The First Third of the Road

Here are some preliminary thoughts on The Road. I’m on about page 100, and though I don’t plan on making many details of the book explicit, I may by accident. So, fair warning.

One of the things that makes a lot of the ad copy on the book – the back of the book, its blurbs on wikipedia and amazon – is that the father and son of this book are “each the other’s world entire.” That archaic phrasing is not, in main, representative of how the book works. Many more of the sentences in the book just work like this, selected at random: “He’d carried his billfold about till it wore a cornershaped hole in his trousers. Then one day he sat by the road-side and went through the contents. Some money, credit cards. His driver’s license” (McCarthy, 51). This is the kind of no-frills, almost monotone phrasing that Hemingway made so popular back when Hemingway was making things popular. It’s also how most of McCarthy’s previous novel, No Country for Old Men, went. But where NCFOM’s monotone was occasionally broken up by Sheriff Bell’s folksy narration, the break in droning in The Road is provided by things like “each the other’s world entire” – weird little inroads of poetic language that break in upon the dry reportage that constitutes most of the text.

From what I hear of McCarthy’s early output (TFlan told me this, actually, and elaboration from him would be apropos and appreciated), the prose is much denser. This was borne out by my highly sophisticated experiment of finding a copy of Blood Meridian and looking at a random page to confirm that the paragraphs seemed longer, more words per page, and endorsing the previously-denser hypothesis wholeheartedly. So the New McCarthy likes to inject something into his streamlined monotone. The most famous example of this I can think of, off the top of my head (this kind of injection, that is) is in the Aeolus chapter of Ulysses – in the middle of staccato, third-person and disorienting narrative, we get: “I have often thought since on looking back over that strange time that it was that small act, trivial in itself, that striking of that match, that determined the whole aftercourse of both our lives” (Joyce, 140). That sort of thing presses home a strange point, since it is a chunk of writing clearly not of a piece with the writing around it, and it can have a strongly disorienting effect. Here are some more from The Road, similar to that other’s-world-entire moment: watching the depressing gray snow, Our Protagonist watches a flake “expire [in his hand] like the last host in Christendom” (McCarthy, 16). Choppy sentences first describe Our Protagonist in his childhood home: “A tangle of dead lilac. The shape of a hedge. On cold winter nights when the electricity was out in a storm we would sit at the fire here, me and my sisters, doing our homework. The boy watched him” (McCarthy, 26). And then – suddenly, remarkably, and playing on the confusion of pronouns here – “Watched shapes claiming him he could not see.” Note just how differently “shapes” works in two sentences – the hedge and the claimants – so very close to one another. The intrusion of this poetic language seems mediated through Our Protagonist – so far (p100), he’s the only person we’ve really met who seems to be able to even think in such abstract metaphorical language, as his son has only ever been concerned with staying alive. Though, Our Guy’s wife seems to have had elements of poesy about her, too – I’m not sure how that affects these interstitial, guerilla bursts of poetry or what we make of them. It should be one to keep track of as we go on, though – whether these flashes continue, or fade out – and to wonder what that kind of fractured, decontextualized weird writing means in any writing at all.