POST-APOCALYPSE . . . NOW; and/or, ABOUT A BOY

A few weeks ago I found myself reading Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Road. This book was all the rage when it first came out in 2006, and no doubt it will be all the rage again when the movie version hits the big screen in a few months. I wasn’t sure that I would get to it this summer . . . but it sort of fell off the bookshelf into my lap, so I gave it a go.

It is a bleak novel, that’s for sure: a depiction of a post-apocalyptic world (presumably after a nuclear holocaust) sparsely populated by survivors who can be categorized unequivocally as either “good guys” (the minute minority) or “bad guys.” As its title hints, the book is a quest narrative, and it traces the route—mostly uncharted—taken through the utter wasteland of human destruction and self-destruction by a dying father and his young son in search of some vestige of human decency. Written with a minimalist precision suited to the barren landscape—physical as well as psychological/spiritual (the “quest” can be interpreted both literally and metaphorically)—the novel is equal measures relentless and riveting: McCarthy offers the reader no respite from the mere remnant of civilization that his father and son find themselves wandering through.

Obviously, one of the challenges McCarthy confronted in writing this novel involved how to ground the narrative in a world both familiar and strange. Resisting any temptation to insert obvious post-apocalyptic landmarks, such as the buried Statue of Liberty at the end of the movie Planet of the Apes, McCarthy relies instead on inscribing a landscape of such remarkable consistency (in two senses of the word) that the reader who buys into it does so completely. I think this is a perfect example of what John Gardner meant when he described, in The Art of Fiction, the “dream” that a successful novel creates in the reader’s mind:

We may observe . . . that if the effect of the dream is to be powerful, the dream must probably be vivid and continuous—vivid because if we are not quite clear about what it is that we’re dreaming, who and where the characters are, what it is that they’re doing or trying to do and why, our emotions and judgments must be confused, dissipated or blocked; and continuous because a repeatedly interrupted flow of action must necessarily have less force than an action directly carried through from its beginning to its conclusion.

But if the result is clearly a cautionary tale—a frightening projection of the post-apocalyptic world that human agency could very imaginably produce—there is another dimension of the novel that I found emotionally charged in a different way. As McCarthy acknowledges in a televised interview with Oprah Winfrey in 2007, this novel of a dying father’s desperate love for a son who will soon have to place his trust in what seems to be merely vestigial human goodness reflects and refracts the 73-year-old author’s own anxiety about the future that his own young son, John Francis McCarthy—to whom The Road is dedicated—will inherit. “Is this a love story to your son?” Oprah asks. “I suppose it is,” McCarthy understates in response. His answer typifying the overall dynamic of the interview—the author’s reticence being far from an antidote to Oprah’s over-simplistic line of questioning—the poignancy of the fact that the novel is, in effect, “about a boy” pervades the entire narrative.

Yet, notwithstanding that essential dimension of The Road, the novel that I chose to serve as an antidote to its unrelenting bleakness was just coincidentally Nick Hornby’s fine comic novel titled . . . About a Boy. I’ve read three other novels by Hornby—How to Be Good, High Fidelity, and A Long Way Down—and enjoyed each of them immensely. I would have read About a Boy long ago (it was first published in 1998) except that by the time I fully tuned in to Hornby, the only copies I could find in bookstores had actor Hugh Grant on the cover—and I despise Hugh Grant! Funny, then, that as I was reading the novel over the past few days (I found a used copy with an older cover), I realized that at some point I must have sat through the film adaptation that Grant stars in (my wife and daughters love him and we probably even own the DVD of the film) . . . and so the character of Will was indelibly imprinted in my mind’s eye in the image of Grant. I could say Ouch! but I have to admit that he may have been perfectly cast. . . . One way or the other, About a Boy proved to be an altogether entertaining read—just the sort of “father and son” narrative that I needed to awaken me from Cormac McCarthy’s nightmarish “dream.”