On 'The Road' of realism with Oprah
Oprah Winfrey's book club picks tend to be met with a flurry of fanfare and technology: Book jacket stickers appear overnight; publishers go into instant mega-printings; booksellers raze their displays to make room for the new new thing. Whether her choice is mainstream (Sidney Poitier), classic (William Faulkner), or even publicly retracted (James Frey), the fact is that Oprah's mighty reach guarantees the book a position on the bestseller list -- sometimes for years.
A lot of additional fuss has been made this week over Oprah's selection of Cormac McCarthy's post-apocalyptic 2006 novel, "The Road," as though the queen of feel-good affirmations had just gotten in bed with Job himself. But Winfrey has long proven her ability to go deep -- one of her first selections, more than a decade ago, was Toni Morrison's "Song of Solomon." Still, her recent decision to gold-star McCarthy -- a legendarily reclusive author known for his exquisite, idiosyncratic language and Gothic violence -- may signal a new level of dark realism, particularly coming as it does on the heels of Elie Wiesel's "Night, " showcased in 2006. Wiesel's autobiographical account of surviving Auschwitz, first published in English in 1960, is unrelentingly bleak, its only redemption the narrator's having lived to tell the tale. And fictional though it may be, "The Road" may trump "Night" for sheer dead ends. No possibility of Allied forces on this colorless landscape, where even the struggle for good and evil has become a question of semantics. With its Old Testament outrage and its Beckettian notion of grace and longing, "The Road" is a heartsore, riveting account of how we go on, we must go on, when the world itself may have given up.
Certain that the book-buying masses can shoulder this grimness of subject, Vintage Books, in charge of the paperback, has reportedly ordered a massive printing of 950,000. However odd or fatalistic Oprah's choice may seem, the truth is that "The Road" is as captivating as anything McCarthy has ever written. That's not a qualitative judgment; it's a pragmatic one: You try reading a scary literary novel about the end of the world -- complete with ashen skies and marauding cannibals -- and just see if you're not loath to put it down.
Which is surely what happened to Oprah, when her reading committee handed her this mythic tragedy posing as a horror story. Given the paucity of life forms on the planet, there are only two fully realized characters in the novel: a man and his son, walking through an austere and empty world toward the sea. It is probably October; the boy is probably somewhere around 10 -- though the father has forgotten his birthdays. They have between them a shopping cart and a few cans of food, a gun with two bullets. We never know what catastrophe has felled the planet, only that "the banished sun circles the earth like a grieving mother with a lamp." Most of what has made them human -- memory and color and the names of things -- is disappearing, being let go like tissue in a high wind. The past itself is evoked as a mournful fugue: The man was most likely a physician in their old lives; his wife and the boy's mother, facing the future, chose the quicker route of suicide.
And yet within this spare and unsparing landscape is an elegance of language and meaning that renders "The Road" a thing of beauty: The novel is a eulogy to what was lost, charting the texture and halting downward movement of loss itself. In stark relief to these depths of despair lies the riveting action of the story: Treacherous questions of where the man and boy will find food and how, indeed if, they will survive the night. The fire encircling this no man's land belongs to the love between father and son -- not so much a Christian metaphor as a simply holy one, a last waltz taking place in a dying world.
Because McCarthy has wisely chosen to omit the origins of his death-knell setting, "The Road" acts as a sort of generic Cassandra novel -- once you've reached the endgame, it doesn't so much matter what pestilence or power-play got you there. In a year when a former presidential contender is being touted at the Oscars for a documentary on climatic ruin, Oprah's attention to McCarthy's novel makes a fine (and hardly risky) bid for planetary conscience. For all its terrors, "The Road" may not be McCarthy's darkest novel (that distinction belongs to "Blood Meridian, " which goes to prove that some things, put to pen and paper, are even creepier than the end of the world). Nor is it necessarily his best -- various camps will grant that to "Blood Meridian, " "All the Pretty Horses, " or "The Crossing." But within a week or two, it's going to be the one on bookstands across America. And McCarthy, a native Tennessean who has lived for years in the Southwest, has agreed to break his years of near silence by talking to the Queen of Pop herself.
One of the few interviews ever written about McCarthy appeared in The
Gail Caldwell is chief book critic of the Globe. She can be reached at caldwell@globe.com. 
