This fall marks 20 years since the publication of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. Set in a post-apocalyptic future where some unspecified catastrophe has turned much of the world to ash, the novel follows a father and son on their harrowing journey through what’s left of the American southeast in search of food and safety.
When a friend who works at a local parish selected The Road for their summer book club, I felt the same awe and amusement I had felt two Decembers ago, when the associate pastor at my home church did a series of homilies on how Advent is meant to prepare us for Jesus’ Second Coming as well as the remembrance of his first. The tagline that winter, in my mind anyway, had been: Let’s make this Advent our most apocalyptic yet!
So let the record show: I truly love that about the Catholic Church—her courage. She doesn’t shy away from even the most difficult or unpopular subjects. In fact, she rushes toward them. She goes, with the fearlessness and love of Mary beneath the cross, where many dare not tread, even in thought.
But was summertime apocalypse a different thing? The Road was one of three dystopian novels we were asked to read—maybe a bridge too far. Still, having participated in the book club before, I had come to appreciate the engaged, welcoming community I had found there. So a summer’s worth of dystopian fiction it was to be.
The Giver by Lois Lowry eased us into things. It’s short, with a small cast of characters and young-adult prose that makes for a quick read. That Hideous Strength by C. S. Lewis asked more of us. The novel consists of roughly 400 pages of genre-defying techno-bureaucratic terror and intrigue, combined with medieval myth, courtly romance and an intergalactic battle between the forces of good and evil. Scrunched into one sentence like that, it all sounds a bit daft. But the mashup of fantasy and satire meant there was something for everyone to love.
And then we came to The Road.
I had read the novel once before, not long after it came out in 2006. Two scenes involving cannibalism had scared the living daylights out of me then, and they remained unpleasantly vivid in my mind. “Just remember that the things you put into your head are there forever,” the father tells the boy at one point in the book. “You might want to think about that.” Useless guidance, it turned out, since neither the boy nor I had any way to opt out of viewing those scenes. But at least the second time around I could skip ahead several pages when I saw the cannibal parts coming.
Aside from those two scenes, the novel had not struck me as objectionable on first read. On a second read, nearly every part turned out to be a horrible part. I found the novel’s baseline atmosphere of unrelenting darkness—odd that I hadn’t noticed it in my 20s—unbearable.
At some point while reading, I began to thank my lucky stars that in real life the protagonists would have died a thousand times over from malnutrition, dehydration or hypothermia. Readers of Alfred, Lord Tennyson and Don DeLillo know that humankind’s age-old pipe dream of immortality is not all it’s cracked up to be. The Road cemented my gratitude for the mercies of a God who has taken away not death, but death’s sting. McCarthy, by contrast, by forcing his characters to subsist on seeds, dust and shivers for far longer than would be possible in the real world, sadistically restores the sting.
It wasn’t just the lack of food, warmth, and other good things in the novel that nettled me. It was the overabundance of bad things, too. Upon encountering what seemed like the 80th dead body floating in blackened water, I felt little more than impatience. It told me nothing that the first 79 corpses in wet soot had not. Trapped in the dimly lit world of The Road and increasingly resentful of the dark, my mind kept stubbornly looking for light. Some kind of hope. Some kind of knowledge—the sort of practical wisdom that German philosopher and cultural critic Walter Benjamin says it is the storyteller’s duty to provide—to help me steer my own fragile life more adeptly through the fraught world of contemporary America.
I’m not sure I found any.
If anything, I began to wonder if we had all been subjected to something rather sinister. Perhaps even the opposite of storytelling. Certainly the inverse of Philippians 4:8: “Whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is pleasing, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence and if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things.”
As an editor once emailed me after I submitted a negative review of a novel: “Aside from that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you like the play?”
But here is the amazing thing: I took all my frustration about The Road to the parish hall and discussed it with people of good will—who had completely different reading experiences. We could all agree that the boy comes as close to achieving normative morality as anyone does in the novel. And we all fell silent and looked downcast for a moment when someone mentioned that cows were presumed to have gone extinct in the book. (Here in the Dairyland State, it takes a beat to recover from the thought of a world without cows.) About almost everything else in The Road, we vehemently disagreed.
When my daughter was in her pre-K years, I found it very effective to purposely mix up words—to say, for instance, “Mrench mries” with a straight face and matter-of-fact demeanor—so that my daughter could rush to the rescue and laughingly correct me: “It’s French fries, Mom!”
To my surprise, something similar happened when I admitted that I really didn’t like The Road. People who had rarely spoken up in whole-group discussion for two months eagerly grabbed the mic to tell me why I was wrong—why I hadn’t given the father enough credit; where I had overlooked sparks of goodness hidden in the primordial grime; how they’d been able to discern, even in the darkness, love. Several people remarked on what a quick read it was. Some said they hadn’t been able to put it down.
Others were contrarians like me. One young professional shook her head with an expression of distaste as she spoke about the desensitizing effect of so much violence and decay. A woman with graying auburn hair and perfectly matching accessories wondered whether the characters still had a gut biome. I got the sense she, too, had devoted a lot of mental energy to estimating the caloric content of seeds and dust, and to tallying up a list of similarly biologically impossible details that McCarthy backed himself into by insisting on a fictional world completely devoid of sunlight, plants, the Holy Spirit or any other source of growth, purification or renewal.
There was at least one double-contrarian who disliked the novel but played devil’s advocate to keep the debate going as long as possible.
We talked about trust and responsibility, about free will and charity and about the differing standards to which the father and the son ought to be held in light of their distinct ages and roles.
“The highest law is the law of charity,” observed one young woman who had converted to the Catholic faith in college. “And that is certainly something that the father is extending to his son. But the son is the only one extending that to other people in this world.”
“Because he can,” came the rejoinder from an ardent defender of the father. “Because he has a father who’s doing all the rest of it.”
In the end, I wasn’t convinced by every argument. But I was grateful to have a small army of research assistants animatedly trying to find something redemptive about a book that many readers and professional critics admire. It was also comforting to see that the centripetal forces of our shared Catholic faith and our weekly book club gatherings were strong enough to allow for expressions of dissent and disagreement.
“You opened us up to bickering,” one woman observed, prompting laughter.
“We did argue a lot,” her tablemate agreed. “That’s good!”
Ultimately, the greatest value in reading The Road, in my opinion, comes from treating it as a kind of counterfactual of what our world might look like if Jesus had refused to drink the bitter cup in Gethsemane, or if he had never condescended to take on human form in a humble stable at Bethlehem in the first place. Or if the Father had not “so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life” (Jn 3:16, KJV). Or if the Holy Spirit did not constantly descend to create new life and renew the face of the earth. Praise God that the origins of human existence—deep within the burning and inexhaustible mystery of Trinitarian love—will spare us from The Road’s bleak fate.
Personally, I have little more appetite for the zero-sum, scarcity mindset now regnant in politics, tech and the economy than I do for the grayscale devastation of The Road. For me, Matthew 24:37-39 is assurance enough that cannibalism and ash are not how the world will end. There will be “eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage,” until the day society is as caught off guard by the Second Coming as it was by the Flood.
But spending time in McCarthy’s mean-spirited and stingy thought experiment, although it raised my blood pressure, ultimately only deepened my love and gratitude for the God who created bell peppers, ice cream and the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. And it made me want to cast an even more skeptical eye on those in our culture today whose actions seem to be rooted in the same fear that propels the father forward in The Road.
Though the appeal of fan fiction largely eludes me, I couldn’t help but think that a quick cameo by Blessed Solanus Casey or Mother Teresa would have set everything in The Road to rights. During the Great Depression, Blessed Solanus set up a soup kitchen at his Capuchin monastery in Detroit. When food ran out, he calmly and confidently led the line of hungry men in praying the Our Father; not long afterward a truck pulled up, stocked with provisions. That sort of thing apparently happened all the time.
Meanwhile, Mother Teresa routinely made order out of what had hitherto been only chaos, cruelty and indifference. Sometimes she did so armed with a broom, to start sweeping the floors as a quiet reminder that care and stewardship are always possible. Other times she moved mountains—inwardly in hearts, sometimes outwardly, too—with nothing more to give than a prayer and a smile.
Of course, tossing Mother Teresa into The Road would shatter the artistic integrity of the book. McCarthy’s technical prowess as a fiction writer is undeniable. Mine is nonexistent. But I offer the incongruous image as a reminder that God has promised to be with us, in the sacraments and working through his saints, until the end of the age. If that makes me sound like too much of a Pollyanna for you—well, I know a parish reading group where we’re always up for a friendly debate.
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