Family Ties

The Road, by Cormac McCarthy (2006: Vintage Books).

For most people, family relationships underlie all other relationships we form in our lives. You can choose your friends, the saying goes, but not your family. Sometimes that can be a blessing – most of us can remember a time when family members rallied to our cause against an unfair, evil world. Other times family can be a source of stress, misunderstanding, and heartache from which there is no escape. Having grown up as the seventh child in a brood of nine kids, there were times when all I wanted was for the people who knew me best to simply leave me the hell alone.

Under normal circumstances, family relationships are complemented by other relationships – friends, lovers, coworkers, even casual acquaintances provide alternative outlets for love, camaraderie, competition, and other healthy human interaction. When extreme situations strip away those alternative outlets, the peculiar strains, stresses and strengths of family bonds are put to the ultimate test.

In The Road, Cormac McCarthy's post-apocalyptic tale of a man and his son's struggle to survive, extreme circumstances reduce the world of the two unnamed main characters to pure mutual dependence. The boy, at first innocent and vulnerable, depends on his father to steal food and blankets, seek shelter, continuously improvise new strategies for survival, and even, when the need arises, to kill. Less obvious but no less real is the man's dependence on the boy. The boy's presence brings to him a sense of responsibility and hope, and, we soon discover, of much-needed humanity. We're the good guys, right? the boy asks repeatedly. That's why we don't eat people, right? Right, says the man, and they walk away from fresh corpses, one day closer to the brink of starvation.

That the two depend on each other for their very survival is a point driven home in a myriad of ways both gentle and firm. We learn that the absence of the boy's mother was by her own self-sacrifice to motivate the man to take action to save the boy. But it also saved himself, for without her disappearance and his desperation to save the child he would have done nothing, and all would be lost. Time and again the man is motivated to improvise, to press on, to take extreme measures and improbable risks only out of his sense of paternal duty. Likewise, beyond the boy's diminutive size, his naivety prompts him to shame his father into sharing their meager supply of food and blankets with any passing stranger, placing them both at perhaps greater risk in their Hobbesian man-eat-dog world.

The lack of other relationships in their lives – except confrontational, violent ones – warp the perspectives of both man and boy on their trek to the sea. The boy, born after whatever apocalypse wiped out humanity and much of its infrastructure, innately senses that the cutthroat competition to survive is somehow not normal, and his hunger for healthy human contact exceeds the pain in his empty belly. The man, having known the love of a wife and family, neighbors and friends, remains at constant war with himself whenever another human crosses their path. Friend, or foe? Almost always he assumes foe. He must, but that is not the way it was, and he hates it. Is this all that his son will know? If so, why go through the trouble of surviving? Why not use the two remaining bullets on themselves instead of attackers, who could mercifully put them out of their misery?

The Road is typical of McCarthy's work in its economy of language, its rule-breaking narrative and grammar, and its minimalist punctuation and structure. The book for example, has no chapter breaks and nearly all dialog attribution is inferred from context. Yet the reading is not laborious because the writing is so well-paced and clear, and the narrative, while understated, packs such emotional wallop.

I nearly always pine for the ending of books – those I like, because I'm curious to see how the hero solves his dilemma, and those I dislike because I can't wait to be done with it. But I raced to the conclusion of this book for a different reason: I wanted the pain of this man and boy to end. I had grown to love them. There were, I realized when I turned the final page, like family. And in that moment I wanted them to know, I was here for them, the whole time.