It’s been about four days since I finished The Road, and there’s something about the novel that makes it hard to write about it now that I’ve finished it. Perhaps it’s best described by Bookforum in the reviews at the beginning, “ Once opened, [it is] nearly impossible to put down; it is as if you must keep reading in order for the characters to stay alive…”. The only problem is, now that I’ve finished it, I almost feel guilty, for not being able to continue to watch over them, that I turned away at the wrong moment and now they’re lost.

I’ve loved McCarthy’s style since the first time I struggled through one of his novels (All the Pretty Horses – a book I at once recommend and discouraging you from bothering with. It’s beautiful like all his work, but a bit too cliched for how I know him now). And I will admit I had watched the film version of The Road (starring Viggo Mortenson) before I read the book. I know, I know, bad form, but it was a good film and I will tell you right now it did not ruin the book for me at all. But it was inevitable I would read the novel soon enough, and luckily a friend of mine took note of my heartache and got me the book as a sort of graduation gift. The irony of apocalyptic journey vs. journey out into the real world wasn’t lost on me, but mine is no where near as heartbreakingly beautiful and crushing.

And so I devoured the book in the kind of desperation that can only be understood by that Bookforum quote up above. The basic gist of the story is that the apocalypse has happened, somehow, in a way that isn’t quite explained and isn’t quite the point, and a man and a boy, a father and his son to be specific, are wandering this awful, awesome world in search of…..something. Anything, it seems. And throughout this, every moment that the man and boy went through cut me to the core. I was elated with them, broken with them, constantly trying to remain objective and failing. I couldn’t do it because McCarthy has always been a champion of pulling you into landscapes and he has done that better here than anywhere else. The world he paints in The Road is brutal but beautiful, and he has perfectly captured both a man who views it like a funeral and wake, and the boy who has known nothing else but to survive the desolation.“The color of it moved something in him long forgotten. Make a list. Recite a litany. Remember.” Together they must push through but to what purpose? To what end? I wanted to come out of this novel and be able to say I came to some great moral conclusion and engaged in a philosophical debate, and I tried and I was close, but in the end I was too caught up, I was in too much pain with them, I was too distracted by the odd moment of beauty and peace. I didn’t have time to question morals, and maybe that’s what McCarthy meant to prove. “Where men can’t live gods fare no better.”

McCarthy, through the man, has us treasure every moment and curse it at the same time. Every moment of beauty, of joy, stems from pain, reminds of grief. In the end there’s the debate of which is worth it? To lie and fashion fantasies that aren’t around and may never return or to force harsh realitiy constantly on such a young child? But the boy proves himself more mature than the man, or the reader in many ways. It is him, beacon of a future that no one quite believes in, to realize first the cold truths, to carry the burdens. “He could not construct for the child’s pleasure the world he’d lost without constructing the loss as well and he thought perhaps the child had known this better than he.”

Maybe this book is actually about growing up or raising kids, and about trying to shelter ourselves and our children. Or maybe it’s about surviving, and what that really means. Or maybe it’s just a novel about an apocalyptic future, and a man and a boy that find themselves there. It’s hard to describe it if you haven’t been there, because half the discussions I have with other people about the book involve us sitting and staring out with some melancholy that’s hard to place. But in the end, truly, all we can do is read what McCarthy gives us and trust him. As the boy tells his father, “’I always believe you.’ ‘I don’t think so.’ ‘Yes I do. I have to.’” All I can say to you is that you should read this book for yourself, because it is some of the most beautiful anguish you will even experience from a novel, and it may just change your life.