Books: Writers on the Storm

Sure, it's all very earnest. McCarthy doesn't name his characters--they're just "the man" and "the boy"--à la an Old Man and the Sea parody. And he's given to using precious archaisms--sometimes you wish he would just say "with his arms held out" instead of "with his arms outheld." (Outheld?) But none of this really matters. The Road is a wildly powerful and disturbing book that exposes whatever black bedrock lies beneath grief and horror. Disaster has never felt more physically and spiritually real.

In a way McCarthy is the last survivor of a vanished world. He is, essentially, a modernist, miraculously preserved like a literary coelacanth from the age of Hemingway and Faulkner, writers of high style and high purpose without an iota of aw-shucks relatability. The future probably belongs to the Fraziers, the entertainers, who serve up their profundities with humor and sex and fisticuffs so they go down more easily. McCarthy would never stoop to entertain us, but there's a stripped-down intensity to his work that is just awesome. You sense that The Road, with its world empty of values and wisdom and human graciousness, isn't about the future at all. The Road is what the world looks like to McCarthy right now.