Absolute Gentleman

One of the many things I try to emphasize when teaching literature to young people is that what you think of a particular piece of literature says as much about you as it does the poem, short story, essay, or novel you are studying. The crystal clear example I like to discuss is in The Catcher in the Rye, when Holden Caulfield visits his old English teacher, Mr. Antolini, and sleeps over. Holden wakes up in the middle of the night to Mr. Antolini stroking his head gently. Sometimes I read the scene with the students in class or I assign it for homework so they can experience it in an environment completely comfortable for them. The issue is whether Mr. Antolini was behaving inappropriately with Holden or not.

To most of the students, it is clear that Mr. Antolini is a dirty old man, a drunk, a molester. I tell them I disagree, but that I completely understand them — that they might even be right. I tell them I disagree because I’m a father. Mr. Antolini married an older woman, had no children himself, had a friendship with Holden’s father, and it was clear that Holden admired Antolini deeply. What if Mr. Antolini took to Holden as if he were like a son to him? It is obvious throughout the novel that Holden and his father have a less than colorful relationship, so when another man shows affection for Holden, he isn’t sure how to handle it, except to run out of the apartment out of fear of being sexually assaulted. Who can blame him? And who can blame students for thinking this way? Every other news story is about another child abduction, assault, or molestation. There’s no shortage of ways adults are letting children down today.

So my perspective as a father of two (three soon) and a fan of Cormac McCarthy promised that The Road would be an interesting read. And it was, even though it was yet another anti-war novel. I spoke to a friend about this the other day, a friend I see once a week at a specific time, and I tried to articulate, barely succeeding, that I found it interesting to recognize that we are in a specific literary period right now. I’m not sure it can be labeled as narrowly as a “Lost Generation” or a “Beat Generation,” and it certainly couldn’t be classified as broadly as post-war literature, but there seems to be a real apocalyptic bent on literature, all seeming to work toward an anti-war end. Everything reads differently now, as if 9/11 tainted my literary palate. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer, Falling Man by Don DeLillo, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union by Michael Chabon, and the aforementioned Cormac Mccarthy novel are obvious reminders that 9/11 is a permanent part of the American canon. The books that have changed for me after my palate was tainted are ones like Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk, The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, “The Lottery,” by Shirley Jackson.

I have read most of Cormac McCarthy’s work, and the spare, but rich, prose kept me picking up his books. He’s Ernest Hemingway without the literary range. This is an Oprah Winfrey Book, but I bought it anyway, and it won the Pulitzer Prize. Honestly, it must have been slim pickins this year for this book to win the Prize. If you ever meet a writer who says he’s been nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, say “Big deal, dude…” because anyone can nominate themselves for a Pulitzer. If he wins one, though, that’s pretty cool.

The structure of the narrative was sometimes painfully linear. The reader is thrown into the lives of a man and his son as they push a shopping cart filled with the last of their belongings through an ash covered American landscape about a year after an unnamed apocalyptic catastrophe. They push on a few feet at a time, and most of the journey happens page by page, with only a few hints as to what their lives consisted of before America was reduced to a wasteland of ash-covered landscape, a steady falling of gray rain and snow, and bands of cannibalistic killers around every corner.

Their desire to get to the coast, presumably the west coast, is what propels the reader forward, if even an inch at a time. There were commendable elements of the writing. McCarthy made the mundane interesting, and heights of action in the plot jumped out at the reader without warning. There was no escalating Jaws music, then a flurry of action, and writing like this keeps a reader glued to the narrative, regardless of the pace it seems to be maintaining. Sometimes, though, the prose got monotonous:

He took out the plastic bottle of water and unscrewed the cap and held it out and the boy took it and stood drinking. He lowered the bottle and got his breath and he sat in the road and crossed his legs and drank again. Then he handed the bottle back and the man drank and screwed the cap back on and rummaged through the pack.

This kind of minutiae slowed the pace even more than already established. Change of pace is good, I suppose, but I thought McCarthy picked his spots decently at best. I expected better of him. Maybe, though, he tried not to pick spots at all, but instead allowed them to come almost randomly, to simulate the precariousness of the journey, and to disallow the reader to make assumptions or anticipate the plot. I am apt to believe this argument after reading passages like this one. The man and his son hear a truck of “bad guys” coming and have to duck into the woods until they pass.

They could hear the men talking. Hear them unlatch and raise the hood. He sat with his arm around the boy. Shh, he said. Shh. After a while they heard the truck begin to roll. Lumbering and creaking like a ship. They’d have no other way to start it save to push it and they couldn’t get it fast enough to start on that slope. After a few minutes it coughed and bucked and stopped again.

McCarthy has the reader entranced, focused on the success or failure of a simple conflict: men trying to get a truck started and rolling and away from the man and his son. It’s excellent writing, because of what comes in the next sentences:

He raised his head to look and coming through the weeds twenty feet away was one of their number unbuckling his belt. They both froze.

It’s what Mark Twain called “legerdemain,” the act of hand trickery, or showing your audience, in clear view, what you are doing with your left hand while your right hand is secretly working to present the surprise. The audience concentrates so much on the left hand, that they leave themselves open to an unanticipated possibility. The scene doesn’t end with the quote above, but I’ll let you discover the rest of it. Just know that there are a few of these moments in the book, and there isn’t an easy way to anticipate them.

In the end, though, there were more than a couple of elements in the writing that bothered me. I’ll put this entry out there and try to articulate them during the next week.