What Do You Mean Cormac McCarthy Doesn't Write Bedtime Stories?

It's been sitting on my bookshelf for almost a year, after being purchased during last year's Arctic Blast 2008. Not that that fact should warrant concern on its own, as it has been keeping good company with the likes of Jonathan Safran Foer's Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, a McSweeney's collection that I forget the name of, some James Joyce, Naomi Wolf's Give Me Liberty, Best American Short Stories 2008, and plenty of other books I've owned for a long time but haven't actually read yet.

But a trailer of Viggo Mortensen grimacing and trudging raggedly through a snowy landscape dotted with abandoned cars before my second viewing of the glampirific New Moon (I won't go into how that happened right now), along with a review of said film highlighting the storage of human bodies consumed limb by limb as a plot point, created the tipping point for my long-delayed venture into The Road.

Descriptions like "terse," "unsentimental," and "post-apocalyptic," are what I've gotten used to hearing about McCarthy's novel. "You should read this book because it is exactly how a book about our future ought to be," says Tom Chiarella of Esquire.

"It was hard to read before bed," a co-worker reflects when I declare yet again my intention to finally open it.

"What is the name of that book, where there's a man, and a boy, and they find a baby cooking over a fire?" one of my students asks at the beginning of the year when the class is creating reading autobiographies of memorable books.

"The Road," answers another student who had read it in a class they shared the year before.

The book's reputation for darkness was starting to make me a little nervous. If my personal history with other books and movies is any indication, my naturally anxious mind would be vulnerable to the strong visual influence of disturbing acts and ideas. I remember having nightmares when I was seven or so after seeing not the Nightmare on Elm Street movies themselves, but just a commercial about one. Later, the evils of 1984 and The Picture of Dorian Gray were not literary visions, but possible, even probable, terrifying realities to me. Around the time I read Dorian Gray, I regretted watching Scarface because the chainsaw-beheading scene kept replaying itself over and over in my head, and my head kept filling in what was left out of the on-screen footage. The same thing happened with The Descent, 28 Days Later, Boys Don't Cry, Seven, and many, many others. Saw and Hostel? I can barely read about these ones without causing self-inflicted trauma.

Really, though, how bad could The Road be? I think as I settle into bed and open it last night. Immediately I am hooked. McCarthy's spare, syntactically unusual, and yes, as everyone says, terse prose draws me in and doesn't let go. The simple tenderness between father and son against a dead, austere landscape, and the father's memory of the perfect day at the lake on his uncle's farm is heart-breaking.

And then the men in the truck come. It's not until one of them grabs the boy and holds a knife to his throat that I realize my heart has been pounding the entire time I have been reading. I've been bracing myself for something horrible that I know is coming. My cheating eyes dart to the opposite page I'm reading, scanning for a sign of the horror on its way. And that first horror comes in the man's memory of the now-dead attacker, when he recalls his "gray, rotting teeth," "claggy with human flesh." I don't even know what "claggy" means until I look it up the next day, but it is enough to send me into a panic.

The horror comes again when the man and the boy secretly watch a "ragged horde" of cannibals, a group led by red-scarved, gas-masked men with crudely cruel weapons and made up of slaves and catamites whose fate I won't even let myself speculate on.

After about 100 pages in, I'm laying rigid and hyper-alert in my bed, convinced that cannibals are now inside my quiet and dark house. And yet I can't stop reading. I can't look away. And now I can't sleep.

I call my fiancé for comfort, who laughs at me but makes me feel better by evoking bunnies he saw on Cute Overload.
“What’s that tapping?” he says after awhile, interrupting his description of an online celebrity cat named Winston eating sour cream.
“What?”
“That tapping. Is that a zombie-cannibal tapping at your window?”

I eventually manage to calm myself down, but I still don’t sleep well that night. I suppose this all sounds pretty Pollyanna-ish. I do like my share of darkness; as I tell my students, it is often where the core of human truth exists. Pithy, tragic stories like Night, Lord of the Flies, and Othello form the foundation of one of my classes’ curriculum. One year a student whined, “When are we going to read something happy?”

“We’re not,” I replied flatly. “These books hold the truth about humanity and ask the real questions that count. Happy books don't show what humans are really made of and what we’re capable of.”

That said, I've found I have to limit my extracurricular exposure to evil. I’ve spent enough time in my own life in self-imposed gloom that I don’t want to dwell there too long these days.

I think McCarthy’s work, and brutal images in general, are so disturbing because of our instinctive identification with the people involved in them. When I picture those claggy teeth, I might imagine that they want to become claggy with my human flesh, but I also can’t help but imagine them as my own. As I watch the gruesome beat-down of Butchie on The Wire, I feel revulsion and…something else. It’s a something that I don’t even want to acknowledge, an involuntary limbic response to violence I can barely sense. But it’s there--a vertiginous mix of disgust, shame, and fascination. It’s my reminder that underneath all of the civilization, all of the rules and manners and infrastructure and bureaucracy we’ve layered upon ourselves, we’re still beasts. Strip these things away, as McCarthy and Wiesel and Golding have shown, and all bets are off; humans will do anything to survive. I know they’re right—and that’s why I’m terrified.

I often think that the longer I’ve been in the world, the less I need to see fictionalized brutality, when there is too much brutal non-fiction as it is. But I can’t stop reading, and I can’t look away. Now I'll just limit my reading of The Road to the daylight hours, preferably in a crowded room.