Why The Road Is a Bad First Selection for a Book Club

“Do you think your fathers are watching? That they weigh you in their ledgerbook? There is no book and your fathers are dead in the ground.” -- The Road, p 196

Now, although The Road was not my selection for the Unpacking My Library book club, it was my idea to put it first, and it’s really the first-ness that this post is going to wind up finding objectionable. So, don’t worry, the buck stops here.

A very smart man once told me that Rasselas, the novella-length piece of fiction by Samuel Johnson, was a novel written against novels. It probably is. It is a very boring story about the Prince of Abyssinia, who leaves the Happy Valley in which he lives to have a series of very long conversations about just what it is that he might do with his life, and finds out that pretty much everything’s a bummer. No one in Rasselas’s world does much, and everyone talks a lot. It is basically a series of Johnson’s moralizing essays, like the Rambler, yoked together with dull narration. It’s the dullness of the narration that makes it an anti-novel, really: compare it to its contemporary, the arch-novel Tom Jones, to see just how inimical that kind of plod is to the novelistic enterprise. Johnson was terrified of Tom Jones, and, as the very smart man who told me this suggested, that kind of inimicality might have been purposeful. Rasselas resists the charms offered by a lively narrative like Tom Jones, because the novel – or rather, Johnson, its author – refuses to give any but the thinnest serving of plot and character, only serving us moral pabulum.

So. We have (some of us have) just finished another plot that plods, and, I think, another novel written against novels. Tim called The Road, in his post, a novel that had been redacted, and that seems appropriate: there is something taken out of this book, that most books have got. I think that the sense of the novel as a valuable object has been removed from The Road, and that the specter we are left with is terrifying.

I hope that my remarks will tie together some ideas from the previous posts. The Old Crow, with a wisdom appropriate to his many avian years, that the muddy grammar in the end times of the book traces a muddying of categories – particularly the echt category of good/bad. This, I think is true. Both the father and the son put pressure on the distinction between what it is good, and what it is bad to do. The father’s morality grounds out in pragmatism – things end up being good insofar as they enable the boy to stay alive (keeping himself alive seems secondary; his being alive is only a good insofar as it ups the chances that the boy will live). The boy puts the lie to this as a real system of morality, because he wants it to be absolute: he wants to share more food than there is to share, he wants to let live those people who would kill him. His morality is untenable, and the father knows this, because it is going to get them both killed. And the father’s morality is untenable, and the son knows this, because it is totally arbitrary that their morality should be based on keeping the boy alive, rather than everybody else.

The quote with which I opened this post speaks to the father’s moral crisis. His fathers, of course, may well have availed themselves of the idea of an ancestral ledgerbook. It would have been easy for them, as it can be easy for us, to live as though there are morals because there are plenty of people – and plenty of amenities – around. It is easy to think about things like the greater good, things your buried fathers would’ve approved of. But when your world has been radically reduced – when one boy is your world entire – the moral crisis becomes a crisis of meaning.

McCarthy demonstrates the depth of this moral crisis of meaning by paralleling a dissolution of meaning in the book. By the time of the father’s death, the hallucinatory passages the Crow describes – those points where, for example, we can’t properly assign antecedents – have given way to the dry reportage style that characterizes the novel as a whole. But after the last gasp of the father’s meaning-bestowing consciousness – one that notes “old dreams encroach[ing] upon the waking world” (McCarthy, 280). There is language like this in the boy’s discourse: it is a remnant of a moral world like ours, like the father’s, one that depends on a system more substantial that mere survivalism – and one that, as The Road shows us, will collapse under pressure.

And thus does The Road make its case against the novel, and thus do we find it so harrowing. It exposes the structure of novels in general as one that is assailable, and not only assailable in theory, but in practice. It doesn’t take the catastrophe that occurs in the prehistory of The Road to put the importance of the novel on shaky ground; the pressure exerted just by the idea of a survivalist society is enough to get us to wonder why bother, with morals and with literature, at all. In the end, The Road offers the opposite of Johnson’s pabulum – it has plot and character, but neither of them seems to mean anything, both pale in importance compared to the mere struggle for life.

The last hope for novelistic value is, naturally enough, with a metaphor: the one metaphor the boy knows, the one thing he seems to possess that reaches beyond his stringent “good” and “bad” valuations: carrying the fire. Until the nearly inscrutable (actually, totally inscrutable to me, I would love to hear what anyone else thought of it) final section of the book, the boy’s one reference to carrying the fire is all we get in the way of metaphor (or literariness of any sort, really) after the father’s death. That may be comfort – its promethean suggestion carries a promise of something, certainly – but it is small comfort indeed compared to the general and uncompromising dressing down that moral and literate endeavors receive at the hands of this novel.

So that is what I thought, in the last analysis, of The Road, and why its argument that books (that everything) are a form frippery is not the best argument to stare down while beginning a program of reading books. But! Our next selection is Ian McEwan’s Atonement, just in time to catch the movie, and which, based on the time-honored technique of skimming without reading, has much fuller paragraphs and pages. Happy reading, comrades!