The Road by Cormac McCarthy

    I remember once hearing the argument that the appeal of post-apocalyptic narratives is rooted in our desire to be unique. We are perpetually subjugated to forces beyond our control, making us feel insignificant and we have near endless access to the lives of others, making us feel like passive observers. In a world devoid of most other human life, we have the capacity to stand out.

    I’m not sure that argument really holds up for Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. The novel has essentially two main characters: the man and the boy. The man is a father, the boy his son. The two are traveling, trying to get to the ocean at the end of the road. The man’s wife appears in a flashback, as well, and it’s a pretty tragic arc in which she fears living in the apocalyptic and the man fails to convince her not to take her own life. The man struggles with a similar impulse but persists for the sake of his son.

    The apocalypse itself is tastefully unexplained. We just see the remnants: a dark and ashy world, seemingly without animals, where the man and boy hunt for canned food and boiled water to survive. The pair push around shopping carts and hide under tarps as they make slow progress down the road with just one bullet in their gun to defend themselves.

    The Road might be the most distinctly American post-apocalyptic narrative I’ve read. Throughout the book, I couldn’t help but feel a resonance with The Great Gatsby and its illustration of the American dream in decline. Early in the book, Fitzgerald describes the valley of ash: “where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens; where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and, finally, with a transcendent effort, of men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air.” In The Road, everything has that same ashiness and the description of men moving dimly and crumbling through the powdery air feels like such an accurate reflection of the characters in McCarthy’s work. The Road also sees the characters find Coca-Cola and the man gives it to his son as a respite and a symbolic moment of the last dregs of American commercialism. Meanwhile, the pair hold a simplified notion of Good Guys and Bad Guys, continually reassuring themselves that they are the former and that they are pioneering highway heroes.

    To the young boy’s credit, he is exploring the nuances of the world much more thoroughly than his father. He’s of an age when moral absolutes become confusing instructions to follow, and seeing his development has a tenderness amidst the disaster. His father still tries to shield his innocence from the horrors of death, which ultimately proves impossible. In one of the more haunting scenes, the pair enter a bunker to discover a cannibalism ring, which is presented with enough detail to make it disturbing and enough subtlety to make it unnerving.

    In fact, most of the book reads as episodic. It wouldn’t be a far reach to reimagine this book as a television show. Sure, the novel progresses in the sense of there being a goal and they are literally walking towards it. On the other hand, though, it feels static, aimless, meandering—just as it would feel to experience the apocalypse.

    The episodic nature of the text is supplemented by a sparse and repetitive style. A student of mine read Blood Meridian and talked about how the sentences were so lengthy and lush. I found it such an interesting difference to The Road which has a number of simple sentences in succession. I opened to a random page and the first paragraph reads: “The falling snow curtained them about. There was no way to see anything at either side of the road. He was coughing again and the boy was shivering, the two of them side by side under the sheet of plastic, pushing the grocery cart through the window. Finally he stopped. The boy was shaking uncontrollably” (94). If I’m correct, there’s only one subordinate clause in the bunch. The unpunctuated dialogue between the characters is even more direct and repetitive. Here’s another random sample: “You don’t have to tell me, the man said. It’s all right. / I’m scared. / It’s all right. / No it’s not. / It’s just a dream. / I’m really scared. / I know” (189).

    This isn’t to say that McCarthy doesn’t have flourishes of lush style. Particularly with respect to the landscape, The Road includes some vivid imagery and surprising word choices. There were some passages early on that felt poetic and enigmatic, but I forgot to mark them, so I’ll include just two passages from towards the end of the book as representative. One passage starts as follows: “The days sloughed past uncounted and uncalendared” (273). Uncalendared! What a word! The passage continues as follows:

Along the interstate in the distance long lines of charred and rusting cars. The raw rims of the wheels sitting in a stiff gray sludge of melted rubber, in blackened rings of wire. The incinerate corpses shrunk to the size of a child and propped on the bare springs of the seats. Ten thousand dreams ensepulchred within their crozzled hearts. They went on. Treading the dead world under like rats on a wheel. The nights dead still and deader black. So cold. They talked hardly at all. He coughed all the time and the boy watched him spitting blood. Slumping along. Filthy, ragged, hopeless. He’d stop and lean on the cart and the boy would go on and then stop and look back and he would raise his weeping eyes and see him standing there in the road looking back at him from some unimaginable future, glowing in that waste like a tabernacle. (273)

Each one of those sentences, in my mind, has something distinctive about it. The “incinerate” corpses, having an odd echo of “interstate” from a few sentences earlier and distinctly not in adjectival form gives the sentences a strange disembodying quality. I’d never even heard of the word “crozzled.” The inversion of “they talked hardly,” which would be more natural as “they hardly talked” again stilts the flow of the sentences in an unnatural progression. The final line of the paragraph referencing the unimaginable future and the road “glowing in that waste like a tabernacle” again feels to me like an echo of Gatsby’s disillusionment in the green light.

The final passage of the book is largely unrelated to the “action” of the book and again provides some vivid imagery, this time in a more focused manner. McCarthy writes the following:

Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins whimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery. (287)

The symbolism of the final passage shines through with a world no longer possible. The fact that fish still existed and they offered maps and mazes—presumably that we didn’t follow, hence the apocalypse—points to the directionlessness of the future. Even the seeming happy-ish ending is really just an aimless prolonged excursion. 

    Overall, The Road was pretty good. I’m not sure it’s the masterpiece everyone makes it out to be, but McCarthy does a lot right as a stylist and an explorer of themes. The characters feel a little thin. The plot is arguably thinner. But, it still offers a particular voice and a story of connection and endurance against a cold and bitter world.

    Happy reading!

Endsickness by Sofia Alarcon

    I hesitate to call Sofia Alarcon’s Endsickness a graphic novel. The word ‘novel’ implies to me a certain kind of continuity of characters and settings. Endsickness, however, is more like eight short stories that are thematically connected, all geared towards answering the question of how we continue to live while living in the end times. Each section is pretty short and is distinct in its own way, and one of the great strengths of Alaron’s work is that the art style changes between different sections to tell different stories.

    In the first section, “Positive Thinking,” is a series of affirmations juxtaposed with more ominous imagery (e.g. “All is well in my world” affirms the woman wearing a gas mask to bed). Then she envisions leaving everything behind and going to live in the woods. It’s a quirky art style and the woman has a nonchalant expression—that is, until the reality sets in that she hates bugs and will probably die.

    “Special Delivery” has a vibrant, almost neon pop-art style that depicts the same neighbourhood over and over, with children wearing gas masks and zombies chasing joggers and AK47s in the street and UFOs setting houses ablaze. The section tells its story almost exclusively through images with no text until the punchline—the special delivery is an Amazon package of a Live Laugh Love sign.

    “Patagonia” is a less memorable section about buying a sweater before descending into a despairing meditation on capitalism and forest fires and the need for a shift in perspective, like, for example, to the VIP suite to a house on the hill. Meanwhile, “Adaptation” takes us through the entire history of amoeba to dinosaurs to people and a reflection on the necessity of interdependence between species and their contexts, the unfathomable improbability of the our existence, and the question of whether capitalism will outpace our ability to adapt with its capacity to destroy.

    “Afterlife” strips away the colour and vibrancy of the other pages and provides a black-and-white narrative before returning to a colourful and scraggly-illustrated section called “Lonesome Garry.” It’s about a human man in the zoo being watched by animals, the last human of the species. They observe him mowing grass and engaging in other human rituals, though he fails in his courtship and we see the tragedy of a species dying out forever. The story, I learned from the acknowledgements page, is based on the last Pinta island tortoise and that gives it additional tragic force.

    One of the more memorable sections is “Icarus,” which I thought was nicely stylized for, essentially, a Socratic dialogue in space in which astronauts question the nature of progress. Do we ever really move forward? Or is time just a loop and us humans keep making the same mistakes over and over and over and over? Are we a spiral that slightly progresses? Is reincarnation a thing? I think that section addresses so many of the central questions in a meaningful way while also having some of the most distinct artwork in the text. Even within just a few pages, there’s a more pencil-crayon style that shifts to a largely black-and-white traditional comic style with great pops of colour.

    The final section, “Genesis,” is further exploration of the destructiveness of our consumerism, featuring a replicated Nick Cage pillow.

    Alarcon’s work is a quick read, but examining the images enriches the storytelling. I loved the art style of the comics, and the themes are all worth thinking about and taking action on. What’s troubling is that there’s a sort of haunting resignation throughout the text which I find it difficult to confront; I suppose that’s the reason Endsickness earns its name—how can we come to terms with the global catastrophes confronting us?

    So, uh, happy (?) reading, I guess…

The Hearing Test by Eliza Barry Callahan

        If you somehow don’t have enough to worry about, I offer you this: it is possible, apparently, to have sudden onset deafness for no discernible reason. Such was the case for author Eliza Barry Callahan and the character in her debut novel The Hearing Test. For a year of their lives, they have difficulty hearing and face the fear of never hearing properly again.

In one powerful section, fictional Eliza spends evenings listening to music she wants to remember if her hearing loss is permanent. She “believed that the more [she] listened to these songs, the more clearly [she] would be able to replay them for [herself] in a future when [she] could no longer hear them” (87). As someone who has allowed music to be such a significant part of my life—and someone likely to blow out his ears at loud concerts—the passage seemed so sad and resonant. Callahan continues, “I limited what I listened to, worrying there might be a limit to what I could retain with specificity” (87). I’ve had that thought myself: how well can songs live in the heart of my memory? How well would I be able to replicate them if I never heard them again? The fact is, it would not go well. The following paragraph of Callahan’s novel reads:

But soon I found myself bored by the slim selection and the repetition and feared that this process of sonic tattooing might ruin the music itself. I no longer associated the songs with memories but rather the songs themselves became memories. I stopped listening to music altogether. The highest fidelity sound is in the head. (87)

I’ll put the novelty of the phrase “sonic tattooing” on pause for now to focus on the pain of this moment. I’ve framed it as sad because it resonates with me personally, but it’s also worth noting that the narrator of the book is a composer whose livelihood is connected to her ability to hear.

Beyond the central premise of the book, the plot is pretty thin. It is not event-driven, but more so a referential collage. Much of the book offers philosophical considerations of sound and silence, linguistic and literary considerations, references to composers’ works, summaries of movies, and so on. One passage offers a reflection on how the word “silence” works linguistically: “simple and unremarkable patterns around the word, such as that seeing, staring, hanging, or watching are often coupled with silence. That the adverb completely often precedes silent. That the verb fall often precedes silent. That the architecture of silence is the gaze. That silence is without transition. That silence is dressed as an injury” (31-32). Sometimes, the referentiality of the novel is alienating—namely when I do not have the same frame of reference. When Roland Barthes, Deleuze and Guattari, John Cage, and Virginia Woolf get shout-outs, though, I have the satisfaction of saying to myself, “Hey! I know that allusion!”. When I don’t know the references, Callahan’s descriptions are inconsistent in the detail they offer to invite readers like me into the experience. Especially since there are few plot events, the assemblage of allusions comes across alternatingly as sloppy and too convenient or cutesy (a nearby store called John’s Cages, for instance).

I will say, though, that one of Callahan’s references in particular was thematically fitting and deeply engrossing. Fictional Eliza has been alerted to the presence of “The Petersburg Popper. The Soviet Sonata. The Commie Contana,” a perpetual radio broadcast from Moscow. I had to double-check to make sure, but it actually exists. Known as “The Buzzer,” the transmission is a continuous buzz that is sometimes sprinkled with voice messages, bits of song, coded transmissions, etc. The parallel of the intentional buzz and the ongoing buzz in Eliza’s hearing is a really nice connection to explore, and Eliza reviews posts in a forum about the station that documents what people heard through the buzz. I find her descriptions haunting and beautiful, especially because reading about what other people heard, and everyone searching this buzz for meaning together—regardless of their ability or inability to hear—offers a depressing and tenuous kind of community. Also, the significance of the sound is out of reach for all those involved as an equalizer.

In terms of the style, I admit that for much of the book I found it a little lacking. The sentence structures seemed repetitive and a bit bland. Huge revelations are presented with the same linguistic flare as tying your shoes. That said, some moments really pop. There’s a scene in the latter part of the book where Eliza seems to have phone sex with her ex boyfriend’s ex girlfriend and the sentence-structure deteriorates in a really interesting way leading towards the, er, climax. There are also some lovely visuals that pepper the text. In one scene, she’s looking at outer space and comments on comets: “A wet white star dragged across a black sheet? A mistake—touched before dried?” (121). She remembers Virginia Woolf saying that the “gigantic cinema” should not play to a “perpetually empty house” (121). She then aligns herself with the house and says, “I saw the comet—a weak flashlight. God searching the basement” (121). Moments like that help give voice to the visual artist in Callahan.

There’s more than a touch of the philosophical of the book, too. Some of it really resonates with me, while other moments seem a little muddled or undercooked. For example, she gives a Heideggerian observation about how “the attempt to escape the frame only leads to the expansion of the frame. We end up drudging more of life back into the frame of art” (25). I also appreciated her commentary on misinterpretation: “I found clarity in misinterpretation. And I thought that our misinterpretations are perhaps the most individual and specific things we have” (54). I love the implications of that and I remember my own fair share of beloved misinterpretations. There’s a deep truth there that I hope Callahan opts to explore in other literary works. On the flip side of things, there are some more comments I’m more hesitant to praise. While I like them, when I pause to think about them I’m not entirely sure they work. For instance, the line I referenced earlier that “the architecture of silence is the gaze” has an appealing quality to it but if you try to think through the synesthesia doesn’t entirely land for me. There’s another part where a character philosophizes that “when you have no particular place to be, and you are in a foreign or unfamiliar place, you are actually moving around with the specific purpose of locating a place within yourself at which you may or may not arrive” (63). It feels true, but at the same time—is it too commonplace? And too clunky in its phrasing? I’m divided.

Overall, I think The Hearing Test is a good debut and Callahan is clearly learnèd in the discourse of sound and silence. The collage-like presentation of the book offers a snapshot of an experience more than a story. It’s a slice of life—essentially a year. Narratively, I feel like it would benefit from being a bit more constructed, which is weird for me to say because normally I love that unstructured stuff.

Happy reading!