The Long ‘Road’ to Appreciating Cormac McCarthy

I’ve had some serious Cormac McCarthy issues for a long, long time.

McCarthy, who died last month, is widely considered one of the greatest American authors. A couple decades ago, I picked up his 1985 novel “Blood Meridian,” which The New York Times described as “a surreal and blood-drenched anti-western about a gang of scalp hunters and outlaws in Texas and Mexico.”

It took me about a half-year to finish. I remember the book had train tickets from various trips I’d taken over the course of those six months nestled between the pages, sand from some summer excursion, maybe a Mets ticket stub, a U2 stub and other detritus marking the Herculean effort it took me to finish that blood-drenched anti-western.

And if you were to ask me today what “Blood Meridian” is about, I’m not quite sure what I’d say. A boy walks across the decrepit American landscape, fending off violent adversaries?

And so with McCarthy’s death, I decided to give the author another crack. I picked up “The Road,” another novel about a boy walking across the decrepit American landscape, fending off violent adversaries. I breezed through it, and I loved it.

The main characters are a man and his son. Neither’s name is offered. It is post-apocalyptic times in America, a layer of ash covering everything and bands of marauders out to steal your food, your gas, your life.

McCarthy never explains what exactly has happened in America that wiped out most of the population.

The boy seems to be around 7. He and his father walk for an entire day, the dad pushing a shopping cart with supplies, then find a place off the highway to sleep. For much of the book, it is brutally cold. There is snow. There is freezing rain. Sometimes they start a fire, but sometimes they can’t. They are heading to the coast, but have no idea what the coast might hold for them.

The relationship between father and son is touching. They speak in snippets, but way more is said than the words they utter. At times, the boy will not speak to his father, mad about something he’s done, typically his failure to help some poor soul stumbling along the road near them. At one point, they see a badly burned man. The father says the man has been struck by lightning. He clearly needs help but they keep walking.

“When they got to the bottom of the hill the man stopped and looked at him and looked back up the road,” McCarthy writes. “The burned man had fallen over and at that distance you couldn’t even tell what it was. I’m sorry, he said. But we have nothing to give him. We have no way to help him. I’m sorry for what happened to him but we can’t fix it.”

When the boy will not speak to his father, the father urges him to do so. He needs the interaction, the companionship. They are, after all, all they have.

The novel, from 2006, has shades of the HBO drama “The Last of Us,” based on the video game that came out in 2013, which sees a man escort a teen girl across ravaged America. As the series begins, he does not know her, but agrees to deliver her. He’s grumpy. Over time, he gets to know her and sees glimpses of his dead teen daughter in the girl. He gets a wee bit happier.

In “The Road,” the man wrestles with how much to tell the boy about their destroyed planet, the dangers around every corner and his own failing health. But the boy is starting to figure stuff out on his own. McCarthy writes, “The boy lay with his head in the man’s lap. After a while he said: they’re going to kill those people, arent they?

Yes.

Why do they have to do that?

I don’t know.

Are they going to eat them?

I don’t know.

They’re going to eat them, arent they?

Yes.”

The man coughs for much of the novel, at times spitting up blood. With every cough, the boy thinks more about what will happen if his father dies, and he is alone. On the road. It is heartbreaking stuff.

The book is a wispy 287 pages, with not many words to the page. I read it inside of a week.

The movie version of “The Road” came out in 2009. Viggo Mortensen played Man, Kodi Smit-McPhee was Boy and Charlize Theron was the man’s wife and the boy’s mother in flashback scenes.

Critics adored “The Road,” which picked up the Pulitzer in 2007. Since I read it in Cape Cod, and read The Boston Globe most every day, I’ll share a review: “No American writer since Faulkner has wandered so willingly into the swamp waters of deviltry and redemption…[McCarthy] has written this last waltz with enough elegant reserve to capture what matters most.”

When McCarthy got a MacArthur fellowship, aka the genius grant, in the early ‘80s, jury member Saul Bellow noted the author’s “absolutely overpowering use of language, his life-giving and death-dealing sentences.”

Indeed.

Mr. McCarthy, I apologize for not appreciating your considerable talents while you were still alive. Yes, I found “Blood Meridian” unreadable. But “The Road” was fabulous. Bravo!

I’m not sure if it will be “All the Pretty Horses,” or “No Country for Old Men,” or “Child of God,” or another of your novels. But I will read more. And will hope to enjoy them the way I did “The Road.”

RIP.

Journalist Michael Malone lives in Hawthorne with his wife and two children.