This post is authored by Dan Poppick, recent Kenyon Review Associate.–TM
Cormac McCarthy did not win the Nobel Prize in literature last week as some of us had hoped, and yet this seems to be a particularly apt moment to revisit The Road, which was published just over a year ago and considered by some to be McCarthy’s finest.
Several months ago a friend of mine called The Road “probably the most important book of the last seven years,” and at the time this seemed a little bit of a shame. I don’t usually find much solace in “important” books, as they are often the ones that I read out of rude obligation rather than actual desire; “importance” alone cannot stir the soul. I wondered what that word could mean in reference to art. Is it some sort of consensus? If this were the only criteria my friend certainly wouldn’t be alone, as the novel won this year’s Pulitzer Prize for fiction and has been deemed “one of the decade’s finest.” But that is wholly uncharitable to this novel, which is indeed quite moving.
And if we take a step back, this is a little odd. The Road is not beautiful like All the Pretty Horses or intricately eloquent like Blood Meridian. The prose in The Road is stark, the imagery is raw; in some ways, it is an ugly little book. And yet it resonates.
The novel is tremendous in its moral clarity, and this is what I think my friend meant when he called the book “important.” McCarthy renders the physical and spiritual landscape so plausible that one cannot but feel shaken. The two protagonists–the man and his son–struggle to do more than survive, to hold on to the flickering light of what it means to be a human being instead of merely an animal. (Consider the section in the abandoned library.) As such, The Road acts as a premeditative moral guide for a world that, at least during the reading, feels frighteningly plausible–as if it could actually save someone’s soul in the event that this imagined world became reality.
Whether the Swedes will recognize McCarthy in the future remains to be seen–but for now, being moved by The Road seems worthwhile justification for its “importance.” No matter what that word actually means.