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.”

SCOTCH ON THE ROCKS + DUTCH TREAT . . .

It’s not often that I get down off a horse—or a book—in midstream . . . but I did just that a few weeks ago with the Scottish novel The Crow Road by Iain Banks. Originally published in 1992, the novel recently appeared in an American edition: its back cover blurbs promise a book that is “riveting” and “masterful”—all the usual blarney. But 206 pages into the 501-page tome, I finally said to myself that “enough is enough”: neither the narrative nor the characters ever came to life for me . . . so I just set it down and moved on.

There’s a chance that at some point I’ll pick up where I left off in The Crow Road, but I think that the novel’s problem—or my problem with the novel—is encapsulated in this observation by John Gardner in the chapter titled “Interest and Truth” in his book The Art of Fiction:

Thus it appears that to make us see and feel vividly what his characters see and feel—to draw us into the characters’ world as if we were born to it-the writer must do more than simply make up characters and then somehow explain and authenticate them (giving them the right kinds of motorcycles and beards, exactly the right memories and jargon). He must shape simultaneously (in an expanding creative moment) his characters, plot, and setting, each inextricably connected to the others; he must make his whole world in a single, coherent gesture, as a potter makes a pot . . .

After setting aside Banks’s novel, I learned from a friend that it was adapted as a popular BBC television series in the mid-1990s. Perhaps the narrative lent itself to such an episodic format right from the start: maybe that’s why the novel’s “narrative arc” seemed to me so intolerably slow in developing. Hmmm . . .

But in the meantime, I picked up another novel which that quotation from Gardner coincidentally affirms: Netherland by Joseph O’Neill. With its protagonist quickly identified as a Dutch-born British banker relocated to New York City, where he gets involved with a group of cricket-playing Trinidadians, I was not so sure setting out where I would find my angle of entry into that multiply “foreign” world. I think the point where I got hooked was on p. 31, when protagonist Hans van den Broek describes his separation from his wife who, suffering from post-9/11 trauma, returns with their son to her parents’ home in England:

The three of us flew together to England. We stayed with Mr. and Mrs. Bolton at their house in Barnes, in southwest London, arriving on Christmas Eve. We opened gifts on Christmas morning, ate turkey with stuffing and potatoes and Brussels sprouts, drank sherry and red wine and port, made small talk, went to bed, slept, awoke, and then spent an almost unendurable further three days chewing, swallowing, sipping, walking, and exchanging reasonable remarks. Then a black cab pulled up in front of the house. Rachel offered to accompany me to the airport. I shook my head. I went upstairs, where Jake was playing with his new toys. I picked him up and held him in my arms until he began to protest. I flew back to New York. There is no describing the wretchedness I felt, which persisted, in one form or another, throughout my association with Chuck Ramkissoon.

That was where the world that Joseph O’Neill created—“his characters, plot, and setting, each inextricably connected to the others”—began to emerge for me as “a single, coherent gesture.” Netherland proved altogether worthy of the blarney of its back cover blurbs.