Sunday Pages: "The Road"

A novel by Cormac McCarthy

Dear Reader,

On June 10, Ted Kaczynski, the domestic terrorist the media nicknamed the Unabomber, died of apparent suicide in a prison medical center in North Carolina. He was 81. Three days later, the novelist Cormac McCarthy passed away, a few weeks shy of his 90th birthday. That they died a few days apart is interesting, given the writing they left behind.

Kaczynski produced a 30,000-word manifesto, with the rather bleak title Industrial Society and Its Future. The Washington Post printed it on September 22, 1995, at the urging of then-Attorney General Janet Reno, with the understanding that its publication would stop further mail-bomb domestic terror attacks. (The Unabomber manifesto, incidentally, has become a foundational text for the neo-reactionary movement, or NRx, whose thought leaders refer to its author as “Uncle Ted”—but that’s a rabbit hole best avoided on an overcast Sunday morning.)

I graduated from college in the spring of 1995, and by September was working my first “real” job, in the video library at Young & Rubicam, the venerable advertising agency. There was a lot of security at the Madison Avenue building—key cards, metal detectors, beefy dudes in the lobby. The reason for all that security is because, at the time, Y&R shared a corporate headquarters with the PR firm Burson-Marsteller; the year before, “Uncle Ted” sent a bomb to the New Jersey residence of an executive at that firm, killing him. The ad execs rightly feared that they would wind up blown to smithereens. (I did not mention this to my parents, who, unfamiliar with the lovely Bryant Park environs, were already worried about me working in the city.)

Industrial Society and Its Future is a Luddite call to arms. Kaczynski argues that technology is the root of all evil, and that, therefore, we should start a revolution, smash the infernal machines, and go back to nature:

The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race. They have greatly increased the life-expectancy of those of us who live in “advanced” countries, but they have destabilized society, have made life unfulfilling, have subjected human beings to indignities, have led to widespread psychological suffering (in the Third World to physical suffering as well) and have inflicted severe damage on the natural world. The continued development of technology will worsen the situation. It will certainly subject human beings to greater indignities and inflict greater damage on the natural world, it will probably lead to greater social disruption and psychological suffering, and it may lead to increased physical suffering even in “advanced” countries.

He calls for “ a revolution against the industrial system” that “may or may not make use of violence.” The objective, Kaczynski argues, is “to overthrow not governments but the economic and technological basis of the present society.” This is what our Harvard-educated Noble Savage was writing in his primitive cabin in the woods, as he subjected innocent humans to the indignities of lost body parts, making ample use of technology as he did so.

If Industrial Society and Its Future is the point, The Road, Cormac McCarthy’s greatest work, is the counterpoint. This is why it’s interesting, cosmically, that these two men died three days apart. That novel is basically a refutation of Kaczynski’s screed. In The Road, McCarthy shows us what a post-industrial world—the world the Unabomber committed acts of terror to try to bring about—would actually look like. And, um, it sucks.

I’m not really a McCarthy guy. He’s sort of the pack-of-unfiltered-Camels of contemporary literary fiction, writing about manly things like riding horses, shooting guns, robbing stagecoaches, and the like. Not my cup of tea. I tried several times and failed to get through No Country For Old Men. Too, his worldview always struck me as bleak and depressing; he seemed to have about as pessimistic a view of human nature as any writer I’d come across.

Not only that, but McCarthy held with stylistic pretensions that I loathe: not using quotation marks to indicate dialogue, not using apostrophes in contractions (so can’t is cant and don’t is dont, but you’re retains its apostrophe for some unknown reason), not using conventional chapter breaks, and similar MFA crap. I’m not sure what is achieved by making writing less accessible in this way, other than to announce itself as Literary Fiction. Writers who pull this shit are the insufferable Method actors of the lit world.

The Road is not a fun read. The story, such as it is, concerns a father navigating his young son through a post-apocalyptic America that is an absolute hellscape. Even though the extinction event—we never find out what it is—wipes out most of humanity, there is not enough food to go around. The surviving humans are all hungry, desperate, and brutal. On the road, father and son encounter thieves, armed bandits, enslaved women with chains around their necks, and cannibals who roast infants on spits over an open fire. You know, real uplifting stuff.

Welcome to the Unabomber’s tech-free Utopia!

While I’m not generally a fan of this genre, Station Eleven, a tale of life in America after a great plague, is my favorite contemporary novel. In that remarkable book, Emily St. John Mandel captures the beauty and wonder of modern life, by showing us a people trying desperately to restore it. Station Eleven is an ode to the richness of our culture, both high and low. On almost every page, I am moved.

I did not feel that way reading The Road. And yet there is joy here. Over the course of the book, the father—cynical, misanthropic, wary, and clearly a stand-in for the author himself—softens as he cares for his son. Along the way, the boy’s innocence and inherent goodness rubs off on him. He is teaching his son how to survive in this brave new world, yes, but his son is teaching him, too: how to regain his lost humanity.

At one point, the pair come across an old vending machine, which contains an unopened can of Coke. The father opens it, is pleased that it hasn’t gone totally flat, takes a sip, and gives it to the boy as if it’s the greatest thing in the world. Which, of course, it is! Take that, Unabomber!

Throughout the book, the son is often likened to an angel, or else a gift from the Almighty. At the beginning of the novel, contemplating the boy, the father says out loud: “If he is not the word of God God never spoke.”

Later, the pair come across an old man, a wretch, who “lives like an animal.” He is starved half to death. The father wants to avoid him, believing him to be “a shill for a pack of roadagents,” but the son gives him food. They build a fire, sit by it, and talk. The subject of God comes up.

“There is no God,” the old man says. Then he elaborates, in a line that has always stuck with me: “There is no God and we are his prophets.”

The conversation continues (I’m adding em-dashes here for clarity, but leaving out the apostrophes McCarthy disdained; Lord knows, I hate when people add apostrophes to my last name!):

—When I saw the boy I thought that I had died.

—You thought he was an angel?

—I didnt know what he was, I never thought to see a child again. I didnt know that would happen.

—What if I said that he’s a god?

The old man shook his head. I’m past all that now. Have been for years. Where men cant live gods fare no better.

The man’s mission, as a father, is to deliver his son to safety. I hope I’m not spoiling the book by revealing that, ultimately, he fulfills that mission. The Road ends in a very un-Cormac-McCarthy way, on a high note of hope. To me, this feels genuine. That is, in the process of writing the book, McCarthy learned something about himself, and about humanity at large—something wondrous and beautiful and good.

That, ultimately, is the point of writing fiction. We explore open questions that puzzle and perplex us, hoping to arrive at some, ahem, novel conclusion. That is what distinguishes a novel from a manifesto. Unlike the author of the manifesto, we novelists know we don’t know.

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Photo credit: Jens Hackradt.