THE ROAD, by Cormac McCarthy, Knopf, 241 pages, $24
The characters of Cormac McCarthy's fiction are restless folk, perpetually wandering a dark mile or two beyond society's fringe. Fugitives on the lam. Nineteenth-century scalp hunters on the job. Twentieth-century cowboys skipping borders in search of romance and myth.
The author's literary creations are again in motion in his new book, "The Road."
Here McCarthy presents a "road novel" that Kerouac would not have recognized as he traces the desperate travels of a nameless father and his young son. At once a jagged horror story and an elegant treatise on the sustaining force of familial love, "The Road" is a haunting achievement from one of our boldest writers.
"The Road" imagines a scorched, post-apocalyptic America where survivors perform their daily tasks in primal order: Stay alive. Stay fed. Stay dry. And always, always keep moving.
The child's mother is gone — a suicide who opted for death over a hand-to-mouth, toxic life of terror, deprivation and violence.
Told in concise episodic segments, the father and son spend much of the novel trudging toward the coast along a dangerous road. All about them are stark reminders of a world's demise. Abandoned, ash-laden farmhouses. Pillaged supermarkets and gas stations. Charred vehicles strewn across highway lanes, forever entombing the bodies of their drivers. Amid such landscapes, the pair push their scavenged provisions in a rickety grocery store cart and defend themselves with a revolver loaded with just two bullets.
What awaits the father and his son at the end of their southbound road? They have no clue or promise. They simply follow an impulse to keep moving, fueled by a vague and reluctant notion that something better awaits. Each step is counted as a small victory on the side of survival.
"The Road" can stand alone as a frightening and first-rate thriller. Yet a writer of McCarthy's skill offers more. "The Road" will remain essential for its examination of symbiotic love existing between a father and son, "each the other's world entire."
The ragged family's devotion also represents the ubiquitous and perhaps allegorical juxtaposition between good and evil that is found in much of McCarthy's work.
Of the father, McCarthy writes, "He knew only that the child was his warrant. He said: If he is not the word of God God never spoke."
Never manipulative or heavy-handed, the author flushes out the connection between father and son in their tender yet economic dialogue. They share a discovered can of Coke (the boy's first) or play checkers in an abandoned family bomb shelter.
McCarthy's storytelling repute is secure thanks to his bloody, myth-busting Western "Blood Meridian" and the popular "Border Trilogy" novels. Still, "The Road" discovers a deep and telling vein untapped in even his best prior efforts.
E-mail: jswensen@desnews.com