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Topic: McCarthy's Western Novels
Thread: First Look at The Road

Total messages for all days: 134

First Look at The Road	Rick Wallach	6/17/2006
Well - (drum roll please) - I got off the plane last night hauling my jet lag around like a sack of bowling balls, and found my advance reading copy of The Road sitting in my pile of mail. I started in on it immediately and let me tell you, the jet lag disorientation really works well with this book. It's McCarthy, all right - very quirky, creepy and episodic, feeling like a cross between Outer Dark, the third section of The Crossing, Mad Max and The Hills Have Eyes. Try and imagine this scenario: a father and his young son, bereft of heavy clothes or much food, are trying to get as far south as possible to avoid the oncoming winter, which has been exacerbated by the "atomic winter" following what one must assume from the evidence is a fairly recent nuclear war. They have a patchwork map and are trying to follow the main southbound road, with a series of stripped-down yet horrifying Crossing-like encounters with odd figures along the way. They are also pursued down this very bleak and lonely highway by an old, sputtering diesel dump truck full of Ork-like cannibalistic rednecks generically known as "road rats," and various other assorted grotesques. Dark? Oh boy. Very dark, but loaded with those breathtaking turns of descriptive poetry and to-the-point dialogue that makes his later novels tick. One could say that it is not only not "unlike anything he has ever written," but rather more like everything he has ever written than anything else he has ever written. I trust I make myself obscure? Good. I'm halfway into this so far, defying all kinds of circadian rhythms to keep myself borderline delirious with jet lag so I can really get into the mise-en-scene. I will gulp down another chunk of this tonight and finish it tomorrow.

First Look at The Road	Bob G.	6/17/2006
Not a glimmer of light in the the apocalyptic chunks you've so far digested? Maybe the father-son thing'll show a flicker or two in the next chunks. McCarthy coming to terms with ole Dad as he kinda did at the end of NCFOM? Anyway, good to hear he's still got his descriptive and dialogic touches! Dialogic? Is that a word? What the hell, I just made it one.

First Look at The Road	arnoldet	6/17/2006
Well, we did ask Suttree to come home at our Knoxville conference, and it appears he has, even visiting the old homeplace. I guess what we didn't know was that McCarthy was going to wipe out Knoxville and the rest of the country when he did make a return visit. Like Rick, I'm in the early stages of the book, but it is good to see Cormac back in Tennessee, or what's left of it. The connection to Outer Dark is one I imagine a number of us will be exploring. Chip

First Look at The Road	blackhiller	6/17/2006
I think I'm already anticipating this one more than I did NCFOM, even with that long drought between it and the other novels. Rick and Chip, Am I correct in assuming the style remains his "new style," the stripped-down one?

First Look at The Road	Rick Wallach	6/17/2006
The filial relationship is the glimmer of light but it's heartbreakingly fragile at times. The book is dedicated to his father so here's that coming to terms the critical biographers have been waiting for. Momma is banished again - but I won't spoil that detail for you; it's also heartbreaking in a hair-stand-up way. Stylistically, it's denser descriptively than NCFOM, perhaps of necessity, because the landscape is so utterly blasted that there's little to describe and what's left has to carry the load, so to speak. There are moments of horror that will freeze your brain in its tracks and they are not few and far between.

First Look at The Road	arnoldet	6/17/2006
I think it's dedicated to his son rather than his father. Check me out on this, however. There is biography in the book, however.

First Look at The Road	blackhiller	6/17/2006
Thanks, guys. I should owe ye each a beer or something next time we're together. And Chip, do you mean Cullen or the young 'un? (the latter, I'm assuming for now).

First Look at The Road	Rick Wallach	6/20/2006
Two days later and I'm just recovering from a hit-and-run flulike bug that masqueraded as jet lag for a day before clobbering me but good. All notwithstanding, I really don't know what to make of this novel. It's a brilliant work, and vouchsafes you the classic McCarthyesque inkling of hope....which strikes me, finally, as realistic if nothing else. However, it is so horrifying in so many ways that it has literally troubled my sleep as nothing else he has written ever has. McCarthy has on several occasions expressed admiration for Steven King, and I think here he may have exceeded the master on his own ground. I will be very interested to see what King thinks of this book. Otherwise, I'm going to wait a bit for Chip and one or two of the others who have ARC's to chime in here. I really do need to think about this one some more.

First Look at The Road	jack kelly	6/20/2006
Rick: Thanks for your advance reviews. Sounds like an interesting and troubling novel. Can't wait to read it.

First Look at The Road	Clement	6/20/2006
Rick, you are taunting us with your troubled sleep. I would like my sleep to be troubled and I have to wait 3 months? Somewhere in the NCFOM the sheriff makes mention of looking into Mammon and Revelations. Maybe Cormac has written it for him? Think a bit about this one some more, by all means - but please do it here.

First Look at The Road	john graham	6/21/2006
Rick, From what you say it seems the new McCarthy novel is reminiscent of Stephen King's magnum opus, The Stand. If so The Road is worth waiting for.

First Look at The Road	Em Nosta	6/21/2006
Sounds like The Stand and The Day After Tomorrow. Apocalypse now? Should we be worried? At this latitude we'll be the first to freeze. OK, who wants to adopt a Canadian, should be someone in Florida.

First Look at The Road	arnoldet	6/21/2006
This is going to take more than one reading. Rick is right about the "father-son" idea. We can play this book off against those failed father-son relationships in other McC books. Think of Culla's denial of his son, Suttree's fleeing from his. This whole business of fathers in McC will have to be further explored: it's in every book, with the possible exception of "Old Men," and it's probably there, too, if anyone wants to point it out to me. The old uncle at the end? I need to reread. Also, the idea of carrying the fire, which should speak to those of you who support a Gnostic reading of McCarthy. At the same time, there is a lot of "Road Warrior" here as well. I've got no idea at the moment how this book will be received. It wears its heart on its sleeve in terms of daddys and sons; again, as Rick points out, women don't play much of a part or get much of a break in it, and McC writes one of his worst lines of dialogue involving a woman. Gear up, Nell. If you don't buy into the male romance of father-son relationships, then I suspect you could choke on parts of the book. But it is disturbing, nightmarish, although it's also surprising how restrained it is, with little actual violence or outright horror (with a few notable exceptions). A lot of nods to his earlier books. We'll all talk about the ending when the time comes.

First Look at The Road	blackhiller	6/21/2006
Chip, Other than the ending, Bell's relationship with his father is troubled, and I think there are hints about Moss and his father to a degree. Maybe he'll edit out or change that dialogue line before the final edition, as he did with a number of things in NCFOM. I suspect that either he or his editor [my money would be on the editor] may lurk here a bit to pick up on things like Nell did on the non-river in Houston. Of course, with the electric chair, they left it, so who knows (though I think we're increasingly realizing the wonderful combination of attention to realistic detail and yielding to the fictionalizing urge that he practices). But if that line brings out the fiery Nell, I'm all for his leaving it in. . . .

First Look at The Road	arnoldet	6/21/2006
One last comment for the time being: I don't know how long McC has had this idea or even this book (screenplay?) in his files, but it's definitely a post-9/11 work in its final form. McC was in Knoxville on that awful morning, watching it on tv. The early scenes in the book are broadly identifiable as Knoxville and then on south through (I think) Chattanooga and into Georgia. I don't know if anyone can identify later places or not: there may be hints that we can pick up on that I missed or didn't get on first reading. Although most of the book takes place in a hellish countryside world of cold and ash, there are a few urban landscapes that bring to mind teetering towers about to collapse. It's not a one-to-one parallel by any means, but that day serves as backdrop, I feel certain.

First Look at The Road	Rick Wallach	6/21/2006
Chip picked up the "restraint" angle, which is dead on - it's that very restraint that makes the horrific moments so horrific in the first place. It's a pretty spare narrative with the descriptions of ash and burnt out forests and cities coming around repeatedly as leitmotifs. Even the very brief description of the war itself - such as we have it - is a set of restrained and understated sensory impressions of a distant event whose consequences have monstrously overspread the immediate locales of its occurrence. I thought the rendering of the way a rural family would be made aware that something had gone very wrong at a far remove was utterly masterful in its concentration and deftness. Chip, if it is Knoxville, I guess we need to assume that Oak Ridge was on the target list. That might account for some of the family's circumstances, no? On the other hand, there's not a single reference to radiation poisoning that I can recall - but, on the other hand, an almost fantastical dwelling on fire and ash, cold and rain and snow. If Oak Ridge or Knoxville had been hit (and without giving too much away, we know that someplace not too far off got hit not once but several times), how do we account for the singular lack of radiation-poisoning related consequences to this family? I have to assume that someone of McCarthy's keen interest in matters scientific must have exaggerated the heat and flame related inferences and left out the radiation issues deliberately for metaphorical reasons; ergo, perhaps we need to think of this work as fantasy, horror or some new very hard edged genre of drama rather than as anything like "science fiction." What do you think about that?

First Look at The Road	blackhiller	6/21/2006
Chip and Rick, Oh, so it's actually set back in the South (or what's left of it), not at all in the West? (Until now, I thought it was a "futuristic Western.")

First Look at The Road	Em Nosta	6/21/2006
Never mind Greg, I'll be another year older before The Road makes it to Canada. Now that's a sad story.

First Look at The Road	salva	6/21/2006
just a few, simple questions for those fortunate enough to have the ARC: (1) how many pages is the novel? (2) is the cover art the same as the one advertised (black cover with grey and red lettering)? (3) is it written in the same prose style as NCOM (pared down, action driven narrative)? and for those of you ready to make the assessment, is it better than NCOM? (although i really liked NCOM as an entertainment, i was holding out for something more substantial). thanks

First Look at The Road	Willie Feo	6/21/2006
Regarding The Road, do the cannibal rednecks in the truck have an identifiable leader, and if so, is he a character in the tradition of Judge Holden and Anton Chigurh?

First Look at The Road	Rick Wallach	6/22/2006
Some answers for Salva and Willie: (1) The cannibals have no identifiable leader. They're utterly faceless. There's no real sense of organization or leadership left in the world. They're not like the organized gangs of Road Warrior and they sure ain't got no Tina Turners. (2) The ARC is 239 pages long. (3) Same cover as the ad; (4) comparable prose style to the non-Bell narrative sections of NCFOM albeit even more stripped, meshing nicely with the environment through which the father and son move. As far as better or worse, hard to respond because I liked NCFOMN from the gitgo when others didn't and I like it a lot more now after spending a year with it. The Road has no richly exfoliated personality like Bell but it has other different strengths and the quotient of horror is actually a lot higher.

First Look at The Road	Rick Wallach	6/22/2006
Em: Sorry, you'll just have to avoid this thread. We want to keep this particular thread focused on The Road precisely because the faint-of-heart like our pal Em here might not want to know any more than they already do about it, and also because we have ample space elsewhere to discuss Harrison et al. Ergo, I am cleaning (or will have cleaned) this particular thread of extraneous discussions. Anyone who wants to continue on the subject of Harrison or other matters unrelated to The Road should open a new thread. Thanks.

First Look at The Road	Clement	6/22/2006
Understandable about scrubbing the thread. Is there any implicit or explicit Biblical references in the Road? In my mind I've already confused the title with the Rood.

First Look at The Road	blackhiller	6/22/2006
Clem, Given all of the crossings and the like (ever notice how frequently McCarthy employs some form of the word "cross" in _all_ of his published work?) that connect to roads, I don't think that confusion is at all unmeaningful. And cross/crossings are of course not merely associated with Christianity, but also heavily with Buddhism. And just a few years ago, Steve Tatum had a long, interesting, and challenging essay on _chiasmus_ (crossings, to simplify) in _Western American Literature_. Marty, my man, Have you gotten an ARC yet? If so, your thoughts?

First Look at The Road	Em Nosta	6/22/2006
Rick, I've got no will power at all, if you're talking about it I'll be reading it. How can I get a copy soon? Sooner than through the usual channels. Soon as possible. Sooooon?

First Look at The Road	osbiefeel	6/22/2006
thanks for the advanced insight about the Road. I have to say though that after OD and BM, e.g., how much more horror can one be surprised by in McCarthy's fiction? i'm guessing the son/father angle resonates more for readers of the Road than Ballard or the Kid ever could. all guesswork here of course--i don't have an ARC. in any case looking forward to reading it. have others heard about Tom Franklin (Poachers) new novel: Smonk? very McCarthy-ish by the looks of it E.O. Smonk is an ugly, unwashed, murdering rapist who has terrorized the small town of Old Texas, Ala., for years. In 1911, the town summons Smonk to stand trial, and a nonstop blood-orgy of brutality and destruction is the result in Franklin's gloriously debauched second novel (following Hell at the Breech). After Smonk's goons assault the Old Texas courthouse and kill the town's menfolk, reformed former Smonk associate turned lawman Will McKissick pursues Smonk. Meanwhile, a posse of Christian deputies chase teenage whore Evavangeline through the Gulf Coast, but the girl is a skilled killer, too, and the trail of her victims spans the region. McKissick follows Smonk's trail out of and back into Old Texas, while Evavangeline drifts into the town, where all the children are dead except McKissick's 12-year-old son and the widows lay out their dead husbands on their dining tables. The town's sordid past, about to be exposed, involves a rabies-ravaged one-armed preacher, a rabid dog named Lazarus the Redeemer, incest and a church full of dead boys dressed in Sunday best. Fast-paced and unrelentingly violent, Franklin's western isn't for everyone, but readers looking for a strange and savage tale can't go wrong. (On sale Aug. 22) Rich

First Look at The Road	salva	6/22/2006
re Tom Franklin - Hell at the Breech is a great novel, so i am expecting good things from the new one too. one of the best southern writers out there, and a must for McCarthy fans.

First Look at The Road	Willie Feo	6/22/2006
Another influence on The Road would seem to be Speilberg's debut film, Duel. This was about a typical middle class man victimized for no reason by the anonymous redneck driver of a filthy, monstrous filthy tractor trailer truck. The rednecks in the dumptruck reminded me of this movie.

First Look at The Road	Clement	6/22/2006
The Road to Damascus Or, the Appian way, on which, according to Roman Catholic sacred tradition, Peter fleeing Rome met Christ. "Domine, quo vadis?" Christ answers that he is going to Rome to be crucified anew. Shamed once again, Peter turns back to meet his fate in the Neronian Circus, an upside down crucifixion. Roadside bombs. Monster trucks in modern Neronian circuses. Stadiums? Am I pushing it? I don't know. Looking at Cormac McCarthy's biography, having fallen out and back into my own Catholic heritage, I don't think enough attention has been paid to his Catholicism. Earlier work was reflexively compared with Faulkner when Flannery O'Connor would have been more appropriate. I've lived McCathy's education, rejected the church, bounced back and forth between agnosticism and atheism before returning to Rome. You can take yourself out of Catholicism, but you can't ever get it out of you. I see McCarthy somewhere between Robert Stone and O'Connor. I have puzzled over it mightily. Its not just the crosses, Black, but all those temptations in the desert...the Judge on his rock in Blood Meridian when the Gang comes upon him, the satchel full of lucre in NCFOM....ah...I'm just thinking out loud. Bell's references to Mammon, a Syrian concept of ill-gotten wealth fleshed out into a full fledged false idol by the end of the 4th century...in the context of Moss taking the satchel of lucre, and then reading Bell's ruminations on Mammon, it became obvious to me that Moss would be killed. I don't know how to explain it except that it made perfect logical sense from a Catholic perspective. I admit to absolutely delighting in Moss' off-screen demise.

First Look at The Road	jack kelly	6/23/2006
I was fortunate enough to receive an ARC yesterday. Halfway through The Road and I don't want to overstate things, but I feel this novel is pure genius. It is an incredible return to form and is as emotional and heartbreaking as anything I've ever read by any author. As Rick earlier predicted, I didn't get a very good night sleep last night and am not planning on sleeping very well for a spell. The world that is painted in this novel is terrifying and real. But the rendering of affection between father and son in this story is so vivid and excruciating it will make you weep. More when I finish.

First Look at The Road	Em Nosta	6/23/2006
Re: Moss's demise It was also predictable and made perfect sense from an atheist perspective. The man was too stupid, venal, self absorbed and greedy to live. His decision making skills were poor to non-existent, all we ever knew was that he would do the wrong thing and take everyone else down with him. Having gone in and out and back into Catholicism you know, of course, that you "can't ever get it out of you" because it was put in before you were 6 years old. Wasn't it a Jesuit who put out that piece of wisdom and was absolutely correct? And it is also true of many of our long held beliefs and attitudes amd prejudices, put into our heads before our 6th birthdays. Therein lies an important lesson for parenting and the value of early influences.

First Look at The Road	webmaster	6/23/2006
I still await my copy -- for some reason, the postal service and what have you down Memphis way is slow at best, and horrible at worst. I expect to see it tomorrow, though -- if not before.

First Look at The Road	rube	6/23/2006
Fantastic news that this is coming so quickly on the heels of NCFOM. Quick question (and risking going off-topic): I recall mention of two other completed novels around the time of NCFOM's publication...does anyone know if there will be another book sometime in 2008? Feeling greedy!

First Look at The Road	Rick Wallach	6/23/2006
From what I have been recently told by a knowledgeable source, McCarthy actually has several more long-term projects very near to completion, if not done. I suspect it will be as much of a business decision between him and his agent at what intervals to release this material, whatever it is, as an artistic one on his own part to determine when any of his projects is truly "done." However, within the space of one year we have seen the release of two novels and a play. That's utterly unprecidented over a career that began, officially, in 1963 (if you don't count the UT short stories) and generally averaged one new novel every five years or so. No point in being too greedy.

First Look at The Road	wesmorgan	6/24/2006
Two things struck me as being quite different about The Road before even reading the first line of the novel. First, there is a somewhat standard and generic disclaimer (persons, events, locals, etc.) on the copyright page. Now even Suttree didn't get a disclaimer. I wonder why this book was deemed to require one? And the book is the first of McCarthy's to be dedicated to someone (his second son) as already mentioned by Rick and Chip. I will be wondering about these changes while I read. Wes edit

First Look at The Road	blackhiller	6/24/2006
I'm in Marty's shoes, still waiting here at what is truly the last postal point of the Lower 48, West River SD, but after all of these posts, trying hard as hell to use my flyfisherman's patience. In fact, maybe I should go flyfishing today, though not until after shoveling up the dog doo and mowing the damned lawn so it doesn't look like the field our nextdoor neighbors have let their yard grow into. I've long though those offstage scenes, as with the Greeks, are indeed often more stunning and thus more horrible in McCarthy, though Glanton's thrapple scene is pretty stunning, too. I think there's a heckuvan essay in analyzing the offstage stuff for someone. As an ex-(though adult convert) Catholic meself, I'm with CleminEm (or should it be EminClem?) on those influences, especially among those raised in that faith. Marty'll agree with me that one of the supreme achievements showing this phenomenon was Andre Braugher's performances as Frank Pembleton on _Homicide: Life in the Streets_. Clem, Chip (Edwin Arnold) has done some fine work on McCarthy and Catholicism if you haven't read it, but I agree there's a lot more to be done with it, as well as with Buddhism, Taoism, and Hinduism at the least (eventually something[s] pulling them all together in McCarthy). And Wes, thanks for confirming which son the dedication is to. Finally, I've long been intrigued by the fact that McCarthy obviously does a great deal of writing around, i.e., working on different works during the same time periods. Probably since that's how I write most of the time, whether scholarly or otherwise. In his case, I think it's part of what produces so many of those personal intertextual references, an idea that I think he carries out more than anyone else I'm aware of (setting myself up for arguments there, no doubt), may well have taken as another cinematic influence on his prose.

First Look at The Road	Em Nosta	6/24/2006
B'hiller, Do you remember Braugher's line in one of the shows: "The Jesuits taught me to think and I've been terrified ever since." HLOTS remains in my memory as one of the finest shows TV has ever presented. I'm not burdened with any background in Catholicsm - on the contrary, I was raised with the Protestant Irish horror and dislike of all things papal. That's a big burden to put down and colored a lot of my thinking for quite a few years.

First Look at The Road	jack kelly	6/24/2006
Just finished The Road and all I can say is this is a magnificent novel. It contains the same great suspence and storytelling in NCFOM, but felt more complete and satisfying. If you missed the descriptive prose in the last couple of novels you will certainly find it here. And if you were disappointed by some of the loose ends in that story, I don't think you'll have that problem here. Rick: I just read your observations on the lack of radiation-poisoning mentioned. My feeling is for the plot to work, that needed to be the case. If you get my drift. Don't want to give anything away, but I will just say that this is one for the ages. It is going to move people for many years to come. This novel hit me like a ton of bricks.

First Look at The Road	blackhiller	6/24/2006
Em, Well, I remember that line now. He had a number of similar ones in other episodes, too. One of the best TV scenes I recall is when Bayliss and Pembleton are going at it that one last time when Bayliss wants to "confess" to Frank. I was raised Fundamentalist Baptist, literally heard sermons on the Pope as Antichrist, etc. But in my case, it made Catholicism attractive to me (as did a number of attractive Catholic girls, to be honest).

First Look at The Road	Rick Wallach	6/25/2006
Jack: Well....yes and no. Having recently returned from both Hiroshima and Nagasaki I have if nothing else learned a lot about inhabiting a nuclear-bomb zone. Degradation of the most virulent radiation and the rate of recovery of plants and animals in both zones defied predictions - the radiation diminshed and plant and animal life returned, plus humans reoccupied the sites, much faster than had been anticipated. Both cities were undergoing significant reconstruction and rehabitation within months. Now I agree that this doesn't take into account the terrible toll of sustained low level radiation or the long term effects of the "black rain" that fell widely after the attacks but those effects would have been way outside the chronological shadow of the war implied by the novel. It also doesn't take into account the apparent scale of the attacks in the novel. Even so, clearly the scenes in some of the major cities as well as rural areas, with those vast, vast regions of blowing ash, indicate that post-bellum firestorms did much if not most of the damage (as was the case in both Hiroshima and Nagasaki as well). I could pursue this point more explicitly but I don't want to give away some of those astonishing, horrifying vignettes with which the book is so memorably provisioned and would be necessary to my argument. You know the ones I mean. You replayed them in your sleep last night, just like everyone else who has read this thing. Anyway, my thinking is: no one is sick. They're either dead or degenerated. There is one scene which I guess I can discuss in which the father examines some unopened jars of home pickles in an otherwise pilfered farmhouse. With almost gut-twisting irony, he notes that no one else in this era of starvation trusted the contents of those jars so he won't either. Now if the father was sensitive to the potentialities of botulism, let's face it, radiation sickness wouldn't have eluded his notice either. It's something McCarthy could have dealt with but deliberately chose not to for thematic and aesthetic reasons. And I might add for moral reasons as well. The various nightmare characters - the cannibal brigades - that the father and son have to keep dodging are terrifying because of how they behave and how they dress, not because they have succumbed to that cliche of apocalyptic fiction - radioactive mutation. These aren't post-humanoids like H. G. Wells' Morlocks (nor are the father and son just a team of passive Eloi - though I think this novel will merit comparison to The Time Machine's visionary future episodes bigtime). They're human beings who have chosen to survive by preying on, rather than banding together with, their fellow humans (outside of some very wierdly defined tribal or cultic limits). They have given up their humanity, not had it irradiated out of them. And it didn't take too long, either. I think this is central to the message of the novel. The narrative has to balance some horrific realism against what is, most like Outer Dark, a realm of metaphor and myth, not of the scientifically founded complexities of such a postwar world in which McCarthy is perfectly suited to traffic if he so wishes. Much of the ash, I think, is just the residue of all those burned-out mythos.

First Look at The Road	Chase	6/25/2006
Any advice that anyone has regarding a procurement of THE ROAD would be appreciated greatly. I have searched everywhere I know to look, including EBay and ABAA, and nothing thus far. Thanks kindly, Chase

First Look at The Road	jack kelly	6/25/2006
Chase: Not sure if you are going to have much luck on the black market, although there were some copies of NCFOM which showed up on Ebay last time. Hold tight though. The wait will be well worth it. Rick: Excellent points ! I think choice and will play a huge role in this novel and I agree that there seems to be a real separation between those who have chosen goodness and those who have simply decided to survive through whatever means possible. It was interesting to note that most of the characters who fell into the later category seemed pretty death-like despite the fact they were still alive. My fear is that there will be a lot of folks nitpicking the details and deconstructing the story because of these issues and I think that always takes away from the impact of the story. I found it interesting that there were other humans encountered along The Road, but no animals or birds. And there didn't seem to be much hope on the part of the father that there ever would be again. Perhaps the "fire" was too great for those species to survive. There is a deliberate generality to this story which is remarkable. The father and son are never named. The country and cities are never specified. It is all a huge, vast nothingness and I think this is very deliberate. What matters seems to be what is gone or what remains inside of the survivors. Hope is an interesting element in this novel and while it is difficult to discuss this without spoiling the plot, I can say that this novel is at the same time completely hopeless and hopeful. I'm not sure I've ever read anything before which is able to straddle both possibilites so effectively. A day after finishing The Road I am still convinced that this is a masterpiece !

First Look at The Road	Clement	6/25/2006
Arghh..its going to be a torture for me to wait for this book. Rick's comments on Hiroshima and Nagasaki will likely send me scrambling to dig up Hersey's book, which I haven't read since high school. The resilience of man and nature notwithstanding, those two acts of terrorism will remain a blot on America's permanent record until the end of time. America gave up a large chunk of its humanity in 1945...certainy no less than the Germans, who at least had the decency to wrestle with their moral degeneracy. Alright, time for me to gingerly step down from my Sunday morning pulpit.

First Look at The Road	Rick Wallach	6/25/2006
Clement: No, no, stay up there - that's where Sunday morning lives. Tell you what - if you really want to set yourself up for this book, here's my recommended reading list: (1) The Bells of Nagasaki by Takashi Nagai; (2) the masterpiece Black Rain by Masuji Ibuse, and (3) the film Black Rain by Shohei Imamura based on the Ibuse novel, NOT the same as the Michael Douglas neo-Yakuza fiasco; (4) Hiroshima Notes by Kenzaburo Oe, and of course (5) Liberty Street: Encounters at Ground Zero by Peter Josyph, just to bring you completely current. That oughtta do ye. Jack: Yeah, me too. You will doubtless have noticed by now that no one is just jumping in and chiming in on this book. We've all been knocked back by it sufficiently far that we've needed to gather our thoughts together first. I don't think that's been true of any other book he's written since the Forum was initiated over a decade ago. Yes, an awful, wonderful, disturbing and amazing book.

First Look at The Road	jack kelly	6/25/2006
Rick: Yes, I did notice that and I am still trying to digest much of it as well. Looking forward to reading what some of the other regulars have to say about this remarkable novel.

First Look at The Road	wesmorgan	6/25/2006
I think that we should use some caution before interpreting the big chill and ash as a nuclear winter brought about as the result of war or accident. There doesn’t seem to have been any mention or concern about radiation that I can recall. I think it is more likely to have been the result of a natural disaster such as a very large or multiple volcanic eruptions. That might account for much of the ash and observed earth tremors as well. Another alternative might be a large meteor hitting the earth bringing on another ice age. Wes edit

First Look at The Road	jack kelly	6/25/2006
Wes: Interesting observation. There is an earthquake that occurs about halfway through, and when I read that it made me pause and wonder what could have caused that. Perhaps it is intentionally ambiguous. Like the names of the protagonists, the cause of what has occurred is secondary to what it has precipitated.

First Look at The Road	Rick Wallach	6/25/2006
Wes: Except for a couple of things: the father recalls the night of what I will still refer to as the war: flashes of distant light in the sky and a series of dull but perceptible concussions, with the clock stopping at a given moment; that stopped clock is a classic nuclear icon, since both the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bomb museums prominently feature their "official" heat-warped public clocks that stopped at the precise moment of the bombs going off, and of course there's the famous "doomsday clock" of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists used to symbolize the proximity of risk to nuclear war. I don't think McCarthy used that image by accident. Moreover, the idea of a war tallies with the extended theme of human responsibility and the loss of humanity by choice or omission that pervades the entire novel, in the way that a natural disaster simply would not. Another thing: there are frequent deep, small earthquakes all throughout Appalachia and the east coast, even - fairly often - in the Carolina low country (where, as amazingly few people are aware, one of the worst earthquakes in US history completely flattened Charleston in 1886). (For just an exemplary notion of how extensive seismic activity is in the southeastern US, check out the University of South Carolina Seismic Institute home page). In typical American fashion, unless it brings down buildings hardly anyone ever notices one in the east; we all figure it's a passing train or heavy trailer on a nearby road or some such thing. I felt a couple of them in upstate New York as a kid and pointed them out to my camp counsellors, who laughed me off about it ("we don't get earthquakes here, kid") - until they showed up in the papers next morning. Oh, and Jack, one last note: recently I was in Hiroshima with my 13-year-old son who is acutely bright and alert("That's not just my opinion. You can ask anybody"). At five in the morning a 6.2 quake centered in Kyushu woke me up by shaking our hotel like a jello mold. I vividly recall lying there in bed while the building jigged around on its huge buried teflon pads, wondering what the metaphorical or thematic point of that was. My son, who is rather more of a science and computer geek than a literary type, clearly realized that instruments were going to collect any pertinent data, and slept through the whole thing. Footnote: when the shaking eased I figured that maybe it was just a foreshock and I'd beter check out the earthquake procedures in the hotel manual. I flipped to the page headed in English, "What to do in the Event of an Earthquake." The rest of it was in Japanese. No kidding. There are a few other images in the novel that suggest we're dealing with the aftermath of a war that I don't want to detail here because they're so powerful.

First Look at The Road	cletusinfurs	6/26/2006
i was sleeping through earthquakes when i was seven. Is there any fiskadoro intertext? also, hiroshima by john hersey is a good book on nuclear holocaust for anyone who's into that kind of thing. mb

First Look at The Road	JackaLupe	6/26/2006
Is there any fiskadoro intertext? Good one 'cletus': Bring on the Miami Orchestra, shlepping over to the Gulf Coast--another beach, diff. from Nevil Shute's in On The Beach , about the first post-apocaclype novel. Denis Johnson--following his much longer Already Dead , set in Mendocino whose funky culture he nails pretty well--has been writing a couple of plays, workshop style in collaboration with Intersection for the Arts, a cozy, 'lofty' place on Mission in San Francisco. Wonder if Harry Belafonte's post-apoc. film The World, the Flesh and the Devil is available on DVD. As I recall, he pops up out of a manhole to find you-know-what. Saw the earlier "Psycho"-something, missed the last one; the Psycho set was mostly graveside, with echoes of CMC's early work.

First Look at The Road	cletusinfurs	6/26/2006
also in the crossing he kills the female lead pretty deep in. the "psycho turn." burroughs red night books are good postapocalyptic cowboy hardcore gay porn litfic for fans of that genre. i will have to check out that on the beach book. do they smoke weed in the new novel? it might be a shiva/deleuze/guittari reference... mb

First Look at The Road	Rick Wallach	6/26/2006
Greg: Drop me an email if you get a minute. The clock is in the home of the family whose father and son are the protagonists of the novel. My impression was that it stopped because the electricity was knocked out by a distant strike, not by direct impact or concussion. The war seems to be the better part of a year and some months in the past. In any case, personal degeneracy occurs pretty quickly in some cases. Just watch any World Cup game with English fans in the stands. This one didn't remind me much of On the Beach, with its otherwise intact Aussie community slowly succumbing to radiation poisoning. A good novel and a better film, just not really much like The Road.

First Look at The Road	blackhiller	6/26/2006
Rick, Chip, and the others are right on: this book is exquisitely devastating, purgatorial, infernal even. I'm just over half way through and will finish it in a bit. No one does understated and real sentiment better. Other random thoughts (random are all I can manage right now): The narrative takes place years after the event unless I've really misunderstood something. I agree with Rick and Greg's take (good information, Greg--thanks) on its nuclear nature, but think indeed multiple elements (see Revelations indeed) are taking place as well. But I'd also ask if perhaps it isn't that old TVA thing going here, as part of the fathers-sons element. Perhaps multiple nuclear plants were hit, by terrorists even? Isn't there one near Knoxville, Wes? (I think Dr. Morgan will once again be of great help to us with some place elements, or at least highly educated guesses on them.) One of America's major faultlines runs in that "general" vicinity: the New Madrid fault in Missouri. I felt two quakes from it as far away as Ohio. Strong (and undeniable) anarchist strains in this novel, but not necessarily at all favorable. The big red A's dark side-- and undeniably, I'd say, about that thin veneer that is civilization, about how readily most Americans, under certain circumstances, might well indeed act like terrorists. And perhaps, given other current resonances, how Iraquis may have felt during Rumguzzler's shock and awe. This is all there, folks, if by nothing else beyond logical thematic extensions. It does indeed have a number of Western elements in it, is a southeastern sort of Western. Another natural disaster element that could have occurred and be occuring with everything else, in leading to all of that ash?--the end of Yellowstone. (Okay, it's a huge extension, I had to work something regional from my area in here, but that event, which has received a lot of attention recently, would be "nuclearly" devastating to much of the country--but alas it wouldn't account for the flash, the war themes/imagery, etc., and it probably wouldn't have much huge effect beyond roughly Iowa.

First Look at The Road	MFleeger	6/27/2006
I work at a magazine and was allowed to "borrow" the ARC for the weekend. Locked the door. Blazed through it a couple times. Astounding experience. I can't wait till its decent to ask a few questions. Nor can I wait till the theological discussions heat up. There is some juicy stuff in there. I just wanted to chime in with blackhiller and say that I calculated the devastating event to have taken place several years in the past.

First Look at The Road	Rick Wallach	6/27/2006
MFleeger: It's decent to ask a few now. We're not permitted to reprint any of the text but we can pretty much discuss anything, with the caveat that most of us won't reveal key elements of suspense or particularly jarring or remarkable scenes or vignettes in detail (in which this book literally abounds). In any case, you're always free to ask. Blackhiller: The Oak Ridge nuclear laboratory complex is about twenty miles to the west of Knoxville. I don't know if they have power plants there or not but they surely have reactors for experimental work. Nevertheless I don't think all the terrorists in Detroit could have "hit" enough plants at once to do the kind of damage we see. As for Yellowstone, maybe - if Long Valley blew at the same time (yeah, that's right - there is another, albeit less well known and romanticized, supervolcano in North America - this one in California). The narrator's reference to distant "lights" and "concussions" and the clock stopping therewith sounds much more like the bombs going off. All the burning and ash sounds like post-Atomic firestorms, not to mention the kinds of rampant fires you could expect to have if all firefighting services were obliterated and the massive amounts of particles were lifted into the air to create static fields to produce lightning storms.

First Look at The Road	cletusinfurs	6/27/2006
Wallach, you really think that when a rich white kid sleeps through an earthquake its because he's smart and not because a middleclass white secular thirteen year old who doesn't understand mortality or being responsible for the lives of others? I'm not saying it to be offensive but one of Mccarthy's recurring themes has to do with reverence for mortality and the modern secular lack thereof? The age of reverence died in the tent and the greenness of the world went with it. And maybe before The Road began the age of judgement and irreverence destroyed itself by attaining oneness with the spirit of clear fire. Possibly. I reiterate that I don't mean that your son is a bad guy in any way but I know a lot of smart thirty year olds who have no respect for suffering, death or soulfulness. Joven. the stopped clock might be far more interesting thematically or symbolically than realistically. like suttree matters more than realism. How about the stopped clock as the anti-suttree or mirror ghost of the watch that doesn't stop on the deadman. mccarthy's oevre is more consciously constructed with the longview in mind. It sounds like the realism is pretty unimportant. Or one can interpret a lack of radiation sickness symbolically or fabulously, and the father and son could be ghosts. Also in terms of the long arc, the setting of the road could be the world that follows tha apocalypse following the age of the judge: of dancing, money, irreverence, the buying and selling of souls. America. No inner reality. Antic clay. (if holden's god is false than he is just antic clay as are the inheritors of his age, soulless and irreverent). Judgments and denumerable values. Male judgments. Human judgment, which is a parody. Children in costumes. Walpurgisnacht. Medianacht. The adversarial system inspired by that old spirit of clear fire you can only relate to by doing battle with. All things bright and beautiful must be made to stand naked beyond pornography before the Gold Standard of Value. Atomic war is just another aspect of secular power. Like proof and legitemacy. So that america has burned like san francisco and its gold age (not golden) is past. Ash is that which is burned. Mccarthy's elemental symbolism is very prominent in all the books. fire and water. That's up there with the absence of the yin. Excepting Ben Tell-fair of course. do the travellers cross any implacable rivers? What about the ash as the aftermath of the age of the spirit of The Adversary, or the spirit of clear fire? After we finally bomb our way through all the pasteboard masks? I think that people should consider that the era we live in might be considered by some to be a spiritual holocaust where everything is burned away by the whiteness of our judgment. Or that the democrats and republicans are doing worse things to the soul than soccer fans ever did to the body? There's more evidence for this kind of view in mccarthy's books. We look too deeply into the atom and not deeply enough into the soul. We are a nation intent on sucking the spark out of the rock and building fences to establish borders and values. And territorializing the soul with the word. I know this seems all wacko and stuff but I think Mccarthy's more interested in being a prophet and excoriating his own morally bereft homeland with a language that is meant to create spiritual possibilities rather than intellectual limitations in a future age when political people stop using philosophical and scientific rhetoric to rationalize their own ravening powerlust. Most great scientists have more respect for mystery and human soulfulness than the secular liberal intellegentsia who try and label anyone not acting out of self-interest "insane" or fundamentalist. But I forgot america is where people came to hate religion and be puritans of "the enlightenment" or holocaust. If you find these and other opinions interesting please send twenty american dollars and a sase to uncle brownie care of general delivery ridgewood nj 07450 i will send you naked pictures of myself in chaps and groucho glasses and a pamphlet explaining exactly how to think. You know if you want one of the professors on this page to do it it costs about a thousand times more. No Texans or canadians or niggers please i'm trying to run a respectable operation. For a small extra fee I also write prescriptions. Or go out on the road and see if you can find out what the nomos is. If we don't learn to travel freely and stop overstabilizing everything through global capitalism, the university's territorialization of knowledge and the increasing terrorist activity of the stormtroopers of medical sanity and mental hygiene. Or go start a fertility cult. Or abandon your family and seek rebirth through fluid dissolution. Oh well. I hope I spiced things up. Again I mean no disrespect towards your son, rick, but I consider it very germane to what I consider an overarcing theme of mccarthy's work and I thought that your previous statements were evidence of how complex and deeply woven into our lives these themes are. oh and thanks in advance for your pedantic responses everyone. I am smart enough to nap through the rumblings but don't think I don't care. Have fun at your concentration camps. uncle brownie

First Look at The Road	John W.	6/27/2006
Wow. As one of my professors used to declare when he liked a novel--this is a helluva book. I started the novel at 8 last night and finished at 11. Two hours later, I was still trying to formulate coherent thoughts, but I've given up. I hoped I might have one of those insightful dreams that McCarthy characters sometimes have, but no such luck. This morning, I've decided to just ramble a bit to see if something intelligent emerges. I'm not quite sure how a writer creates a world that is quietly devastating, but McCarthy has done so. Chip points out that the novel has nods to past works and he is right on. McCarthy seems to have imagined what the world will be like if Billy Parham's false sun is not a test in the desert somewhere. Then we travel along the road with a Suttree-like character, meeting John Wesley's father along the way. We've got cannibals, roasted babies, and an amazing juxtaposition between a dessicated world in which it seems to always be raining. But, the novel exists outside of time in so many ways. The clock stops, the characters don't know what month it might be, the sun is hidden, the map is barely useful--in some respects the day is measured in whether one gets to eat or not. I found little nostalgia and no future. No one has time (or energy, perhaps) to lament the past. These nods to other novels, or consistent ideas McCarthy explores in the fictional worlds he creates, are reflected in the style as well. For me, the novel most resembles the Crossing and Blood Meridian in its language and tone, but, the long faulkneresque sentences that create that biblical cadence are cut in half. Take your King James bible and divide every sentence in half. It's like the ash and daily survival have rendered words too precious for long sentences--or perhaps, in this world, the daily pressure of survival simply overshadows and renders useless the excess. In Blood Meridian, the characters rode on. Like something. Or As if something. McCarthy created those homeric similes and metaphors. They are back in this novel. The characters move on. They walk. The run, but the homeric tones are blunt, truncated--like the world this father and son inhabit. And the novel is pared down in so many ways to the existential decision to simply get out of bed (in fact, the father makes mention of that very thing). I was struck, though, by the almost total lack of humor in this novel. There is one scene (with a hermit like character) that made me smile, but other than that, I would say there is less of McCarthy's dry humor than any other novel. I also have to admit that as much as I like the novel, the ending doesn't work for me. Yet. There was something a bit pat for me. This novel deserves a second reading. That's enough for now. I have always been struck by the Yeat's line that a "terrible beauty is born." This novel has a terrible beauty.

First Look at The Road	blackhiller	6/27/2006
uncle brownie/cletisinfurs, This is one of the "pedants" who's with you on the prophetic function of McCarthy. Essentially did my 230 pages of text for the PhD on it (another 30 with the Works Cited). Agree with you on the realism/"fantasy" factors, too--it is so easy to get wrapped up in his realism (a real presence) that I think we've often neglected to some degree his more fantastical elements. But I see enough of the naked in chaps stuff during the Sturgis Rally (epicenter 20 miles up the I-State) that invades me homeland each year, albeit adding some spice and a number of deaths, thus providing us with an annual sort of mini-apocalypse of our own. Indeed finished the novel last night--short of my own death, it's impossible to imagine having done otherwise. STUNNING. More seriously, the kid in this novel is the moral center. His faith is rewarded, though not without toll. He redeems the father, saves him. It's tempting on one front to make this a possible further theodicy: the Son saving the Father. I harp on McCarthy's endings, especially beginning with _Suttree_: being intentionally cryptic here, this is another one that fits the bill, resonating especially with _NCFOM_ and _Cities of the Plain_ and Billy though also with it and John Grady (Marty and I, and I think Chip and Dianne, have been together on this for years). There's a consistency to them, and we ignore that at our hermeneutical peril. . . . Anyway the Romantic and Comic veins in McCarthy need more exploring, directly and indirectly. The "final" 2 endings/paragraphs are meant to jolt us, surprise us, as much as any seeming kinfolk of Jimmy Blevins the younger. . . . Chip: The Peckinpah references here are several indeed. Thanks for the pointer. This clinches what I need to do for San Angelo. John W. (Mr. Wegner, I presume?), Your post came on while I did this initially. McCarthy's novel ends with hope. May seem tacked on, but it's consistent with his oeuvre as I reference above. Your observations on style are right on to me. I'd add that overall the syntax and diction (each pared down) both are more like NCFOM than like most of the earlier stuff, though OD was always coming to mind stylistically as well as image-wise.

First Look at The Road	John W.	6/27/2006
blackhiller: Wegner I am. I agree that the ending is consistent. In fact, I thought of the dedication at the end of Cities of the Plain first. I don't want to sound critical about the ending. It's possible I just didn't want the novel to end and I wouldn't have liked anything that made me stop reading. Instead of pat, perhaps I should say abrupt. I don't want to give anything away to those who haven't read, but the part I felt abrupt is the very ending with the other man who arrives. How do you mean the kid is the moral center? McCarthy does, of course, consistently place kids in a sort of neo-Romantic position, but he also seems to eschew the Romantic idea that kids are pure with some insight into the soul. I like the way McCarthy complicates this issue: the kid keeps quoting the father's wisdom back to him, reminding him about morality in the past. Do you suppose McCarthy is arguing that morality transcends the reality of the day? The father's moral code is clearly influenced by his desire to help his son survive. Also, how old do you think this kid is? I was having a hard time pinning that one down. Greg. We do read a couple of times about in year's past, but the timeline itself is as ash covered as the land. After one reading, I do know they walk a long way but I can't say for certainty how long they are on the road. The devastation does seem classic post nuclear. Plenty of people are sick (the father included), but I didn't see any one-eyed, three eared, bald guys. There are good guys and bad guys and, at least to my reading, a pretty clear line that demarcates good from bad. My reading (as of now) is that the nuclear "war" simply gave the bad guys the chaotic moment necessary to cut loose. What's interesting to me in terms of this as an SF novel is that it doesn't really seem that far into the future. But, I don't really know much about science fiction. Wes pointed out in his earlier post that this is the first novel to have the disclaimer about similarities to the living or the dead. I find that amazing, but as Wes implies, strangely appropriate for this novel. The novel has that Outer Dark feel as characters wander metaphorically through the dark woods.

First Look at The Road	jack kelly	6/27/2006
One thing that hasn't been mentioned is the ubiquitous shopping cart and it is as crucial to the father and son in this story as horses are to the protagonists in the previous four novels. The shopping cart is what the man and his boy use to cart their "stuff" around and it is a bit of an albatross throughout. Does anybody else think the shopping cart may be a metaphor for our clumsy material accumulations ? Once you've read this book, you will never see a homeless person trekking through the city streets with a shopping cart in the same light.

First Look at The Road	blackhiller	6/27/2006
John, I won't ask if you'll be in San Angelo. . . . that's a congone foreclusion. For some reason, I imagine ye're there right now unless vacating. 1. On the moral transcendence, yes, I do, at least in part but not merely. I'd suspect that's a major part of being a "Southern Conservative" like Wendell Berry and Walker Percy (I think Richard L. first made this comparison a few months back). These folk tend to separate, though not completely, social conservatism from other types, the more Goldwaterian/Burkean strains. Libertarian overall in orientation. Percy, for instance, as a Catholic was opposed to abortion, yet he also took on the numerous shortcomings of the Pro-life movement. Berry is much the same in those regards, though a type of Baptist as I recall. 2. Yes, the father's morality is more pragmatic--Charles Peirce and of course William James come to mind (there's a lot more to be done with William James and McCarthy, I'm convinced--including with _Varieties_). My own current readings of McCarthy would stress that there's a lot of room for pragmatism in his thought; the son needs to move beyond his innocent black and white morality (at the same time that it may be "higher," curiously enough) and into the grey. But the father has to be careful and influenced by the son in mercy, meekness, the like. Here, the ending indicates that perhaps the meek shall inherit the earth after all--or at least that _hope_ is there: there are _seeds_ of goodness and beauty left--but of course, the seeds of evil remain, too. Regardless, hard moral deicisions must be made. The Jehovah-istic father, agent of hard acts, the hard god, versus the merciful Christic son? And I think of Buddha on the road as well, having left papa's palace and seeing the world, the poor, the suffering, the evil, the dead. God, there's so much going on here--all of the prayers, all of the "swearing" in God's and Christ's names that are also prayers themselves, prayers of anger, Job-like. And all the little graces. 3. The kid (son) is pretty well-drawn and believable to me here, at least for the most part. He's born after the catyclysm if I'm reading it right. My guess is he has to be at least 6-8, but probably isn't more than 10. My own son, now the latter age, was capable of most of that speech and most of those questions at 6-8, and they continue now. Others: We can't forget Sherman's march through the south, either. Fire and ash. La agua again playing a vital function. The father and son started in the north (we pick them up en media res). We also know they go at least probably 300 miles to get to the coast after they've already trammeled a long distance since that beginning of the story.

First Look at The Road	wesmorgan	6/27/2006
I am still not convinced nuclear explosions are in any way involved although I will admit to plenty of ambiguity about the source of the event or events. The travels seem to be taking place at least five or six (if the boy is precocious) years after the clock stops. Why would an informed and cautious survivalist head toward Oak Ridge if there were any concern about radioactivity? It seems as though Knoxville just happens to be on his route from where he starts to somewhere on the southeastern coast. One would think that he could avoid the Oak Ridge vacinity from most anywhere easily if desired. There do seem to be plenty of burned and dismembered people encountered along the way, but I have to imagine that these injuries were acquired secondarily to the catastrophic event or events. I found some evidence of humor, but not nearly what I expected from McCarthy. And I would agree that the style resembles NCFOM and OD much more closely than his other works. Wes edit

First Look at The Road	John W.	6/27/2006
I am here now, will be here, and I hope plenty of other folks will head out this way in October. We got blue skies, tasty food, and cold beer--what more could anyone want? I agree with the elements of pragmatism and William James. People have, in the past, discussed Twain's Huck Finn and McCarthy and I couldn't help but think of Huck's pragmatic justification for stealing when the father and son found food. What strikes me as intense in this novel is the choice that the wife makes (her decision makes perfect sense to me) is a decision left then to the father who must make that choice for his son. (I thought of Sophie's Choice and Beloved, not because the novel necessarily echoes them, but because of the parent child relationship.) In the world that he inhabits, his inability to make the logical choice seems so foolish based on everything we've seen. The fact that he simply can't rip his own heart out, even if he knows it might be better to do so, makes him a pretty noble guy. Yet, it works. The meek shall inherit the earth--but, I'm with John Grady's dad--I'm not sure that is a good thing or accurate. After all, the man who shows up at the end is fully armed. I think all the characters work in this novel. I noticed that the father is the most well educated character we've seen, or at least I assume he's well educated. I figured the boy for 8ish, but Wes has given me pause. How did you get the 5 or 6 years? The ambiguity of the disaster is interesting. My assumption is that what happened here has happened everywhere in the world. There is no wildlife and the scene where the boy asks about a crow (is it a crow?) flying above the clouds to see the sun somehow struck me as incredibly sad. Missing trout is one thing, but no birds? That's just cruel. I don't remember much about the volcano in Washington state when it blew, but I know ash was everywhere. When I was a kid, I visited Pompeii. Could ash hang that heavily from wood smoke, volcano, etc.? Doesn't the father see white flashes in the distance? But, the bomb shelter is empty so some family had no chance, or they left because it was a different disaster? A question for all: why is the father so intent on getting to the coast? It's a hell of a trip through those mountains in the winter. Is that just he easiest route away from the cold? Is there something I missed about the coast?

First Look at The Road	MFleeger	6/27/2006
What about those mushrooms? I know they are refered to as dried, but did anybody else get confused? Were they supposed to be pre- or post-Apocalypse fruiting bodies? Do we have any mycologists out there who can tell us what a dead morrel sitting in the dirt would look like after passing through several brutal and presumably wet winters. I can't imagine that it'd be anything more than dust. Did anyone else read this as a semi fresh crop?

First Look at The Road	Dave Cremean	6/27/2006
The morels are recent--morels grow well, in fact best, in fire zones. They too are a sign of hope. The coast? Journey to the East? A hjirah? Much use of pilgrims and its forms (not, I know, unique to this novel). I noted a bit about Christian and Jewish and Buddhist elements, but as Ken pointed out awhile back, The Way = Tao = The Road. Yeah, it would be meekness at least largely in a relative sense. And Wes, that's a good point about the reactor--what, Chernobyl's far more than 7 years old and still deadly. But I think I may have it: an asteroid/meteor. And I'm serious. It would account for it all except the war elements, and those can be related to what is going on with the survivors. And dang if it aint tasty that the meteor ties in well with BM and the Leonids.

First Look at The Road	wesmorgan	6/27/2006
John, The boy could say his ABC's and might be able to write some as I remember. His father still reads stories to him. In other ways he seemed several years older than five or six (I think that John Francis McCarthy is 6 or 7-years-old now). But I believe that the man's wife was pregnant with the boy when the clock stopped, so we are talking about an extended period since that moment anyway. MFleeger, I remember the morrels as fresh, but I have not checked back with the text. Morrels emerge in the spring with a rise in temperature and moisture. How does that match the season in the book? I remember the season as winter and cold for sure. I wouldn't think that under the circumstances it would make for very good morrel hunting. Wes edit

First Look at The Road	Dave Cremean	6/27/2006
Clarification: That's why they're recent, not fresh. But they've been growing. The best place to find them is in ashy areas--they tend to be among the first plants to come back. And we can't forget seeds. Human seed, flower seeds, the like.

First Look at The Road	Em Nosta	6/27/2006
Thoughts without reading the book, If it were the volcano thought to be fomenting underground and creating a measureable bulge, in Yellowstone, and if it were to be as powerful and explosive as Krakatoa, then there would be great destruction in the U.S. and could be a long period of winter in North/South America just from the ash in the air. Krakatoa created a year without a summer in Europe after it blew and bodies of people who perished in it washed up on the western shores of Africa a year later, floating on pumice and plants that had moved around the world on ocean currents. How did so many of you get this book? It's making me antsy to read all this stuff, (me of the "no willpower"), and not to have the book. I'm rereading On the Beach by Nevil Shute, Wolves Eat Dogs by Martin Cruz Smith,(Chernyobl) and Krakatoa by Simon Winchester to fill the gap. Pobracita.

First Look at The Road	mfleeger	6/27/2006
Very interesting to hear that morels are specific burn lovers. But one gets the feeling that the earth has been poisoned far beyond site specific burning. The father takes the seed packets but he doesn't know why as if it's a foregone conclusion that nothing can grow. I wonder how the mycelium survived what nothing else could.

First Look at The Road	Rick Wallach	6/27/2006
Greg: degeneracy as a purely behavioral matter. One of my points is that there's not much if any evidence of radiation anywhere. Wes: who said anything about moving towards Oak Ridge? We were merely speculating that if the family saw lights in the sky along with feeling distant concussions at the time that their clock stopped, they were at least close enough to exploding warheads to feel some of the jolt and see lights from some of the fireballs. We then speculated that if they were in the Knoxville area, Oak Ridge might have been a likely target of an enemy missile strike, as perhaps might the air force or air national guard base at the Knoxville Airport. It seems pretty clear that past a certain point, the father and son, given their exposed condition, are merely determined to get out of the northeast and head south to beat the awful prospect of surviving yet another seasonal winter exacerbated by the nuclear winter. I just don't buy the volcano thing. Once volcanic ash gets wet, for example, it turns to cement. It's not really light - it's flaked stone, in fact. This stuff in the novel is blowing around loosely, sometimes in great swirls, and ash from burning organics would do that as soon as it dries. Moreover, the trees are all burned out - the "forests" are nothing but stands of burnt-off trees. In addition to the vast panoramas of burning cities that the boy and his father pass, all that burned-out forest land would supply plenty of organic ash on top of what a repeated pasting by nuclear bombs would throw into the atmosphere. Yes, actually, the mother does give birth after the war, in a very vivid but very brief scene, and then she departs from the scene when the boy is at least old enough to discuss as a personality, so it would have to be four or five years in passing at least. They head for the coast, trying to move to the south at the same time, because the father believes it will be warmer there than inland or up in the mountains or foothills. I think the capsized sailboat that they find, with the Spanish books and so on inside, may be an indication that they have reached the Gulf of Mexico, and so they may well have hiked through the Georgia hinterlands - which also kind of explains the behavior of many of the peripheral characters.

First Look at The Road	blackhiller	6/27/2006
"You gotta get obsessed and stay obsessed." John Irving, _HNH_ Mushrooms are spore-born spreaders. Also: It's not so poisonous (though not terribly healthy, either). I've gotta run my Cormac to Rapid City for an appointment or I'd look this up: when next do earth and the Leonids meet? This may be the time of the incident. Perhaps multiple meteor strikes as well? A meteor of sufficient size takes care of the flash, the dust, the lack of fallout, the lack of gruesome mutations, etc. It places humans with dinosaurs. Etc.

First Look at The Road	Thorn T. Thorn III	6/27/2006
C’mon guys, you’re giving the whole story away. For those of us not blessed with an ARC, you’re ruining it. At least have the decency of keeping quiet about the plot line and the narrative We can discuss these things when the book reaches the hot and sweaty masses. Hyduke is already chiming in, and I’m tempted also. But I haven’t read the fucking book yet. Let sleeping dogs lay, until it comes out, will ya? TTIII

First Look at The Road	Em Nosta	6/27/2006
Re the volcano thing, those of us living down wind from Mt. St. Helens will tell you it is dust and ash, it does blow in the wind, it does cover and get into everything, and it does last a long, long time. Mt. St. H is in Oregon and the south west part of this province AB was covered in dust. The ash cloud rose 16 miles into the sky and was visible 200 miles away. That it eventually blends into and enriches the local soil is not enough to make you forgiving when your car is under a foot of it. Also, ground and aerial photos of the devestation of trees shows the same "blown down all in one direction, tops missing" kind of destruction that also occurred in Russia at the site of the meteorite that hit, and flattened everything in a circular pattern around its crash site. If you have access to a copy of Winchester's -Krakatoa-, page 282 describes the dust, "...of all grades and compositions thrown into the air by the eruption. Much of it, too heavy to be kept on high for long, fell down as drifting veils of gray....Ships at sea...came under a slow rain of a white ash that "Looked like Portland cement", in the Indian Ocean 2,000 miles away from the volcano Others ran into the same drifting ash off the Horn of Africa 3,700 miles away." It goes on to say, "...lighter material was thrown up right through the troposphere...was caught for months in the stratosphere itself. For the "sphere" challenged, that's 30 miles up. I am gathering that CMcC wrote the destroying force in a most ambiguous way. Why might he do that? To keep us openminded and questioning about what the possible apocalyptic event might be? To make readers less narrow in their views about how to avoid such an event? To encourage readers to be as uninformed and uncertain as the survivors in the book that we might better identify with them? The suspense is terrible.

First Look at The Road	Rick Wallach	6/27/2006
Em: Perhaps, but Knoxville isn't immediately downwind of Yellowstone and too far from the Pacific coast to experience that kind of pervasive ashfall. I've seen projections of the ashfall path from a catastrophic eruption of Long Valley and/or Yellowstone and eastern Tennessee ain't in the picture. But most of all, I don't think there's anything ambiguous about the destroying force. I don't think anyone in the Knoxville area would experience a Yellowstone eruption as a series of concussions and illuminations in the sky, clock stoppages, burning cities or a complete national breakdown of authority and services to the point that all governmental functions and divisions are eliminated. Nor do I think that the scenes of urban destruction described in the novel could be attributed to a volcano or to a meteorite - all pretty far fetched mechanisms for the way the masses of the dead are posed in these scenes. You would need massive irradiation or heat-induced depressurization, shock and suffocation to account for them. Moreover, if it were volcanism or some other purely direct-impact scenario like a meteorite you would also expect there to be ministration activity by foreign powers, European especially, along the coast - and there isn't any. Whatever it is has knocked out civilization on a pretty close to planetary level, and no volcano is going to do that. But again, for maybe the third time, a natural disaster doesn't work with the them of choice and human responsibility that is so pervasive in this novel. Only war, the ultimate bad choice, makes sense in this context. Ask any Iraqi.

First Look at The Road	Em Nosta	6/27/2006
Hi Rick, Aha, but of course you can trump my ace,( and don't let the sound of my sobbing disturb your sleep), you have the advantage of having read the book. I, on the other hand, am out here in the stratosphere, waiting, waiting......... May I just mention, for fun not for a better understanding of The Road, that AB was not in the projections of ashfall from Mt. St. Helens, either and I was on horseback in the mountains of west central AB when it blew. The sound was unmistakeable and the horses were alarmed too. If I give you my phone number and let you call collect, will you read the book to me?

First Look at The Road	John W.	6/27/2006
Y'all were all talking over my head with ash clouds and wind patterns until Rick mentioned bad choices. I've made plenty of them, including that fourth glass of wine with supper. I'm not sure I buy the gulf of Mexico, though. I don't have my map here, and, admittedly, time is tough to follow in the novel, but I've got these two heading into South Carolina. The Spanish ship is simply sign that the devestation is wide spread and universal. For those of you who are positing meteors, volcanoes, etc--which of these is most likely to wipe out all the animals but not all the people? Em: I don't think it matters much in the end what destroys the world. The choice to be a good guy or bad guy, the choice to get out of bed, or more importantly, to let your son get out of bed, is far more important than ash or radiation. In McCarthy's past works, I've been struck by the sense that characters may have choice, but they are driven by some internal desire or purpose that they can not change. I'm no Schopenhaur expert (considering I'm not even sure I can spell it), but isn't this a basic tenet of his ideology? I see this in Cole, Suttree and other characters. They are predictable. I'm not sure the father here is predictable. Maybe this is partly how the kid serves as a moral center, as blackhiller claims above.

First Look at The Road	jack kelly	6/27/2006
Nobody responded to my shopping cart comments, but that's okay. As far as why they are heading to the sea, it's a good question and certainly worthy of discussion. My feeling was where the father thought other folks may have gathered. Although you don't really get a sense of whether or not he's really all that interested in finding other people. I think the comments that have been registered about these two moving simply for the sake of moving are right on target. I felt like the father believed that as long as they kept moving they would continue to find food and fuel for their fire. I'm not sure if the sea was his intended final destination, but it seemed to be an important place for him to reach. By the way, what did the folks who have read this novel think about the scenes aboard the sailboat ? There certainly was a lot of time spent on it and the discovery of the flaregun seemed pretty significant.

First Look at The Road	Em Nosta	6/27/2006
J.W. >I don't think it matters much in the end what destroys the world.< So true, as none of us will have any say in it anyway. But if North Korea makes .5 degree of an error and hits Canada instead of the U.S. I will be some ticked off. It's an impossibly long hike from here to the equator, if there still is one and we'd have to cross some of your toughest territory to get there.

First Look at The Road	Rick Wallach	6/27/2006
Jack: On the shopping cart, I hadn't given it all that much thought but probably need to. Some of that stuff is pretty remarkable. As for the sailboat, some of that episode reminded me of the film Dead Calm, which featured both the long swim to the derelict vessel and the flaregun in an important role. I think the father hoped that enough people would try to gather to the south, where it was warmer, so that perhaps civilized behavior in mutual interest, and hence safety, might be preserved there. And Em, I think our slug-in-chief and his coterie of crooks and thugs in Washington are a lot more of a danger to all of us than that Korean missile.

First Look at The Road	blackhiller	6/27/2006
Jack, I liked the shopping cart points, but felt you made them well in a few succinct words (I know what everyone is thinking, but it aint me, babes). Rick, If one includes some sort of divine judgment as a possibility, which given McCarthy's track record it could be, the meteor (or Yellowstone and the whole damn ring of fire, etc) could well relate to human responsibility. But the nuclear bombing thing would have to be so widespread that it would seem improbable, too, without heavy fictionalization. A meteor (or again, several meteors)wouldn't. And we'd lose that wonderful connection to BM. But of course the nuclear thing all connects to fire--illegitimate use--and to the Border Trilogy, esp. _TC_. Perhaps it's indeed all so ambiguous by intent, for readers to make dual or multiple guesses. I don't believe it's the gulf--they're headed pretty much due south for quite awhile, then pretty much due east for well over 200 miles because it isn't straight. They're on the I-States it seems as the only real way to be sure of directions. Eyeballing my atlas, I'm guessing they head south "into" Knoxville, then Chatanooga and Atlanta (all on 75), then east and slightly south to near Savannah. That's the most direct route, I believe. . . . I don't think anyone's commented on it, but the father and son both speak without southernisms and the like. I've lived as far north up I-75 as Bowling Green, and even up there in Northern Ohio you get a lot of southernish farm speech. Clem, we may be talking Michigan. . . . Finally, Thorn, I think all--or at least most--of us are trying not to give the plot away. But as someone said during our NCFOM ARC time, y'all don't need to read this thread if you don't want to know anything about it. None of us are trying to be mean (well, I can speak for myself, anyway), but we are following certain guidelines.

First Look at The Road	Rick Wallach	6/28/2006
If one includes divine judgment, then one is importing it into the text. It's a real stretch to say that a meteor shower or volcanic eruption is anyone's "fault," even if one is superstitiously inclined. This is The Road, not Left Behind. On the other hand, the eerie erasure of all other life forms except perhaps from memory does track that sick, twisted logic by which religious conservatives negotiate their delusions of the world, in which natural law is suspended by superstition. I heard a report on TV the other night that noted that since Uganda replaced its medically directed, condom and education based AIDS prevention program at US gunpoint (subject to a cutoff o various other kinds of medical and economic assistanxe) with a "faith based" program led by evangelists and church groups, its rate of AIDS has tripled from one of the best in Africa at 5%, to 15 percent of the population. Way to go George; apparently the butchery of innocents in Iraq still isn't good enough for the King of Death Warrants, you ignorant murdering scumbag. Pardon the digression, but yes, this reminded me of The Road too. One thing about the scenario of the novel that I thought you could consider "hopeful:" no clergymen of any kind. A tough solution to a big problem, perhaps, but good riddance nonetheless. Also, why would the father, equipped with a map and determined to get warm, deviate to the Atlantic coast when the Gulf coast is clearly where he will find climatological succor the fastest? A turn towards the Atlantic from Atlanta (which I agree is the big city of the dead they traverse) would necessarily entail a climb eastward over the mountains where it would be colder yet; not exactly on his stated agenda. He would have to realize that heading south to the Gulf follows much flatter and easier terrain. Moreover, I don't think McCarthy plops a sailboat full of Spanish-language manuals and magazines into the Carolina or Georgia waters to "symbolize" anything as nebulous as the universality of the disaster; that's already made quite clear by the extent of the devastation. I think he put it there to indicate proximity to Latin America and the Caribbean and give us a bit more of a geographic fix.

First Look at The Road	blackhiller	6/28/2006
Rick, Though I did attend college with one of Tim LaHaye's daughters (another incarnation), I've never had a desire to read any of the _Left Behind_ "books." But I do know that the single most influential piece of tripe that came out on "the end times" was Hal Lindsay's _The Late Great Planet Earth_, and it postulated nuclear destruction as the almost certain judgment of God. On the other hand, that works against part of my argument. And I should have used the term "Cosmic Justice," since meteors have long been held in that fabled function. Regardless, no one is "importing it into the text"--it's just plain there in the text as at least a possibility. The father addresses it directly in angry prayer. Whether it's nuclear or cosmological or earthbound. I think the strongest point for the nuclear war idea is indeed the corpses and the like, and perhaps the fact that so many building seem to be standing, but I'm not sure that a meteor wouldn't do much the same (help out there on the two possibilities?). I'm not convinced yet in any direction, by the way, but leaning toward the intentionally ambiguous theory that someone above suggested. Each of what I now see as the two main proposals has its own strengths and weaknesses. On the directions and all, once they head east I believe there are more mountains, and the distances (they're not traveling straight but as a crow flies and it is 200 miles if straight) are a definite problem with the Caribbean coast. Again, I'm open to persuasion the other way, but at this point utterly unconvinced. As for a Spanish ship, it makes sense that it could be farther north given the elemental changes and the fact that everyone's dead. It is of course fitting Columbus- and other-wise. And where are all of the towering hotel structures along the beach? Certainly, the beach seems a direct reference to Shute's book, so that could play into a nuclear argument. But I do need to enter my second, more deliberate reading soon. I'm not even sure how much of the road is or isn't I-state, upon reflection.

First Look at The Road	Rick Wallach	6/28/2006
Dave: Who was it that posted a few weeks ago lamenting the decline of the "Fightin' Cormackians"? Boy, has this book ever resurrected those legendary times, eh? So we both assume, I take it, that Atlanta is the big fried city they pass through. Okay, just took my trusty ruler to my Rand McNally 2006 road atlas and measured the distance from Atlanta to Savannah and Atlanta to the gulf coast via Tallahassee, more or less. They are just about identical - approximately 225 miles in both cases with Savannah a wee, and I do mean wee, bit closer "as the crow flies." However, as I already pointed out, the southbound route would be far warmer and cross much lower, more easily navigable terrain, which definitely tallies with the father's key objective: avoid as much winter as possible, keep warm, head south. It also makes easier sense of the Spanish-language materials in the sailboat. Finally, the Gulf coast isn't quite yet as cluttered with high rises as ye think, mate - except in the gambling hotspots and by the urban centers like Mobile and Pensacola. In fact, once you get north of the Tampa Bay conurbation, the coast gets pretty rural pretty fast. It's a nice ride - little cracker shacks where you can actually get a platter of dilly (fried armadillo bits). Ecchhh. I'd rather eat people.

First Look at The Road	Dave Cremean	6/28/2006
Rick, Yeah, it's great to have the fightin' back! And I suspect this novel will really get it rolling in a way NCFOM hasn't. I may be wrong, but I thought they headed more or less due east out of that major city. I know I really need my second reading. But yes, I'm with you and Chip on the Knoxville to Atlanta run for sure. And there's no way it's the gulf coast, I don't think. Crows are going to be important here in many ways, I think. Hell, Richard, I'm just Road-scrambled. . . .

First Look at The Road	timkjazz	6/28/2006
It sounds like a nucleur event has taken place and not the worldwide volcanic eruptions some are postulating. I'm still waiting for my friend to get done with The Road, can't wait. If it was a natural disaster occurance wouldn't FEMA be on it by the tenth page or so? With King George in office a nucleur war is more likely than meteors but who's to say when this book was writen. I have also read that Gary Fisketjohn(not sure of spelling) has stated Cormac had five or six books close to readiness for publication when they chose NCFOM to come out last year. This sounds like a golden age for all McCarthy lovers. Now if they'd only get the Blood Meridian movie in production with Ridley Scott directing. Also, has anyone ever read Riddley Walker, a truly great and unique end of world novel by Russell Hoban? Place it on the shelf with Fiskadoro and On the Beach.

First Look at The Road	Rick Wallach	6/28/2006
Timk....: If FEMA had gotten on the job, I doubt if there would have been anyone left to write about five years later. Except maybe some Halliburton executives. And it's Fisketjon. Based on authoritative second-party sources, I can confirm what you heard or read. There's more stuff in the pipeline. McCarthy told me at the Sunset Limited premiere that arrangements were being made for publication of that piece as well. Incidentally, where is our illustrious webmaster, for Buddha's sake? He's been sitting with his copy for near on a week now and not so much as a >gasp!< or a >wow< ? Martino! Chime in, willya?

First Look at The Road	jack kelly	6/28/2006
As for the location of the sailboat, I was pretty certain they were in Mexico. There is an instance in which they come upon a coin before they get to the sailboat and it has Spanish lettering on it. But this all still begs the question: Why are they heading to the sea ? To find others ? To find a better source of food ? Any thoughts ?

First Look at The Road	timkjazz	6/28/2006
Rick, Thanks for spellcheck. It would be nice to get an annotated edition of The Road with all the small yet significant metaphors and allusions like Atlanta as the dead city relating to the Civil War perhaps, and maybe the signifigance of the crows as a nod to Stephen King and the crows in his apocalyptic The Stand. I have read in various places King is a huge fan of McCarthy, any word anywhere if he has an ARC of The Road. I'll keep eyes on E. W. where he does his bi-weekly column. Also, I would think the gulf coast would be a good source of food and warmth for father and son and maybe a jumping off point to head into S. America. Can't think of why S. America would be involved very much in nucleur war except maybe for OIL!!!! Maybe I'll ask our OIL prez and vice-prez if they have any thoughts.

First Look at The Road	blackhiller	6/28/2006
Gulf coast just doesn't work for any number of reasons unless I'm really misreading directions and the like. Also the vegetation (all burnt, but much recognizable): rhododendrons, hemlock, the like, is southeastern. Nothing vegetatively West-Southwest. No burnt palo verde or ocotillo or yucca or cholla or the like or even East Texas stuff. A billboard for "Rock City" is mentioned early on. At first I thought of Southern New Mexico with that, but that place is actually named City of Rocks, and as I read the other details I realized no way. The Spanish coin strengthens Rick's Florida argument, which I agree would makes the most logical sense given they're trying to get as far south as possible. I may well have turned them east too early or be over-stressing that eastward move. Morels are also very phallus/missile shaped, moreso than other mushrooms. Like a closed rather than open umbrella. Thus a lot of suggestive symbolism to them. There's that 1:17 by the way, the time the clock stopped, the links with NCFOM. Rev. 1:17, one wonders?--"And when I saw Him, I fell at His feet as dead. But He laid His right hand on me, saying to me, "Do not be afraid, I am the First and the Last [Alpha and Omega in Greek]." Christ's speech begins here and continues through 3:22, with verse 18 opening "I am He who lives, and was dead, and behold, I am alive forevermore. Amen. And I have the keys of Death and Hades." (All New King James Version) But again, the clock _stops_ at 1:17. Rick, as you know I aint reverting to the fundamentalism of my rearing, but I'd argue that any "endtimes" scenario invites somethings from the speculation and biblical, even more particularly with an author like McCarthy. And when we move to his one-text intertextuality. . . .Martz, my main man, chime in already! We don't care if you're infernally busy, just don't sleep or eat or do anything else till you. . . . By the way, did anyone ever dig up any information on that friend of Mac's and Betty Carey's, the "unorthodox evangelist" named Frank Morton that Garry Wallace mentions? I've done a bit of quick looking, found nothing. Many evangelists emphasize eschatology (or, as I like to call the worst of it, es-scat-ology). I grew up hearing them. . . . Including one who ran a borderland radio station "ministery" somewhere in Texas.

First Look at The Road	John W.	6/28/2006
I'm a third of the way through a more careful second reading, making a list of things to look up. 1:17 is on my list. I don't have my King James here. What happens in 1:16 that ends with Jesus' speech, I wonder? I don't buy the gulf coast, spanish coin or not. The ship capsized could have been heading toward Savannah or Charleston just as easily as the Florida coast. I said earlier I had them in S. Carolina, but Rock City (right outside Lookout Mt.) points them to Georgia. I don't remember well, but I thought they discussed sticking to state roads? I was also struck by how cold the water was as he explored the ship. Not sure what that means or why it's relevant to location yet. I'm leaning more and more toward some nuclear event. It's always idle speculation regarding a novel's creation, but we know, as y'all point out, that M. has stuff in the pipeline. I wonder if this novel's genesis might have been closer to the cold war--it's not like these doomsday nuclear scenarios weren't running rampant. It's also interesting that he dials his father's number from a gas station (doesn't punch numbers). After the father sees the explosions, he rushes in to fill the bathtub. Before bottled water was readily available, we used to do this when hurricanes were coming in. It allowed us to have fresh water if all else failed or if the sewers overflowed, but we also only thought of doing it because we were reminded as natural disaster loomed. Any other ideas why he fills the tub? The wife has no idea why he's doing it which leads me to speculate that whatever has happened is a surprise? Was this some nuclear disaster drill? As I'm reading the second time, I can't help but wonder why the father is so uninterested in joining others. We know there are communes (with barricades) and to my understanding these are some of the good guys. So why does he insist on the coast? The father, I think, knows he is going to die (the bloody cough). I'll posit, just for grins, that he is telling the boy a story and that the story, the memories he's trying to implant are more important than anything else. They visit his childhood home, he tells stories from the past as they travel, he tells the boy (more than once I think) that what goes in his head will stay there. When they get to the beach, doesn't he have a memory of having been there? This is supposed to be the end for them both but he can't do it. By the way, I love any novel that uses the word tokus.

First Look at The Road	timkjazz	6/28/2006
John W, Rev. 1:16 'He had in His right hand seven stars, out of His mouth went a sharp two-edged sword, and His countenance was like the sun shining in its strength.' With the light of nucleur explosions like the sun, seems appropriate.

First Look at The Road	Em Nosta	6/28/2006
At this point I have to ask why you all don't just post the whole novel and be done with it. It is one thing to ask that no one post passages from the novel - it is a transparent technicality to paraphrase and tell all in your own words. I know, don't read if you don't want to know, see my earlier willpower post. There's nothing else going on on this forum except this and baseball, yecchh..

First Look at The Road	MFleeger	6/28/2006
John Speaking of words, what about a novel that would so lovingly develop a motif considering the eventual extinction of language and at the same time employ the word "crozzled"? And if we're getting all numerological, I googled playing card divination to check for significance of 2 of clubs, their sole missing card. "Bad luck. Being let down by those around. Opposition from friends and family. Do not count on others." This is meaning of the card. I don't know what it means for it to be missing. I thought it was strange that the Father knew he would find another arrowhead. I grew up in the south, (rural North Floria, summers in South Alabama). Walked turned fields after rain, kept eyes peeled. I'm not trying to come off like an artifacts hunter but it's just my personal experience that arrowheads are not a dime a dozen. But it was interesting how often it came up what the father knew and what he didn't. Like when he knew about the flare gun. Or knew a house would be empty. Or stopped over the bunker. The other side of that coin might be that he was always wrong about the map. Or finds himself in country where he no longer knows the rivers or towns. Then again the boy was intuitive. At least twice his dreams foretelling events, if I'm not mistaken. During my second read through I tried to see a pattern or logic to his fear of locations, tried to see if his intuition was guiding him away from danger, but realized he was indiscriminately afraid of houses. Curiously, he wasn't afraid of the train.

First Look at The Road	jack kelly	6/28/2006
MFleeger: The father does have good instincts and that may be why he is still alive. Or perhaps his choices reflect good luck.

First Look at The Road	wesmorgan	6/28/2006
Atlanta--give me a break! Can we agree that the man and boy went to Knoxville early on to visit the father's (and Cormac's) boyhood home after passing over the high concrete (Henley Street) bridge under which the fictional ragpicker once lived? I can trace the route back further if necessary. If so, let's look at where they went after leaving the home on Martin Mill Pike. First they head to the foothills of the eastern mountains (Smoky Mountains) to a resort town (Gatlinburg, TN, the starting place for Suttree's walk in the woods). They then take the road south (US-441) toward the summit, the pass, the gap (Newfound Gap at 5048-feet, where Cormac might well have stood with his father) and the parking lot there (where Sut and Joyce parked and watched the madmen skiing). Then they go down the southfacing slope and on to a deep gorge (Cullasaja Gorge) and then to an 80-foot waterfall (Dry Falls). They then go EAST to a broad piedmont plain. This ain't the way to Atlanta! If one wanted to travel from Knoxville to Atlanta, one would take either the I-40/I-75 route via Chattanooga or the older US-129/US-411 rural route. One sure wouldn't go through the Smokies especially in winter. Keeping the fighting tradition alive, Wes edit

First Look at The Road	Rick Wallach	6/28/2006
Oh for pity's sake Wes - don't just leave us here! Then where do you think they go? And if not Atlanta, what large city of corpses and confusion is it that they pass trough? And how does that tie into the father's desire to go to the south and avoid the winter?

First Look at The Road	blackhiller	6/28/2006
Wes and gang, Good stuff above. Like John, I'm about 1/3 through a second reading now. They're on state roads, not Interstates, but see one of the latter below. I think I'm just about sold on the nuclear cause now too, but still puzzled by other elements of the descriptions regarding the destruction that seem to make it problematic. But the father and the mother hear several loud concussions. And thematically and even intertextually, I think the nuclear aspect works best after pondering it further. John, Totally with you on the Gulf Coast--no way whatsoever. And the Spaniards did wander above Florida a good ways as I recall, well into Georgia at least. Even gold has lost its value. Leave it to Wes (I've been waiting for this stuff, Morgan!) to straighten us out geographically. Your argument is pretty convincing. The father is doing the dad thing indeed, taking his son back to old haunts, as my 10 year old calls them. Thus when he thinks they're far enough, it's heading for the coast. They also seem to go through the cities much quicker than one could traipse Atlanta. And Rick, I think they're far _enough_ South for him now, once out of the mountains. But hell, Dr. Wes has the advantage of a Knoxville address. I had that house in Knoxville. too, and I think so did Rick and Chip, but I guess we all goofed from there. And Wes, I think the fishing trip on the lake with the uncle is in Rhode Island, since hurricane damage is mentioned and since birches and firs are all around. What say ye? Do they go through Asheville, then, as one of the cities, perhaps (but off I-40)? Apt name, of course. One clarification on one of my earlier posts: the father and son exhibit _little_ southern diction, but at least one other character speaks hill rat.

First Look at The Road	Clement	6/28/2006
I have not read the book. But I remember when I first heard about the Road I was absolutely floored that McCarthy would write a novel set in the future. Reading what you guys have to say about the book, I had forgotten this, as it somehow seemed right that McCarthy would tackle this subject. Yet I still find myself wondering. A forty odd year career during which (excepting Cities of the Plains ending, which also threw me for a loop) he could not bring himself to plop his characters down in anything later than the early eighties. A friend of mine told me that he heard James Ellroy say in an interview that he couldn't set a novel in a time period later than the seventies. I don't know if that is true or not, but I always had that sense about McCarthy. Interesting he should jump to the future to destroy civilisation, but somehow fitting. "Pray that your flight not be in winter or on the sabbath, for at that time there will be great tribulation, such as has not been since the beginning of the world until now, nor ever will be." Matthew 24:21-22 "As he was sitting on the Mount of Olives, the disciples approached him privately and said, "Tell us, when will this happen, and what sign will there be of your coming, and of the end of the age?" Jesus said to them in reply, "See that no one deceives you. For many will come in my name, saying, 'I am the Messiah,' and they will deceive many. You will hear of wars and reports of wars; see that you are not alarmed, for these things must happen, but it will not yet be the end. Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom, there will be famines and earthquakes from place to place. All these are the beginning of the labor pains." Surely this last has great resonance with what you fellows have reported of the novel.

First Look at The Road	jack kelly	6/28/2006
On my way home from work tonight on the MBTA Orange Line as I spied homeless people pushing themselves along and one poor, deathly ill person wearing a face mask to protect her immune system, I realized that although all this talk about where the father and son are walking is fascinating, I think the more interesting thing that is not being discussed so much yet is what is going on inside of them and the people they encounter. I could be wrong but I think, as I stated above, that the geographic specifics and the exact cause of this holocaust are secondary to the internal battles that are being waged. And if you think the scenario that is depicted is particularly futuristic or even fantastic, take a closer look at the world in which we currently walk. We are not that far at all.

First Look at The Road	wesmorgan	6/28/2006
Rick: "Beyond here there be dragons." Later clues seem more infrequent, generic and obscure. But I will work on it. Wes edit

First Look at The Road	John W.	6/28/2006
Thanks, Wes. I'm curious to see where you place them. I just read the piedmont plain section and was about to go look it up. Maybe I'll go back to my original South Carolina after reading your post. I'm going to posit that this is the least regional of McCarthy's novels. While there is some "hill rat" (I love that term), I do not hear these characters as southern characters. The narrative voice, if there is even one, is itself almost non-regional. This adds another element to the ash covered world--regional distinctions don't matter when the big bombs fall. But that can't be the only reason. I don't mean to imply that the novel has no feel, but the characters aren't distinctly southern. Storytelling--I may have misread this, but I hear the father contradicting the dreamer in the The Crossing. Dreams do play a huge role in this novel, but their validity as stories seems different. Anyone have anyone more intelligent to say. Someone earlier mentioned the boy's dreams. Anything else to note? timkjazz: thanks. I've got to get my bible out later and do some exploring. MFleeger--I'm making a list of words I need to get into the OED for. What about gryke? The shopping cart--I'm not sure what to make of any of the "technology." The flare gun jumps out at me. What interested me about the guns is how good a shot the father is with both the pistol and the flare gun. Someone who knows more about this than me--what's up with the wooden bullets? Someone--why is he filling the bathtub?

First Look at The Road	jack kelly	6/28/2006
John: I think the wooden bullets are simply slugs to make people think he has more ammo that he has.

First Look at The Road	MFleeger	6/28/2006
My Bible is in Florida. Anybody want to flesh out Elijah, the famine times prophet fed by crows, right? "What's wrong with Ely?" Especially why he might have been compared to Buddha/buddhist? I get the character's buddhist attitudes. I was just wondering is there anything in the Bible that might earn such a comparison with Elijah. John, I agree with you concerning the strange sensation that regionality has been leeched out of the characters we observe for the most part. Not only do I get the feeling that McCarthy intended to limit his pallet so that speech and character might be as raw and colorless as the landscape. But also this relative lack of regional color fits nicely with the theme that everything associated with civilization is passing away very quickly so that something inanimate such as residential architecture can tell you far more about where you are than a person's voice or vocabulary. Concerning the wooden bullets, was anyone else reminded of the "false specie" theme in Blood Meridian?

First Look at The Road	Rick Wallach	6/29/2006
Wes: Thanks. Based on concrete input like this, I now think they pretty much have to come out somewhere along the southern South Carolina or Georgia coast. I doubt if they head for the Hatteras area since that adds hundreds of extra miles to their professed southward inclinations, and I suppose it would also account for a sailboat full of Spanish literature coming up from Florida. Perhaps the duo is counting on the Gulf Stream to warm things - assuming that its character wouldn't be fundamentally changed by the nuclear winter anyway, since it's a shallow conveyor current for north equatorial warm water. Jack: I think you're dead on aabout the metaphorical nature of the apocalypse in this novel, and the proximity to the state of poverty and despair in which so many of the current victims of capitalist civilization already live. Our current tolerance of such conditions in our midst isn't really all that far reoved from the disregard of humanity and prevails in the novel. It's a world where the predilictions of Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh have triumphed in all of their reprehensible implications.

First Look at The Road	blackhiller	6/29/2006
The overall loss of the regional and all may be a reflection of the monoculture, which in numerous ways jives nicely with Jack's comments on the shopping carts and their importance. Greg can correct me on this (I'm wondering if he may have been flooded out there in NJ?) if I'm wrong, but doesn't the father's shooting position indicate he's well trained in firearms? And all of the various things he knows and thinks of, though he may be a bit rusty after the years of layoff: was he, ala Chigurh and Wells, possibly a spook of some sort? A cop? The hill rat (who does speak in the southern idiom, unlike the father who doesn't though raised there) wonders if he's a doctor. I think he's McGyver (for any of the literal-minded, it's just a joke). Ely for me recalls prophet_s_: Elijah, yes, but moreso Eli, the old and blind prophet who raises and trains Samuel. Elijah's not blind. Perhaps the name could indicate that this is someone the son should listen to. Actually, though, it's just Mac commenting on football: he prophetically (in the predictive sense) killed off Carson (Palmer, my main man as a Bengals fan), has Ely = Eli Manning as blind here for his betrayal by choosing Ole Miss, but has yet to even mention his own main guy, UT's own grad, Peyton, who is present by implication. (Again for the literal-minded, I'm being satiric this time, and self-effacing.)

First Look at The Road	Rick Wallach	6/29/2006
Blackhiller: At this time of year, you shouldn't be self-effacing. You should be applying sun block. Hooo haaaa heee heee hoooo hahahaha..... Anyway, don't tease Greg. If he hasn't got the book, how does he know what the father's shooting skills imply? Now if Greg were really the intelligence expert he claims to be, he would have a copy by now via the simplest of expedients. It only calls for a very little bit of situational analysis. Let's see if a guy who refuses to turn on his email link can guess what that implies. But Greg, what would account for mega-hurricanes and monster storms lashing the southeast coast? Hurricanes are vents for pent-up heat energy in the summer oceans, and in a nuclear winter there would be far less thermal energy reaching the oceans in the first place. I even question whether the Gulf Stream, which is driven by solar heating of the surface waters of the tropical Caribbean, and one of the primary sources for hurricanes to pick up heat and evaporated moisture along the eastern seaboard, would flow very strongly (if at all) after four or five years, minimum, of its solar energy source being interdicted by so much atomic debris in the atmosphere. It's possible that some other engine might drive these storms, but at this point I can't imagine what that might be with global temperatures so sharply reduced.

First Look at The Road	John W.	6/29/2006
I don't think he is really going south to survive. While he clearly wants to live and he keeps telling the boy the south is warmer, in this case it simply means no snow. The beach is pretty darn cold still. Hurricanes, pounding surf--those things don't really matter to the father at this point. The more I read this second time, the bleaker this novel gets. I'm not even sure I really see all that much hope here. So the boy survives--what will he survive on? There must be a limit to the amount of canned goods and dried up apples left after five or 6 years. Man can not live upon morels alone. There are no animals, no bugs (sorry Greg), and no sign of underwater life. At some point, the only protein left is the guy standing next to you. What kind of life has the father abandoned his son unto? I'm starting to think he fails in his most important moral choice. The wife recognizes that quality of life is more important than just life. So, why go south? To either fill the boy's head with pleasant thoughts from the past or to re-fill his own head with memories being deleted by the new horrors around him. The boy's dreams get increasingly scary and the father wants to create new memories--I'm reminded of the line in Blood Meridian ("The past that was differs little from that past that was not.") There is a similar line in this novel, although here it is a query (asked by the father, I think), not a claim. We haven't broached the subject yet, I don't think, but there are some heavy duty epistemological questions here as the father takes this trip down memory lane in a world that is slowly fading. In my reading, the physical world is getting worse, not better. The opening lines seem to imply as much. It's getting harder and harder to talk about this novel without quoting passages.

First Look at The Road	Rick Wallach	6/29/2006
Nobody has mentioned the brilliant A Canticle for Liebowitz yet. Tsk, tsk. The road rats all speak English and are seriously dishevelled. There's been no foreign invasion of any kind. One group in a coughing old diesel dump truck or garbage truck drives a herd of yoked prisoners ahead of it - probably the Bush justice department still refusing to grant any constitutional protections to its prisoners and having arbitrarily reclassified them from "enemy combatants" to "enemy rations." Why not? They proved with Jeffords that they're perfectly capable of eating their own.

First Look at The Road	jack kelly	6/29/2006
I was thinking this morning that the father may not have any reason why he is heading to the ocean, other than the desire to keep warm, stay alive and find the courage to do the thing that he cannot do. He is obviously wrestling with his own past and trying to make sense of a senseless world. I love the way he talks to God or about God in this novel. I found it stunning.

First Look at The Road	timkjazz	6/29/2006
You would think after a nucleur apocalypse it would be more along the lines of Beckett: 'God. That bastard. He doesn't exist.' There is always at least a subtext of God in McCarthy, glad to hear it continues in The Road. I would think conjecture as to why heading south is simple: Hope. Without hope there is only loss. Rick, if Greg does not wish to turn on his e-mail and get advice on how to get his own ARC of The Road, I do. I don't claim to have been in intelligence in the army, I was a computer programmer in Germany and Ft. Huachuca(home of the Intelligence School but not where I worked - I was CSE/CECOM) and would love an e-mail on how to get my very own copy so I don't have to wait for my friend and then have to tragically give it back when done reading it three times. End of world stuff - Dylan's 'A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall' though he denies it's about nucleur rain/fallout. To each one's own interpretation, I say. And 'Kalki' by Gore Vidal, end of world but not with war, with love(?). Or insanity. And have we all forgotten that forgettable "The Day After" with the great acting of Steve Guttenberg.

First Look at The Road	Rick Wallach	6/29/2006
Greg: I suppose that makes some sense - but for how long a period? If the difference between land and sea temperatures becomes "abrupt" following the onset of a nuclear winter, one would think that those temperatures - based on the difference in rate of cooling between land (rapid) and water (much slower) - would pretty much equalize after an extended period of nuclear winter had elapsed. Would they persist five years later? Hard to figure how. You're right about one thing - it was an important Supreme Court decision, but of course the Bush corporate statists on the court, including our old favorite the Black Fuhrer himself, constituted the entire minority. Political and civil rights in this country clearly depend on those Justices who were not put there by a Bush staying alive as long as possible. Anyway, you chose the wrong word. I'm not really bitter, but disgusted that in this country, of all places, it took a Supreme Court decision to force the coterie of scum in the White House to obey the basic principles of human and judicial decency enshrined in the Geneva Accords.

First Look at The Road	timkjazz	6/29/2006
Rick, Unfortunately I think we're stuck with Roberts and Alito for a long, long, long, long time. Remember when it appeared that Gore(who actually did win) won Florida and Sandra Day was quoted as saying she would have to wait to retire now, even though she was a relative moderate? The effects of this prez and his Supreme Court are here to stay for far too long. Another in a long litany of things this presidency will be remembered for and dissected by historians. I have to add that I believe the prez, vice-prez, a.g. Gonzalez and others will be able to get around any ruling anyone makes by somehow trying to fit it into a war powers arguement and, if the lame democrats can't win the House in the fall, be able to because they will still have total control of the government. Sad, but we've seen far too many examples of stepping on rights, the Constitution, whatever they feel they need to trample on to maintain power to the detriment of the vast majority. Boy, The Road couldn't be more topical, could it? Good choice, this one, by Cormac and Mr. Fisketjon.

First Look at The Road	John W.	6/29/2006
timkjazz, The order of publication does seem interesting. I know years back, I imagined McCarthy toiling away on a work for about 5 years then releasing his brilliance upon the world. We know now (and maybe many of you knew before) that McCarthy has works in the pipeline. To me, this changes my sense of his work habits quite a bit. Understand, I'm not being critical. I'm interested because I like to know how great artists create. So, if we trace McCarthy's career, do any of you see patterns or topical relevance for the other novels? Blood Meridian seems, for some, commentary on the Reagan era and the recent NCFOM fits with the ever dangerous border. How does the Sunset Limited fit? Or does it? Does anyone see a real pattern to the release of these novels and play? Anyone want to try and speculate if these are purely artistic decisions (ala McCarthy is polishing works as he desires) or are there some marketing issues. We've got drugs and apocolypse--what the hell is coming next? If there is ever a biography of McCarthy, I suspect creating a timeline of his work habits will be tough. Chip, Early on, you put screenplay in ( ). Do you think this script started as a screenplay? I don't. This lacks that same narrative distinction that NCFOM or COTP does. In fact, I find the novel stronger because it is not an adapted screenplay. (If someone tells me it was a screenplay, then I retract me previous sentence.)

First Look at The Road	timkjazz	6/29/2006
Greg, That is what makes this the great country it is, the ability to disagree, argue vociferously on your belief system and in the end shake hands and understand there will be no repercussions because my beliefs differ from yours or the people in power at the moment. The problem now arises because certain things we have held sacred have been secretly and not so secretly whittled away in the name of power through fear. The events of 9/11 can not be marginalized in any way, as far as I am concerned, we should have swept into Afghanistan with 200,000 troops, but to use it to invade Iraq because they had wanted to since the day the prez and crew took office, in some reasoning we probably won't know fully for years to come, is just wrong. And then to use the threat of terrorism to erode civil liberties this country was founded on? By all means protect this country with all we have without stepping all over me and my rights. I'm sure there are plenty of geniuses in this government that could figure out ways to combat the threat of terrorism without dismissing the Constitution. But that's hard and requires thought and planning. The easy way isn't always the right way. And that ends my rant, for today. As far as being a rat, I would never pass judgement on another person, let alone someone I do not know. We disagree, that's all, nothing more. Who knows the deep reservoir of goodness inside a man or woman when faced with extreme circumstances. Oskar Schindler, Raoul Wallenberg, the soldier that brought Abu Gharaib to light. Happens every day somewhere. Unfortunately there never seems to be a shortage of rats in the world. Ask the starving people of Africa, or the sufferers of AIDS there that can't get enough medicine despite the best efforts of Bill Gates, Bono, George Bush(yes, he does some admirable things too, pouring money into places that truly need it like the Tsunami fund, among others), now Warren Buffet, because of corrupt governments. In this world good sometimes get thwarted despite best efforts but it doesn't mean you quit trying. JohnW. I agree, the timeline of some publications is very interesting. Thankfully Cormac does not suffer from writer's block like J. D. Salinger or Harper Lee or Ralph Ellison, so, depending on the climate, we have some interesting guessing games on what type of book may come out in the coming years. Does anyone know if he's still creating new works or is he devoting his time to family and scientists? For fans of end of world books, try Swan Song by Robert R. McCammon if you liked The Stand by Stephen King, same vein, great horror novel.

First Look at The Road	blackhiller	6/29/2006
Fine stuff, gang. Fine stuff. Greg, My apologies--of course you don't know what I mean by the shooting position yet. More Road obsession stealing from my active mind, no taunt intended, though if it were Rick it would have been, thus his thinking that way. You will have one shortly, though, shortly, won't you? At least that seems to be the drift, and I hope so. It's a new Ice Age a-comin, I believe, so survival is part of the motivation, especially given the father's ponderings about the son, his exhortations to the son, etc. So much "This is my son in whom I'm well pleased" here. . . . Hope, absolutely, and that apparently in the Paulinian sense of the essence of things unseen, etc. The morels are a subtle sign of hope, including hope for other types of life, though apparently green is everywhere vanished due to insufficient sunlight. There may well be more regenerations of edibles, depending on types. Moreover, up the same pike, the movement back farther south for life is a movement toward the regions where humankind began, or at least their hemispheric equivalent. John, I'm behind you some now on that second reading, only halfway, but I go back to my earlier general claim that the two endings, those last 2 paragraphs, are so very counter to the rest of the novel--much like _Plains_ and _NCFOM_ and thus the whole trilogy--that they wrench a person just like so many of McCarthy's sudden incidents of violence and the like, only here in the Comic (again, as in Comedy, not comedy). And I keep forgetting: I love birds, but as a flyfisher, I love trout too, and often combine the pleasures of watching birds while flyfishing: here, water ouzels (Muir's dippers, and my little grey tooting favorites), tanagers, grosbeaks, kingfishers, mallards, and more. On that fishing theme further: this novel resonates a great deal with Hemingway's "Big Two-Hearted River," both halves. The trout, holding. The burnt out landscape around Seney (. The importance of ritualized actions, including all sorts of campcraft and creative enterprises. The consequent healings of primitivistic acts. Perhaps military backgrounds. A sort of new yet simultaneously anti- Eden, beginnings amid the rubble of "sin's" effects. The wealth of implied deep psychological matters someone mentioned a few entries above. The idea that suffering may have meaning(s), that it probably authenticates and spiritualizes the human. Another text that offers some resonance: Percy's _Love among [or is it "in"?] the Ruins_. And does McCarthy here go beyond "optical democracy" and the like (something I've long thought Phillips takes too far)? Does this text indicate a priviliged place for humanity despite its penchant for ruination? (I'm making no claims here, just asking real questions.) Finally, a possible wrench to throw into Wes's facts (though I still think I'm convinced by Wes): Given that McCarthy fictionalizes places at times, such as the alligator too far north in _OD_ and the numerous topographical and other changes that Hodge notes in his Harper's piece, might he not move these?

First Look at The Road	Rick Wallach	6/29/2006
Timk: There's disagreement and there's disagreement. But it's not just "disagreement" when someone's idea of "traitor" broadens to include a genuine patriot whose offense is to expose yet another example of this government's contempt for rule of law, or a writer whose crime was to point out that all the hysterical name-calling and attributions of motives to the 9/11 hijackers was missing the point of the attack and misapprehending the mindset of the attackers (despite the fact that that very same hysterical reaction led us right down the primrose path into our Iraq catastrophe). Now it's just jingoistic, spiteful, and not a little paranoid, to believe that our security can be served by rigged, kangaroo military courts in the name of something - though what that something is eludes me. I can't even call it survival, since nothing that survives would even remotely resemble the ideals upon which this country was founded and up to which it seems now to have so much difficulty living; it would look a lot more like the very regime we supposedly set out to dismantle on the grounds of its own injustices. It's only the Bill Kellers and Susan Sontags of this country that stand between us and a fate more closely resembling that of the average Iraqi before our aggression against that wretched and oft-brutalized nation, not the self-described superpatriots with their fit-all cry of "traitor" for anyone who disagrees with them. Frankly, it seems to me that for every day Bush and his criminal gang remain in office, it becomes at least as important that we are thwarted in Iraq as decisively as we must win in Afghanistan. We seem not to have learned the lesson of our defeat in Vietnam worth a damn; but then, Bush wasn't there to learn it anyway (>hic! urrrppp! snort!<). Tragically, it looks more and more like we have made it necessary to learn it from Iraq all over again. I do think the timing of this work is interesting, but I suspect that interest is a product of coincidence rather than deliberate design. On the other hand, if I'm an editor or author of an apocalyptic novel and I see a marketplace full of customers paranoid about dirty bombs, gas attacks and suicide vests in the subways, would my decision publish that novel be either partisan, cynical or exploitive? Not necessarily. It's just good business, and psychologically, it's also the most receptive moment for the work.

First Look at The Road	blackhiller	6/29/2006
Damnable 92 in the shade here in SD, with high humidity for us. But I'm back now, a glass of cold Red Hook IPA coolin' me down before I go take my bike ride up Spearfish Canyon. . . . and me esposa, a former bartender, will be mixing some Sangria for later. As someone said above, the purpose of the wooden bullets is clear--to make the handgun look fully loaded (they're carved and colored grey). There's nada to fire them: no urine-laced guano, etc. Three, then mysteriously two, then explicably one, live round left, thus the 5 wooden nickels. I'm going to wait on the father's firing position, Greg, until you've been able to read it, because I feel I'd pretty much have to quote the passage, and that isn't kosher until October, of course. I think it would be easy to inadvertently misrepresent otherwise. JVH, one of my favorite Canucks, are ye out there? Martz, me boy, still awaitin' ye. Dianne? Nelluva gal? Bill? Peter? And Chip, ye've vanished. Linda too. Stever Frye? Colonel Campbell? Maybe Mr. Stephen Imwalle? Dick Schein? Stever Tatum? Markster Busby? Meredith? Old Nick Adams? Stacey? Everbuddy I've left out? Wherefore art thou all, amigos mio? Of course, I don't know whose pseudonyms are whose anymore, or beyond a certain level who has an advance copy. . . . Rick, Howsabout "self-deprecating," then?

First Look at The Road	timkjazz	6/29/2006
Greg, Not saying Cormac and/or Gary have any agenda, I dont know. It could simply be sound business sense because look what discussion is already happening. For all we know, he may have written this in the Prez Ron era and the evil empire before the fall of the wall and all that stuff. But with countries like India and Pakistan now having nukes and possibly Korea, I think it is very topical, especially with Khan passing nuke secrets to who knows. The more countries that have nukes, well, you can guess the rest. We know terrorists want it, if one goes off somewhere it could lead to total disaster, India using them on Pakistan then China and/or Russia getting involved in some way and all hell breaks loose, let alone one going off in, say, Israel or Saudi Arabia. And the Iraq war has created more enemies to this country then ever. After 9/11 almost everyone in the world was on our side. Can that be said now? Is the world truly a safer place since then? How many terrorists were in Iraq before we invaded? The Iraq war has brought us closer to the brink of total stupidity. I think a novel about a nuke event makes one think about all the craziness out there. I truly don't believe they have an agenda, I think they have good publishing sense that fits around what he has ready to publish. I kind of figured tongue in cheek. Maintaining power to the detriment of others means many things. One for example is the tax breaks for rich people while we are in the middle of an incredibly expensive and stupid war while less people have health insurance now, the number of people in poverty increases and our government doesn't even address it, they bring up crap like gay marriage to talk about. You know the arguements. The policies of this administration are well known. Everyone that disagrees is a traitor or someone that's soft on the war or something equally simplistic. Let's eliminate social security so financial companies can make a killing. Can't get info from someone, torture them. Or send them to a country that will torture them. On and on and on. We only listen in on calls outgoing to other countries. Well, that's not entirely true, after all. When does it get to the point where enough is enough? Rick, I agree wholeheartedly. Are we so naive to think terrorists didn't know the government was doing everything it could to track them and their money with everything they could use at their disposal? We should do everything we can to protect this country, as long as proper measures are taken that have been set in place for reasons of citizen rights protection. The people that make the traitor comments are passing over all the underhanded things this group has already done. How about torture is okay in certain situations. Really? I don't remember that from history class. Or listening in on phone conversations without using proper channels in our government to clear this practice. Or disenfranchising thousands of minority voters in Florida and Ohio during the last election. That was a real good one. They continue to just bypass all the checks and balances that have been there for years and years because they feel they are above the Constitution. It's almost like living through a twisted Dr. Strangelove movie that encompasses the entire government not just the military. Disagreement is disagreement but I think my second sentence above shows that this government has gone beyond the pale in my eyes. But, I also say that anyone should be able to say they are in total agreement with this administration, however wrong they would be. That was my maybe not too clear point from above. We have already seen the levels to which this administration and their ilk will stoop to when trying to get what they want. Max Cleland. Swift Boats, anyone. John Murtha, called out on the House floor months ago. So, don't think I am foisting a totally liberal arguement out there Rick, if this was happening in some other country we would be sitting back saying our government should help the poor citizens of that country as their rights get trampled on. It is a very surreal place we are in right now, no doubt about it. I am not a happy camper, believe me. But I believe change is in the air for November. I hope. Out for today, be back in discussion tomorrow. Dinner beckons and so does Superman afterwards.

First Look at The Road	cletusinfurs	6/29/2006
hee hee...

First Look at The Road	Clement	6/29/2006
It's not surprising that the subject should seem dated to you. I remember handing in a post-nuclear war short story to a creative writing professor some 25 years ago. He read the first page with me standing there and told me to write another story. "No post-acocalpytic stories period," is what I think he said. "It's been done to death." If The Road is pre-Border trilogy, I've no doubt that Fisketjohn would have done everything in his persuasive power to keep it from seeing the light of day. Things change however, and most folks under 30 are likely not to have had the experience of pondering the lint in the navel of the world's mortality. Oh, they see movies, read books etc, but they likely never FELT it. Smallpox seems dated to me too, until AIDS and Ebola and H5N1 came along.

First Look at The Road	Rick Wallach	6/29/2006
Timkjazz: Boy, you're supposing a lot for November - like, that the Democrats will actually grow a spine and stake out an alternative position and clearly enunciate and defend it? When even Dianne Feinstein and a dozen other Democrats vote to support that imbecilic anti-flag-burning amendment, what are we supposed to think? I think there are millions of Americans who don't like what's going on but when they look at the Democrats, with their whinging, whining, double-talking and shapeshifting, they will stay home or hold their noses and vote Republican anyway. Did you notice how the party screwed Paul Hackett out of a shot at the senatorial race in Ohio after he ran so powerfully in an overwhelmingly Republican community? Now why would they do that? Because they don't want a candidate who will tell the truth and speak his mind; they'd rather field a wobegone, lackluster good ole boy party hack even if he loses. What is the Democratic consensus on anyting other than that they hate Bush and the Republicans? Hell, I don't even know. I get Democratic fundraising calls every few weeks now, based on long past participation and contributions. I tell them to go away and come back when they find their balls.

First Look at The Road	Clement	6/29/2006
Rick, you nailed it on the head. The Democrats will pick up some seats in November, but it will not change one thing. Then what? A Hillary Clinton nomination? No thanks. What Hillary do I get? Joe Lieberman? Join the the GOP already. Biden's cantankerousness doesn't hide the fact that he ain't saying much of anything different than Bush, he just packages it attractively. I had hopes for Bill Richardson, but I listened to his inane droning on imigration and he reminded me of that guy on Saturday Night Live - Horation something. I'm sitting out this year and '08. Quite frankly, the American people want their civil liberties abridged - who am I too stand in their way?

First Look at The Road	jack kelly	6/29/2006
Hey Rick: That guy from Massachusetts did a pretty good job spelling out exactly what he stood for in the last election, but nobody gave a damn. In fact, he kicked George W's butt in all three of the debates, and nobody seemed to give a damn about that either. Anybody remember the debates ? People still voted against their own self interest all over this once fine nation of ours and look where it got them. Their sons are being slaughtered half a world away, they can't afford to fill up thier own gas tanks and everybody is running around scared and full of hate. Like I said above, we're not that far from the world of The Road.

First Look at The Road	Clement	6/29/2006
I remember the debates. I watched them on TV and read the transcripts on the internets. Kerry did indeed kick his butt. Mr. Bush however, had the benefit of four years of lowered expectations. Kind of like expecting a Special Olympian to beat a juiced up Ben Johnson in the hundred meters. Guess who the sentimental favorite will always be. We are not that far from the world of The Road, but other parts of the world are closer....certain parts of Iraq, Afghanistan, and latterly the Gaza strip. It was fine to hear Secretary Rice implore Israel to use restraint even as Mr. Bush says "We support Israel." Of course we do. Lest anybody forget it, the Palestineans won't. Them are US Apaches those fellows are using over there. Kidnap a soldier? Take out a couple of bridges, power for 700,000 of the regions poorest, and arrest the democratically elected officials you reckon you don't like. Americans can fool themselves, but they aren't fooling anybody else. There are dividends aplenty that will be paid out from these loci for years to come.

First Look at The Road	Rick Wallach	6/29/2006
I beg to differ on Kerry; I was singularly unimpressed. I can't recall anything substantial about Iraq, any policy statement about social security, health care or anything else - just a lot of pious restatements of "principles" and nothing in the way of real programs and strategies. He played dignified silence to a campaign of calumny that made him look like a wimp. And don't tell me that there wasn't anybody on his staff who couldn't take his wife aside and point out that she wasn't helping matters by strutting around like some patrician android with a cosmetician from a funeral parlor (same one who works on Katherine Harris, perhaps) and a plastic headpiece. You also have wonder whether Kerry bothered to listen to his VP nominee before he selected him; I remember how my jaw dropped the first time Mr. Telegenic opened his mouth at the DNC and started squeaking his address like Feivel the mouse from An American Tail. As far as the Palestinians, whereas I have excoriated Israeli stupidity, arrogance and brutality here on a regular basis, I must also demur that, as I said earlier in this thread, cockaroaches play a more constructive role in the ecosystem than the Palestinians do in the world political order. If there is a more useless, mindlessly violent (even toward themselves), self-pitying, self-subverting, self-destructive society on this planet, I haven't seen it yet. I would be hard pressed to name any pair of adversaries who so lushly deserve each other - except maybe for Mia Farrow and Woody Allen. You're right about one thing in spades, though: both parties have been ripe for exploitation by the slimers at Chez Bush.

First Look at The Road	Francois	6/29/2006
As a French person writing from Japan where I work (research institute, oops), some contradiction seems to emerge between the various comments on McCarthy's new work, the actual predicament of American politics (let's face it, French policy and power games in Africa are a mess of telluric magnitude...not to mention the fact that the Pompadour, high-flyin' actual Prime Minister never got elected at any level) and the author's own conservative stance (which in many ways I would share). Prophets of destruction collide with people like the elderly sheriff and, as far as political convictions and issues are concerned, McCarthy's attitude reminds me of Bellow's Mister Sammler's Planet main character. And they composed a crowd of whom Some were right good, and many nigh the best... That dazed and puzzled 'twixt the gleam and gloom Mechanically, I followed with the rest. As for Rick Wallach's comments on Hiroshima, they express an attitude that is not the one actually held in Japan. Hiroshima (more than Nagasaki, where the contents of the exhibition are more critical, albeit the fact that the Japanese do not mention the word invasion war in the Japanese captions whereas it is mention in the English ones...) has been used as a symbol of Japan's primeval innocence and turned former agressors into mild and over-criticized victims. Oe, even unintentionally, carries on that stance. Endo Shusaku is also a very good read for that (especially his novel called Chinmoku -Silence- that relates in many ways with McCarthy's worldview). As for the absence of any clergymen, I still wonder if, those men in black, do not appear among many commentators in the forum clad in their Southern Protestant livery (Wise Blood and Night of the Hunter come to mind). Apocalyptic scenarios, comments on Catholic rituals in The Crossing and elsewhere, would, on the contrary, incite me to reconsider the relevance of the Roman Catholic Church to explain some of Cormac McCarthy's writings (Spanish is the Catholic tongue one might say). Anyway, since I read Blood Meridian for the first time back in 1987 (a present by a former colleague at the Sorbonne... he didn't know), McCarthy's novels took me across America in a Guthriesque fashion to visit all the places (almost) appearing in the novels. It has indeed been The Road to me. Thanks for these discussions anyway.

First Look at The Road	Rick Wallach	6/30/2006
Francois: I wasn't aware that I was expressing any attitude about Hiroshima in particular; if I recall I was more interested here in raising the issue of the iconography of the stopped clocks and the surprising rapidity with which the blast zones were repopulated. Having spent time in both of the atomic cities I do agree that there is a difference of attitude and focus between the two of them, but this isn't the place to get into that. There are substantial differences even between the chronicles of Oe and Nagai, Endo and Ibuse, ad infinitum. Might as well say that responses to the overwhelming horror of such events will be every bit as distinctive as the individuals who express them, whether they're chroniclers, novelists, dancers or off-duty postmen. I'm not Japanese and I have an historical sense of being on the receiving end of the act of brutality that initiated the war, not the one that concluded it, so I am at an immediate remove from whatever the Japanese reaction could be said to "average out" to be. However, the exhibits in the Nagasaki museum - especially the ones in the main rotunda that feature a series of films that systematically trace the expeditionary army's faked Nanking incident and massacres of Chinese civilians - are hardly indicative of a sense of "primal innocence" whether the Japanese narrative uses the word "war" or not. Several other chronological exhibits in the Hiroshima museum chronicle the brutal imposition of the so-called "Co-Prosperity Zone" which was the Tojo cabinet's facile term for colonial enslavement of east Asia, and the visuals are more than sufficiently graphic to make the point that there was nothing "innocent" about the Japanese path to disaster. Meanwhile, the route up the hill from the ground zero obelisk to the museum in Nagasaki features a monument and national apology to the Korean and Chinese slaves laborers who were dragged to Japan in order to die in the nuclear bombing. Both the museum exhibits and monuments represent courageous and soul-searching acts of expiation that I have waited in vain for this country to enact in the wake of Vietnam, so I'm not losing any sleep waiting for the current administration to apologize for our latest foray into barbarity. Both cities now go about their business quite apparently without being weighed down by the terrible memories and history. In Nagasaki, the tourist shop across the street from the peace park sells bottles of souvenir sake with the park's major sculpture on the label. Hiroshima people are more upset these days by the Toyo Carp's parsimonious payroll budget: when are we going to get some decent pitching? Coming from Miami, I can definitely relate to that.

First Look at The Road	Francois	6/30/2006
Rick, I had no intention to raise the difficult question of relations to and with the past in Japan in speaking about Nagasaki (one might as well had the Museum attending the church of the 36 martyrs as an example of a somewhat dated but very moving museology). The grotesquery of mannequins and dummies straight out of a cheap 70's grindhouse movie weaken considerably the impact of the Hiroshima memorial (living in Kyoto the thema-park syndrome is present under my very eyes). Yet, talking about apocalypse, and pitching (a quality deemed essential in Spanish flamenco), France has also been slow at the very least to admit her role in the Second World War or in colonial wars in Algeria and elsewhere -cobwebby minds do not run against the grain, especially among politicians. Still, however relevant actual considerations may seem when talking of a novel whose chronology belongs to an undefined (yet possible) future, I am not certain that they always enhance our appreciation of literary works. I have no clue as to what Cormac McCarthy would say about American politics, and coming from a country where "intellectuals" have a say at almost everything, his stick-to-your-guns and cultivate-your-craftsmanship approach is also very moving and pertinent to me. A famous exegete said that Scriptures (Albertus Magnus)grow with their readers and it is definitely the case when reading a major author. As for the Catholic background (remember the comments about the way Mexican people envision the Christian faith), your insights (those in scholarly publications are -as they should- conflicting) must be precious anyway. And, as some commentators seem to imply, is the new book about prophecy? In Hebrew, navi' "prophet" is synonymous with ro'eh "seer", khozey "visonary man", and, finally ish ha'elohim "Man of God". I have no intention of displaying any of the critical skills shown by the Woman of Endor, yet, one of the charms McCarthy's work have for me -beyond the style and all the obvious qualities people mention- is his classical conception of literature as the supreme necromantic art, based what the Italian humanists called a sacred conversation between the Living and the Dead. Just like Japanese poets used to read their ancestors from the continent, to the point of thinking that Chinese was not a foreign tongue. And we move back to the previous relations to the past.

First Look at The Road	Rick Wallach	6/30/2006
Francois: Aw, now you went and did it. I have nothing but naked envy for anyone who lives in Kyoto. Amusement parks aside - I guess you're referring to that very odd Ninja-movie park up by Kinkakuji - memorable to me mainly for the gigantic shaved-ice desserts in that replica samurai tavern on the property, or perhaps that new Nintendo museum / walk-through video game based on poetry cards in Arayashima at the south end of the garden of stone bodhisattvas, the one where the two or three most beautiful young women in Japan greet you as personal hostesses - it's just a wonderful city. The Konchi-in garden may be the most peaceful place I've ever spent an afternoon doing nothing at all in; hardly anyone knows it's there and it's not really on the usual tourist circuit. Almost directly across the street is a large privately owned garden whose name I have forgotten but which is open to visitors a couple of times a week - not sure if you know it; there's a tea house up on a cliff edge you approach through an tunnel in the rock and come out to a spectacular view across the garden to the north. And...and...Ashoka, the incredible Indian restaurant on the second floor at the south end of Terramachi market...about three blocks south of the little bakery that makes the fresh warm green tea custard tarts...arrrggghhh, but why am I doing this to myself? Ah but I digress - Kyoto does that to me. Point taken about the manniquens in the Hiroshima museum (I assume you mean the diorama of victims with their skin melted off). I also found the overkill on the Sadako Sasaki story a bit cloying. However in both cases perhaps we've gotten a bit too old and hardbitten. My youngest son was about eleven the first time he went through the museum and the mannequins really horrified him, and my fourteen year old daughter very much related to the Sadako story. If that's what it took to impress upon them the horror of what happened and could happen again in the unfortunate historical conjunction of a corrupt, ignorant jackass like Bush and a psychopath like Bin Laden or a religious fanatic like Ahmadinejad, I suppose that's fine with me. They can and surely will refine their tastes later, but every voice in opposition to a crackpot loose cannon like our current thug-in-chief is well found.

First Look at The Road	jeff shalek	6/30/2006
Last night I read the first 110 pages of the novel and will finish it before the end of the weekend. My first impression is that CM has written the greatest love story he has ever authored. The love between the Father and Son is more prolific and profound that any other relationship I have read in any of his books. Heretofore, love has always been a flawed relationship between man and women. You scholars out there, examine this. The love between father and son in this book is so much more powerful then the love between John Grady and Alejandro and/or Magdalena. In the midst of death, ashes, cannibalism, indeed living at a time I think of as a virtual walking purgatory leading to hell, there is the greatest, unwavering love between father and son that strengthens them, keeps them alive, and offers them each hope and reward and reason in a completely and utterly unreasonable situation. I am a very slow deliberate reader (sorry that is my legal training). 100 pages in a night is highly unusual for me. But it is the love (indeed the only people even remotely able to display any sign of love in the book) that makes me sit and wonder what will happen next. The horror, the gore, the anguish, the war the destruction, the cannibalism, is tangential to me. I never expected McCarthy to offer such a beautiful relationship. I am moved by this book. Perhaps the dedication to the son is not without reason.

First Look at The Road	Rick Wallach	6/30/2006
No indeed. It is very much a love story and thanks for insisting on that point. Dianne Luce pretty much came to the same conclusion about it and emailed me to that effect and I was hoping she would post sooner than she has to add that perspective to the discussion, and no doubt soon she will. Scholars have all sorts of problems with love, which is one of the things I love most about them. Thank the gods that lawyers don't.

First Look at The Road	blackhiller	6/30/2006
Is that a Jackson Browne reference there, Rick? On of my favorites among his tunes. "Waiting for World War 3 while Jesus slaves / To the mating cry of lawyers in love." That song has a lot of other lines that are apt to this book (I'm of course claiming no influence or awarenesses on this one). The father also obviously loves his wife as well, however she comes across to us readers. . . .

First Look at The Road	Rick Wallach	6/30/2006
Funny you should mention Jackson Browne in this context, considering that he was once arrested for beating the shit out of Darryl Hannah.

First Look at The Road	blackhiller	6/30/2006
Yes, unfortunately yes, though I intend no subtext above. But there are always subtexts, right? And contexts beyond the art. . . .

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