What We Talk about When We Talk about Cormac McCarthy

As I write, I am on what I’ve called a “writing sabbatical,” largely because I’ve gone off the grid for a few days so I can tackle several long-delayed writing projects (brief essays, nothing too impressive) without interruption. (I here note the profound strangeness of completing a sentence and having no e-mail to read or phone call to answer. I feel like Henry David Thoreau, only mildly less self-admiring.)

However, I’m also reading, which is something I rarely do anymore. Since a massive percentage of my waking hours is spent in the act of reading, that last sentence might easily be challenged; but when I think of “reading,” I think of hours of sustained attention to a text without concern for its usefulness in my work. My typical workload, plus being in a marriage and a family, doesn’t permit that. So yesterday I finally got to read the bulk of the hottest memoir in American confessionally reformed circles: The Secret Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert by Rosaria Champagne Butterfield (which, incidentally, is a name no one would believe were it assigned to the heroine of a romance novel). But that’s not the book I want to talk about.

The final third of Butterfield’s memoir is chiefly taken up with her current life as the mother of a foster and adoptive family. This, inevitably, led me to consider my own foster and adoptive family, which equally inevitably leads me back to Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.

I can no more quantify my intellectual and psychic debt to McCarthy than I can to Shakespeare, and I am equally embarrassed by how relatively unfamiliar I am with the entire body of work of both. (Here I feel even more acutely the impoverishment incurred by not giving sustained attention.) I read The Road only once, but it has never left me. I recently ran across a review of it in an old copy of First Things, and the reviewer faulted it rather sharply. As I recall, this was largely because McCarthy failed the purpose of the dystopian genre, which is to explore the nature and meaning of society and civilization.

I think this is a profound misreading of The Road. McCarthy didn’t write a dystopian novel. Rather, he wrote a book about fatherhood and used the genre of the dystopian novel because it allowed him to strip away everything else. Along those lines, this is why he had the mother commit suicide before the book’s opening: not because he’s a misogynist who thinks women are incapable of parenting through crisis, but because he was writing about a father, not parents. (A note to skeptics of that last sentence: as someone married to a mother who spends a great deal of time thinking through that role, I can assure you that “parenting” is a generic category quite distinct from those of “mothering” and “fathering.”)

SPOILER ALERT: I will now discuss details of The Road’s plot. For the record, this is the most mind-numbingly terrifying book I have ever read (which is why I’ve only read it once and don’t own a copy), so I don’t recommend anyone else ever read it. In that light, perhaps revealing the plot won’t much matter. At any rate, you’ve been warned (twice in just this paragraph, actually).

As the title indicates, The Road’s basic plot is the father’s plan to travel across a dystopian nightmare, left after an unnamed and barely described apocalypse, to the ocean. It’s not much of a plan because the father doesn’t know what he and his young son will find when, if ever, they get there. Right away, McCarthy shows the fragility and futility of the father’s attempt to provide for his son’s future. We’re told he carries a gun with two bullets, one for the father and one for the boy in case the unspeakable threatens. In the opening pages of the novel, the father has to use one of his bullets to shoot a man who might kill his son, throwing off his entire calculus for their journey.

With equal authorial boldness, McCarthy brings his protagonists to the end of the road, to the ocean where they find only more ruin and human despair. The father’s best efforts leave him with nothing for his young boy, and then illness sets in. He leaves his son with the best instructions he can on how to survive, but dies with no real hope for the boy’s future in a nightmarishly hostile world.

Then McCarthy delivers what may appear to be an arbitrary deus ex machina, in which a small band of adults and children emerge. They tell the boy they’ve been aware of him and his father for some time, but didn’t approach because they judged the father too dangerous; his protective zeal, ironically, made him a threat even to those who might sincerely befriend him. The boy is taken in, and the most despair-ridden book I’ve ever read ends with a genuine ray of hope.

Of course, careful readers of Cormac McCarthy’s work know nothing with him is ever arbitrary. Instead, the entire book is carefully crafted to commend the path of true fatherhood. A father, to be worthy of the title, must be absolutely committed to his children. While he will have to die for them, he must go even further: he has to kill for them if the circumstances demand it. He does all he can to provide for their welfare and their future, but both of those are ultimately out of his control: though a father, he is, ultimately, only a man. In the end, however, his children are not as dependent on him as he thinks; they each are part of a much larger world, and that world has a place for them, a place which even their father is unable to imagine.

For a post-apocalyptic novel, The Road is remarkably devoid of religious symbolism (those who write of the apocalypse have a hard time avoiding the Biblical one). From what I can tell from his other works, Cormac McCarthy leans toward nihilism, or at least a rather dark existentialism. Nonetheless, he is only a Westerner by way of the Christ-haunted South, and The Road admonishes me as a Christian father. McCarthy is right: I must imitate Christ by dying for my children, but I am not their Savior. They have a greater Father, and I need to entrust them to him and teach them to forsake me.

In this, I’m not sure Cormac McCarthy taught me anything new, but he did help me realize that which any reader of Scripture should already know. That’s the thing about giving hours of sustained attention to a text without concern for its usefulness: that text just might answer the questions you didn’t realize you were asking.