability to do that kind of detail and then write a book as verbally spartan as The Road is further proof of his mastery.

I’m just glad I still have a few books he wrote I’ve never read⁸. Like having Christmas presents you never got around to opening.

1. In no order:
Cormac McCarthy
Michael Chabon
Karen Russell
George Saunders
Dave Eggers
Jesmyn Ward
Jennifer Egan
Nick Hornby
Chuck Klosterman
Amanda Petrusich
Rob Sheffield
John Steinbeck
Zadie Smith
Brian Doyle
Denis Johnson
David Foster Wallace

2. Not a word.

3. I guarantee that Cormac McCarthy never used “ho-hum.”

4. Fight me. I love the Coen Brothers. And this is their masterpiece.

1. In The Valley of Elah

2. Probably No Country For Old Men

3. The Fugitive. Just perfect.

4. Men In Black / The Three Burials…

5. .

1. Blade Runner 2049

2. The Assassination of Jesse James…

3. No Country For Old Men

4. Fargo

5. 2017

6. O Brother Where Art Thou

7. Sicario

8. Doubt

9. The Village

10. A Serious Man

6.

7. McCarthy writes that on the very first page. Talk about coming out with guns a-blazing…

8. I also read Blood Meridian which is a book I’ll never be able to forget, try as I might. Just absurdly brutal and violent and ugly, for reasons obvious to anyone familiar with its historical context.