Thanksgiving

I LOVE the scene in the fallout shelter where he makes a feast for the boy. The boy is taking it all in. Is this coffee? he asks. Like it's this legendary drink he has only heard tell of but never hoped to experience! Can you imagine smelling coffee for the first time? When I was a little kid, my mom would always store coffee in a yellow Tupperware container, which she still uses. (Can you imagine owning a piece of Tupperware for 30-some years?) So, after the trip to the grocery store, I would always stand by as she opened the metal coffee can for the transfer to the Tupperware. And that first whiff of coffee as the can-opener popped the tin was so glorious. It was like some magical genie escaped his Maxwell House and filled the air with sweetness and promise. Even my sister, who never developed a taste for coffee, would stand by and marvel at the smell. Is this coffee? Yes.

And then he shows the kid butter! Here. You put the butter on your biscuits. Like this.

Wow.

And the kid is digging it but something's wrong.

Do you think we should thank the people? he asks.

Like, all on his own, the kid invents the idea of saying grace! It's magical.

The dad says What people?

And the kid says The people who gave us all this.

So then the kid says:

Dear people, thank you for all this food and stuff. We know that you saved it for yourself and if you were here we wouldn't eat it no matter how hungry we were and we're sorry that you didn't get to eat it and we hope that you're safe in heaven with God.

A guest concern

A co-worker of mine is reading "The Road" right now. Last night she told me she was alarmed at the discovery of a first-person passage in the book but she didn't have time to explore it. Then today she sent me this urgent e-mail.

Hi Kim

i checked out that passage again (page 87 in the paperback) and now it is clear to me that it is Papa speaking (the night before i'd had a glass of wine before picking up the book, and anyone knows drinking and reading don't mix!).

but it is still a departure from the form, because while there is use of "I" in dialogue, this is a first person observation. perhaps it is establishing the father's point of view -- all i know about this from rob is that if we hear a person's thoughts, that person cannot die.

I love this book!

susan

Thoughts on this? Hehe

The last god

A couple passages seemed to deify the boy in a way. Do you think it was just the normal love of a father for his child (not, granted, that these were normal circumstances), or did you feel there was something else going on?

The couple that I noticed:

The night after they shoot the guy, the father replenishes the fire as the boy sleeps: The boy didn't stir. He sat beside him and stroked his pale and tangled hair. Golden chalice, good to house a god.

Then when they meet the old man:
When I saw that boy I thought 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 he's a god?
The old man shook his head. I'm past all that now. Have been for years. Where man cant live gods fare no better. You'll see. It's better to be alone. So I hope that's not true what you said because to be on the road with the last god would be a terrible thing so I hope it's not true.

Then after they give the old man something to eat, at the boy's insistence:
The old man says: Why did he do it?
He looked over at the boy and he looked at the old man.
You wouldn't understand, he said. I'm not sure I do.
Maybe he believes in God.
I dont know what he believes in.
He'll get over it.
No he wont.

And THIS floored me. They come across the next guy in the road and the boy wants to help him, too.
Just help him, Papa. Just help him.
The man looked back up the road.
He was just hungry, Papa. He's going to die.
He's going to die anyway.
He's so scared, Papa.
The man squatted and looked at him. I'm scared, he said. Do you understand? I'm scared.
The boy didnt answer. He just sat there with his head bowed, sobbing.
You're not the one who has to worry about everything.
The boy said something but he couldn't understand him. What? he said.
He looked up, his wet and grimy face. Yes I am, he said. I am the one.

I nearly wept when I read that. I am the one. What did you take it to mean?

Writing style

This is one night when it's just muddy and cold and they haven't eaten, but they have a fire:

...they sat there in silence with their hands held out to the flames. He tried to think of something to say but he could not. He'd had this feeling before, beyond the numbness and the dull despair. The world shrinking down about a raw core of parsible entities. The names of things slowly following those things into oblivion. Colors. The names of birds. Things to eat. Finally the names of things one believed to be true. More fragile than he would have thought. How much was gone already? The sacred idiom shorn of its referents and so of its reality. Drawing down like something trying to preserve heat. In time to wink out forever.

And this was the morning after the passage Erin cited in the comment on the last post. I think it's insightful about his feeling for the woman and their past and how the past should be "handled." Normally we think the past is preserved in remembering and in story telling, but this is another take:

Rich dreams now which he was loathe to wake from. Things no longer known in the world. The cold drove him forth to mend the fire. Memory of her crossing the lawn toward the house in the early morning in a thin rose gown that clung to her breasts. He thought each memory recalled must do some violence to its origins. As in a party game. Say the word and pass it on. So be sparing. What you alter in the remembering has yet a reality, known or not.

I love that. It also seems relavant to his writing style, which is sparing — simple sentences, or often just sentence fragments, a plain, unassuming, yet stunning, vocabulary. I had the feeling, after reading the passage above, that when he's writing he's calling on a rich, probably overwhelming, storehouse of experience and distilling it to an essence, not just to create a story, but so as to do the least amount of violence to the original thing. There's the thing. And then there's the story of the thing. And the poetic feeling of "truth" that we readers experience is the emotional loyalty between those two.

(Trust me. That makes a lot more sense if you mull it at 2 a.m. in a hot bath with a cup of tea)

But, my question: Did you enjoy McCarthy's writing style? Was it hard to get used to? Did the unconventional prose, with all the fragments and contractions without apostrophes and direct speech without quotation marks sit well with you? Why do you think he drops quotation marks? Is it to integrate the speech fully into the narrative? (There must be a lot written about this because he seems to do it in all his books).

McCarthy's words

I can't get enough of McCarthy's writing. I was looking back at some places I marked in the book. I'll share them:

In those first years the roads were peopled with refugess shrouded up in their clothing ... Their eyes bright in their skulls. Creedless shells of men tottering down the causeways like migrants in a feverland. The frailty of everything revealed at last. Old and troubling issues resolved into nothingness and night. The last instance of a thing takes the class with it. Turns out the light and is gone. Look around you. Ever is a long time. But the boy knew what he knew. That ever is no time at all.

And:

No list of things to be done. The day providential to itself. The hour. There is no later. This is later. All things of grace and beauty such that one holds them to one's heart have a common provenance in pain. Their birth in grief and ashes. So, he whispered to the sleeping boy. I have you.

This is my child, he said. I wash a dead man's brains out of his hair. That is my job.

And while he's preparing the boy's sleeping area that night (punching indentations in the sand for his little hips and shoulders!):

All of this like some ancient anointing. So be it. Evoke the forms. Where you've nothing else construct ceremonies out of the air and breathe upon them.

Oh, there are a few more, but I have to go to work now! Did any passages in the book especially move you?

Into Afghanistan

Yikes....my first pick! I was enthralled with "Kite Runner" and have been waiting for another Hosseini novel. This has only been out since May but I can wait no longer! It is only available in Hardcover right now, sorry about that.

I think there are some similarities to Kite Runner, a country in turmoil (obviously) and an unlikely friendship that tests cultural norms, but this time between two women. I hope you enjoy.
Do we start discussion the first part of December?

Good People and Bad People

In an earlier comment, Erin said, "When we're stripped of our most basic needs, we see what really matters: food, water, shelter, safety, love, companionship. Or we become marauding cannibals." Did you have the sense that most people who were left were of the latter sort, the Bad People, or did you think most people might be Good but there were just enough Bad ones out there that, for survival reasons, you had to assume the Bad People were everywhere and that you were in "constant peril," as Erin said?

I couldn't get a good feel for what McCarthy thought about basic human nature, really. On the whole, it seemed sort of bleak, but then we have this shining example of selfless love between the dad and son. The father figure could seem rather cold and dismissive when it came to others, but I always had the sense that he was being that way to protect his son. He didn't want to share with others because it would mean less for his boy. The scarcity of food and warmth and comfort made it so difficult to be good and trusting. And I wondered where, exactly, the boy got his unerring sense of goodness. Was it from the example of his father's love? But his father wasn't always good to others (not in the boy's sense). Where would the boy have learned his goodness — it seemed almost Christlike sometimes, something even the father seemed in awe of — or is McCarthy saying goodness is not something you acquire, like reading and writing, but something you just have or you don't? Did you have any sense of this?

The coast and imagination

I assumed they were heading south to be warm, but why specifically were they going to the coast? It seemed sort of like he wanted the boy to see the ocean, but the ocean wasn't going to be blue and alive. Still, he gave the child enough sense of the ocean's magic that the boy, when he beheld it, wanted to run on the beach and touch the sea, even though it was cold and gray. I found that very moving, but I wondered where the impetus to paint the world's former beauty for the boy's imagination came from. Did he just want him to have an internal sense of beauty and glory and magic, even if nothing in the outer world would ever compare? Just something for his soul?

Miss Frank, you were saying?

Do you discern any reply in this book to Anne Frank's conclusion that, in spite of everything, people are really good at heart?

I just read this Reuters story about McCarthy's appearance on Oprah, where he apparently said: The message readers might take away from "The Road" is that one should "simply care about things and people and be more appreciative. ... Life is pretty damn good, even when it looks bad. We should be grateful," McCarthy said.

Did you take that message from the book?

Slouching toward Nothingness?

Did you have the sense that this was it? That the remaining survivors would live out their days in this nightmare world and then that would be it? No more. Or did you have a glimmer of hope that somehow the world could someday begin anew? I chided myself for it, but I kept having this burbling optimism that a corner of this dead, gray, cold, unrelenting awfulness would turn out to have color, warmth, life, like they'd stumble on some part of the earth — some meadow teeming with plants and animals and beauty — that was mysteriously untouched by the devastation.

When they were cooking coffee and biscuits and ham in the oasis of the fallout shelter, I got this sensory overload, like I could taste and smell the food, feel it warm and fill my body. It was so vivid and engulfing, so about the promise of life.

Names and causes

Did you find it peculiar that there were no names? I think at least one person was mentioned by name, but that was not a "real" name. The boy and the man were just the boy and the man. And the boy did call the man "Papa." This made the story more minimalist in a way, more essential. Was it just part of this idea that you wouldn't have a name if no one addressed you? That your identity is just bare bones, like man, boy, Papa, Bad People, Good People.

And why is there no real explanation of how things got this way? Of what exactly happened to blot out the sun. Is the idea that causes, like names, are moot points in the overwhelming fact of how things are now?

Back story

Were you satisfied with the background provided about the boy's mother? Or did you feel it needed to be fleshed out a little more? Did you have a good sense of the man's feelings for that woman? I sometimes sensed a great longing in him but also a strange forgetting. Maybe that was part of this great truth that many things in the world simply did not exist anymore and their profound absence was almost like they had never really existed to begin with.

Fate and faith

Did you correctly guess the ending, that the man would die and the boy would fall in with the Good People? I think I had a weird kind of faith that that would happen. There wasn't much in the book to give rise to that faith, except maybe the sheer power of love between the two. Do you think the man himself had that faith about the boy's fate?

Reading "The Road"

I gather we all read this book quickly, in one or just a few sittings. If I had to put it down to go to work or do an errand, I couldn't wait to get back to it, and while I was in it I savored every word, often reading and rereading the spare conversations punctuated with poignantly resigned "okays" and "I knows." What about it, exactly, kept you riveted?