The Road
I just finished Cormac McCarthy’s latest — The Road — and am sitting in stunned contemplation, utterly saddened and affected by one of the best pieces of contemporary literature I’ve read since Don DeLillo’s White Noise.
McCarthy’s tale is of a father and son making a hopeless pilgrimage to survival on the road from some unknown and undescribed point of devastation through a burned landscape to an unknown destination to the south, where there may be some warmth against the nuclear winter. The boy is perhaps 12, the father perhaps 40, together they wheel their shopping cart through the ash and snow, terrified of any other human contact in a world filled with cannibal marauders reduced to infanticide for their own survival.
To describe The Road as the most powerful caution against nuclear war is an understatement, and McCarthy makes that understatement by never describing how the world came to end. It’s simply over, finished, and the conclusion is so foregone that you read the spare language knowing where the journey ends, but unwilling to accept it in light of the love between the father and his son.
I can’t recommend this book — it’s a profoundly depressing read — but I will re-read it in some time, and will share it with my own sons as one of the most profound expressions of paternal love I have ever read. This is a little book but a big book, and made me think of the passages in Stephen King’s The Stand when the survivors make their way across the country of bicycles. Oh the number of times I wished for a carless road when I was a cyclist. After reading McCarthy’s grim tale, I know there will be no bikes in his future.
Heart of a Soldier
My step-father lent this to me last weekend and I burned through in three short flights. Story of Rick Rescorla, VP of security at Morgan Stanley, who perished when the towers collapsed on 9/11. Rescorla was a Brit who enlisted in the US Army, served as an officer in Viet Nam, was a Silver Star winner at the Battle of Ia Drang (reenacted by Mel Gibson in We Were Soldiers), and an all around Hemingway-style man’s man who did it all … from playing rugby in Rhodesia to shooting a lion. The book is not a tale of tragedy and terrorism, but of a remarkable friendship between Rescorla and his best friend and fellow Army officer, Daniel Hill. By James B. Stewart.
What Makes Sammy Run?
Budd Schulberg’s (On the Waterfront) classic tale of ambition and greed in Hollywood. It is the story of Sammy Glick, Lower East Side newspaper copyboy who rises to Tinsel Town prominence through backstabbing, plagiary, and utter weaselishness as told from the point of view of fellow Jew and writer, Al Mannheim. Good book, not a classic, but sort of essential in a Sweet Smell of Success sort of sense.
David, your reading selections raise the cognitive bar a bit out of my reach. For me, reading is escapist fare and your choices force the reader to reflect on the human condition, something not all of us are ready to face.
I am reading two books currently. One is W. P. Kinsella’s first novel, an ingenious baseball story, “Shoeless Joe”, published in 1982 and later made into the movie “Field of Dreams.” The other is a real page turner, “Wish You Well” by David Baldacci, a coming of age story set in W.Virgina. : “It is the stark but optimistic tale of a simple, difficult, but somehow uplifting existence” , and a book that I know will have me craving a sequel after the last page is finished. I also finally read Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird” and it qualifies as one of the best books ever written. Why did I wait so long?