Eleven-Seven...The Road

Forum Gets a Hat Tip

A friend tells me the Cormac McCarthy Forum has made today's New York Times.

ELEVEN-SEVEN: Cormac McCarthy’s fans — they gather in the forums of “the official Web site of the Cormac McCarthy society” — are smarter, and definitely more laid-back, than those of just about any other living writer. They have names like Clem, and tend to refer to themselves as “fellers.” Watching them hash out their feelings about McCarthy’s new novel, “The Road” — see No. 4 on the fiction list — is like listening to the members of Waylon Jennings’s old band talking on a back porch somewhere, smoking cigarettes and plunking squirrels with varmint rifles.

One burning issue in the forums right now is McCarthy’s strategic deployment of the number 117. In his new novel, 1:17 a.m. is when clocks stop and the world ends. In his last one, “No Country for Old Men,” there was a grisly motel murder in Room 117. And so on. Is McCarthy referencing the Book of Revelations? Genesis? Who knows? One writer on the forum drawls: “That’s the Bible: you can make it support an argument any which way.”

posted by Marty Priola, Webmaster @ cormac mccarthy.com
10/15/2006 10:58:00 AM

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By WILLIAM KENNEDY

Cormac McCarthy’s subject in his new novel is as big as it gets: the end of the civilized world, the dying of life on the planet and the spectacle of it all. He has written a visually stunning picture of how it looks at the end to two pilgrims on the road to nowhere. Color in the world — except for fire and blood — exists mainly in memory or dream. Fire and firestorms have consumed forests and cities, and from the fall of ashes and soot everything is gray, the river water black. Hydrangeas and wild orchids stand in the forest, sculptured by fire into “ashen effigies” of themselves, waiting for the wind to blow them over into dust. Intense heat has melted and tipped a city’s buildings, and window glass hangs frozen down their walls. On the Interstate “long lines of charred and rusting cars” are “sitting in a stiff gray sludge of melted rubber. ... 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.”

Viktor Koen

Polished and muscular and torsional” in a time gone when the world was becoming; and what had been was “a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again.” And all things “were older than man and they hummed of mystery.”

THE ROAD

By Cormac McCarthy.

241 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $24.

Featured Author

Cormac McCarthy

A retrospective with reviews and a rare interview.

McCarthy has said that death is the major issue in the world and that writers who don’t address it are not serious. Death reaches very near totality in this novel. Billions of people have died, all animal and plant life, the birds of the air and the fishes of the sea are dead: “At the tide line a woven mat of weeds and the ribs of fishes in their millions stretching along the shore as far as eye could see like an isocline of death.” Forest fires are still being ignited (by lightning? other fires?) after what seems to be a decade since that early morning — 1:17 a.m., no day, month or year specified — when the sky opened with “a long shear of light and then a series of low concussions.” The survivors (not many) of the barbaric wars that followed the event wear masks against the perpetual cloud of soot in the air. Bloodcults are consuming one another. Cannibalism became a major enterprise after the food gave out. Deranged chanting became the music of the new age.

“There is no God and we are his prophets.”