The Road as Parenting Book

Well. I just finished Cormac McCarthy's The Road.  Two or three pages into the thing, I was thinking, "What, so all the apostrophes were destroyed in the Apocalypse, too?" By ten or twenty pages in, I was beyond noticing any such quirk of punctuation. I was well on my way into a full-blown panic attack. Honestly, I haven't felt so terrible, so anxious and edgy and fearful, since Luke was a tiny baby and very sick.  In fact, I'd only recommend the book to someone else with that caveat. Yes, The Road is an extremely well-written book. Sure, you should read it. But before you do, be aware that it's going to make you feel exactly as if your child is likely to die at any moment and you are powerless to help him. In all fairness, they should put that on the book jacket. So, you know, if you enjoy that kind of thing, why don't you pick up a copy? Better yet -- here, take mine.

This Guardian review compares The Road to Beckett's work. Beckett's work, though, is saved from utter hopelessness by the fact that it is often funny -- while The Road is completely humourless. (Weirdly, there's something hopeful about humour, even when the humour is about hopelessness.) In this article  in The New York Review of Books, Michael Chabon mentions that McCarthy has a sense of humour, too, just one that goes largely unnoticed. He notes the discovery, in the novel, of a fully-stocked fall-out shelter whose builder, obviously a survivalist, has not survived. To that I say, oh ha ha. And ha. I was too busy waiting for the survivalist to suddenly appear and roast the boy on a spit to notice the joke.

Chabon devotes much of that piece to deciding what kind of story, exactly, this is. I read the article with some impatience at first -- who cares what you call the thing? A satirical work of science fiction, a fable, a Western-style adventure story, what does it matter? It seemed like pointless academic quibbling. By the time Chabon settled on epic adventure/ Gothic horror, though, I began to see the point of trying to understand the tradition that shaped this book. Because this book is, while brilliant, almost offensively frightening. And almost offensively hopeless, too, if it weren't for a "moving and reassuring" ending that, as Chabon implies, doesn't quite seem to belong to the rest of the book. Sam Lipsyte, all tongue-in-cheek, called it "the best parenting manual in recent memory" here.  I have to say, it kind of is. It's the kind of thing you should read -- as a kind of "worst-case scenario" -- when you're trying to decide whether or not you could handle having a child. You know, along with making up the list of pros and cons and taking a really good look at your finances. Because sometimes it's going to feel like that. It's going to feel that bad.  Lipsyte echoes, in a smart-ass way, Chabon's conclusion:

The Road is not a record of fatherly fidelity; it is a testament to the abyss of a parent's greatest fears. The fear of leaving your child alone, of dying before your child has reached adulthood and learned to work the mechanisms and face the dangers of the world, or found a new partner to face them with. The fear of one day being obliged for your child's own good, for his peace and comfort, to do violence to him or even end his life. And, above all, the fear of knowing—as every parent fears—that you have left your children a world more damaged, more poisoned, more base and violent and cheerless and toxic, more doomed, than the one you inherited. It is in the audacity and single-mindedness with which The Road extends the metaphor of a father's guilt and heartbreak over abandoning his son to shift for himself in a ruined, friendless world that The Road finds its great power to move and horrify the reader.

 

Comments

[babelbabe]

I read The Road a few months ago. I had to read it in bits and pieces; it was too intense otherwise. It's an amazing book but NOT for the faint of heart. It didn't even make me cry; it just made me read, breathless and gasping, until I had to put it down for anther day.
And I spent an inordinate amount of time checking on my sleeping children.

[Stephany Aulenback]

I had to read the thing all the way through, and fast. I wanted to get it over with! And I read a great deal of it with Luke asleep right beside me -- I had to keep stopping to check his breathing, too. Crazy. I've heard that from several people with kids.

[Kate]

Oh noes! The Road is the next thing on my night-stand! I'm scared now... ;)