Skating on the Superficial

Rescuing Masculinity for What It's Worth

I’m reading The Road with my 13 year old. We’re about two-thirds through it and I pretty much know how it’s going to end. My boy snuck a look at the ending and he says he also knows the outcome. But we press on—a chapter a night. There’s not a lot of plot, suspense or character arc here. This doesn’t bother me. Maybe it deserves a Pulitzer, maybe not. Maybe this isn’t the best book I’ve read, not even this year, but I’m glad to be reading it and glad to be reading it with my son. I certainly don’t think it deserved the round pounding it received from the Inky’s book critic.

I had my boy read the withering review to me early last week and I was kinda surprised when young Master W. agreed with Mr. Wilson’s critique of McCarthy’s narrative conventions, but not with his overall assessment of the book. Sure, of the short list of people who did it both first and best, McCarthy will never out-hem Hemingway, or fitz Fitzgerald, but The Road isn’t exactly the facile fast food sizzler of Love Story or Celestine Prophecy ilk, despite the fact that it’s being hawked at Oprah’s Book Club, right beneath a chastely voluptuous (but yummy) “Bras of Summer” banner ad.

Despite a million little pieces of egg on her face, a flyover the big O’s site reveals titles like As I Lay Dying, A Hundred Years of Solitude and Anna Karenina. Her O’ness seems almost self-consciously intent on steering her tube fed demographic toward big L literature. Years from now, inquiring minds may yet debate whether The Road deserves such a capital letter—whether it was oracular or just apocryphal goth. But it deserves whatever attention it gets, then or now, because The Road has grit.

I must confess I hadn’t know Cormac McCarthy’s work very well. I haven’t even google-imaged him yet because I’m savoring my precognitions. I want to see how my image of him jibes with the real deal. With celebrities, I find the reality mostly pales measured next to my preconceptions. I want a ruddy-headed, freckled David Caruso meets Charles Bukowski type. Craggy face. Pockmarks. A drinker's nose. Except that the title All the Pretty Horses is a bit of a discordant note. Kinda fem, more suited to a Dominique or an Emilie than a Cormac. I start all my journeys on the most superficial of terms. What do I know?

Ok, curiosity got the better of me. The last link didn’t exist before I wrote the previous sentence. And now I’m a little disappointed. The romanticized Charles Joseph McCarthy Jr. is replaced with a www reality thumbnail. He looks a bit more clipped and buttoned down than I thought he would. Ex-USAF. He still doesn’t look like a “pretty horses” kinda guy, but it still makes sense. He makes sense. I understand his protagonist’s relationship with his son in this ghostly, monochromatic world they’re passing through. The dying man lives for only one thing. Love for the boy. The kind of love that kills without blinking to protect him. The kind of love that would die, with a song in its heart, rather than see the child hurt. It’s a fierce, joyful animal thing. It starts when you see them pulled out of their momma and placed before you on the warming table. It hasn’t diminished an iota in all these years. Twenty-first century life is overstuffed, supersized. It’s easy for the love between a father and a son to get lost in all the chromatic distractions of a life with so many choices.

With the first gray light he rose and left the boy sleeping and walked out to the road and squatted and studied the country to the south. Barren, silent, godless. He thought the month was October but he wasn’t sure. He hadn’t kept a calendar for years. They were moving south. There'd be no surviving another winter here.

When it was light enough to use the binoculars he glassed the valley below. Everything paling away into the murk. The soft ash blowing in loose swirls over the blacktop. He studied what he could see. The segments of road down there among the dead trees. Looking for anything of color. Any movement. Any trace of standing smoke. He lowered the glasses and pulled down the cotton mask from his face and wiped his nose on the back of his wrist and then glassed the country again. Then he just sat there holding the binoculars and watching the ashen daylight congeal over the land. He knew only that the child was his warrant. He said: If he is not the word of God God never spoke.

In pre-apocalyptic America, young men without models (from literature or real life) of how to be a man, turn to mass media and encounter two polar and equally loathsome caricatures—the neo-Neanderthal, misogynist, hip hop blingmeister and the emasculated, marginalized, post-modern milquetoast failure. Both leave one with the cheesy slide from masculinity to machismo to misomania. Alas in the 21st Century our spears have been beaten into laptops. Our questions of survival are more existential than literal. Men are still going off to the woods, beating on drums and trying to reconstitute their masculinity through metaphors. Masculinity’s virtues seem virtually, but not entirely extinct. Without actually going to war, we get precious few chances to be warriors. Save in the loving of our children. Cormac and I are together on that.

Wilson snipes at the scientific credibility of McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic limbo. The Inquirer critic calls The Road “just the latest installment in the pornography of despair.” Possibly, because I’m reading it to a 13 year old, the phrase hit me with the impact of a slab of raw liver to the puss.

Master Weiss: What are we reading tonight, Dad?
Mister Weiss: I thought we’d indulge in some more of that pornography of despair, son.
Master Weiss: Gosh dad, aren’t I a little young for that?
Mister Weiss: No son, once you get acclimated to the harder stuff, you realize that Tolkien, Rowling, Twain, Lewis, Lessing, Lem and all the rest of the ones we’ve read over the years are just pantywaists and poofters. No more soft-core depression or Hollywood endings for you me bucko. Time to break out the Vonnegut. `My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings: Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!'
Master Weiss: Dad, your rant is cutting into my read time.
Mister Weiss: Okay.

Wilson utterly misses the point. Veracity, color and hope don’t live in landscapes, favorable outcomes or even in language, but in the relationship. Let’s pray it doesn’t take a cataclysm to make either the point or the men of my generation willing and holy warriors for our children. If we can’t do that, then we are not men. Happy 13th Birthday, B.
-@V@-