Absolute Gentleman

It’s fair to challenge my argument for The Road as an anti-war novel, but compelling evidence (to me) lies in what I consider the climactic scene of the story. The man and his son have just come back from looking for a vagabond the father initially shunned and abandoned. They couldn’t find him and presumed he wandered off naked and freezing — his death imminent. The boy is trying to convince his father the importance of finding the vagabond:

What do you want to do?
Just help him, Papa. Just help him.

The man looked back up the road.

He was just hungry, Papa. He’s going to die.
He’s going to die anyway.
He’s so scared, Papa.

The man squatted and looked at him. I’m scared, he said. Do you understand? I’m scared.
The boy didn’t answer. He just sat there with his head bowed, sobbing.

You’re not the one who has to worry about everything.

The boy said something but he couldnt understand him. What? he said.

He looked up, his wet and grimy face. Yes, I am, he said. I am the one.

On the surface the boy realizes that his father is going to die. He has broken down and admitted fear and has become the child, arguably.

The anti-war sentiment lies underneath the scene. When the boy says, “Yes, I am. I am the one,” McCarthy, now age 74, seems to tell us that we are in the process of leaving a wasteland to our children — that the adults of this world are setting up our future generations for great suffering. We think we’re miserable now? McCarthy seems to say, Just wait until our kids are faced with the carnage left over from what we’ve done to this planet…”

My final issue, because I actually am tired of writing about it at this point, is with McCarthy’s word choices. I know it’s important to get lost in the moment while you’re writing, but some of McCarthy’s riffs are more posturing than aesthetic:

He squatted and scooped up a handful of stones and smelled them and let them fall clattering. Polished round and smooth as marbles or lozenges of stone veined and striped. Black disclets and bits of polished quartz all bright from the mist off the river. The boy walked out and squatted and laved up the dark water.

Maybe it’s the syntax in this example. I’m not even getting into the inconsistency in the use of sentence fragments. I have no idea what he’s trying to say in this one:

When he rose and turned to go back the tarp was lit from within where the boy had awakened. Sited there in the darkness the frail blue shape of it looked like the pitch of some last venture at the edge of the world. Something all but unaccountable. And so it was.

If I’m spending the next ten pages annoyed with what I perceive is a writer’s arrogance — if I feel like I’m being reduced to someone who is just supposed to accept a paragraph of writing at face value because it’s Cormac McCarthy’s work and he is allowed to be cryptic and ambiguous…I know he’s an old man, and I know people will buy his books because he has written great ones and he’s a brilliant man…I don’t want him to take me for granted, though. There are many poor choices, and he needed to work harder. This is what I expect from his genius.

I’ve read glowing reviews of the book that suggested the novel was a brilliant character study. Excrement. I’m assuming the boy is around eight or nine years old. This scene demonstrates some of McCarthy’s laziness and nothing even resembling a depth in character:

Bye and bye they came to a set of tracks cooked into the tar. They just suddenly appeared. He squatted and studied them. Someone had come out of the woods in the night and continued down the melted roadway.

Who is it? said the boy.
I don’t know. Who is anybody?

What kind of a question is this for a nine year old boy, much less your own son? It’s easy to end the dialogue there, so open-ended that we assume it’s all wrapped up in zen Buddhism, with a side of fried existentialism. We don’t dare to question it, and yet it hovers over the reader while he chases his tail, searching for meaning in the words of the ever-elusive genius of Cormac McCarthy.

So it’s only fitting that he ends his book with more of the same:

Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery.

OK, I understand: the Earth will reset itself and life is a force that cannot be stopped, even if the form it assumes resembles nothing of what preceeded it. Great. I really don’t care how a book ends, as long as it’s well-written. I learned a long time ago not to hold much stock in how things end up. If it’s rendered well, I am satisfied. This was most definitely not rendered well.

I am not going to read any more of McCarthy’s subsequent books. He broke my heart with this one and treated me like an idiot. Yes, maybe it’s my problem with how I interpreted our relationship, but I don’t care. I feel what I feel. Instead of reading his next ten books (I hope he lives to 100 and beyond.) I’ll wait for his letters or his unpublished outtakes from past work. I’ll read his lectures and his interviews. I want to be reminded of the times I clutched his books and couldn’t (couldnt) wait to read the next page, the time before he started to drift away from me.