I read Cormac McCarthy's The Road during Peace Corps In-service Training following a book exchange with Victoria. I didn't think it was possible to swap a book comparable to Arundhati Roy's God of Small Things, which she loved, by the way, but Victoria did not disappoint. We were busy as hell with day-long workshops, and in my much needed downtime, I'd shut my hotel room door on all the merrymaking across the hall and read. This was the perfect book in which to throw my weary, anti-social soul.
McCarthy immediately drops the reader into a dying America. Bandits and murderers roam the Road, on which layers of ash cover the shells of vegetation and half-eaten human corpses. A nuclear catastrophe? McCarthy never says, but such details of this man-made disaster pale in significance to the story that follows an unnamed man and his son as they wheel their shopping cart of belongings toward what they hope is safety.
"The blackness he woke to on those nights was sightless and impenetrable. A blackness to hurt your ears with listening. Often he had to get up. No sound but the wind in the bare blackened trees. He rose and stood tottering in that cold autistic dark with his arms outheld for balance while the vestibular calculations in his skull cranked out their reckonings. An old chronicle."
What I found most remarkable was McCarthy's portrayal of the relationship between the man and his son. The man did whatever it took to protect his son, even at the risk of alienating himself from his son's affection, showing the simultaneous strength and fragility of the bond between parent and child.
McCarthy's parsimonious prose left room for me to internalize a sense of doom in the fear, anguish and desperation of these two emaciated survivors. However, he was, best of all, careful to do no more than nudge me toward a discovery of the faith that one cannot help but have, even in a humanity that barely exists.
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