Lost on the Road

OK, I'm not sure if it's the fact that I've been pulling 12-15 hour days on this damn project or what, but I'm having trouble sleeping at night.

Of course, last night, it could have just been that I was haunted by The Road. I still have images of it going through my head (and not just the sepulchral charnel-house ones [though those are there, too])... images of a father and a son alone in a world. I keep thinking, could I be as good a father as "the man" is in the novel? As understanding to and of "the boy"? I wonder if life has become so complex that we can't conceive of a time where life (and survival) is such a clear-cut proposition [and here I've got to be careful... I had a buddy who felt the same way about the Michael Mann version of The Last of the Mohicans... and though he doesn't see it or won't admit it, I think that sort of philosophizing led to the subsequent end of his marriage]

I listened to the Slate Audio Book Club discussion of the novel. They spoke of its simultaneous profundity and simplicity (and not in a good way). Its overtly Hemingway-esque bluntness. The images of masculinity.

I don't know why I felt the need to find what others had felt. Was I trying to figure out why the ending hit me so hard? Did it hit others in the same fashion? (yes and no) And why did it not have me in tears, thinking of the ending later, and yet haunt my thoughts so?

Don't read unless you've finished the book:

Is it because the ending is somewhat (or according to some readers) overtly and too-easily hopeful? Is that why I don't cry in recollection? I know I seem to be harping on this, but you weren't there in the bathroom... I was a mess. I was crying hard.

The ending sequence had the father dying. I lost Ma. The father and son had some unspoken (but clearly defined to them) arrangement for one putting the other out of his misery if the first was to die. In those moments before death, even after we had decided to let her go, hearing her rasps, I wanted to die (... instead... too? I'm not sure.) So maybe that was the connection. But the father refuses to use the final bullet on the boy, telling him that he had wanted to, had planned to, but now cannot bring himself to. The father says that the boy must go on. To carry "the fire" in him. To find the other "good guys." The boy rails against this decision, this betrayal, this abandonment. I get that, too. In spades.

Then the boy is found by a man. And in the nihilist world of the novel, we expect the worst. Of course, what that worst is can fill a laundry list of nightmares: the boy is killed; the boy is raped; the boy is killed then eaten (we've already seen a locked basement filled with people [one of whom is a man with amputated legs], who are obviously being kept locked up as food storage, and a baby on a spit); or even the boy killing the man (even though we'd seen "the man" kill, this would be worse than the simple loss of hope the boy endured late in the book).

But it isn't the worst. It's the best. The man is traveling with his family (the boy son of which we had seen glimpses of earlier in the book), and the man takes him in to join his wife, son, and daughter.

(The boy returns alone to the body for one last goodbye, and here I was sure that the boy would commit suicide over the corpse of his father [it's not crystal clear, but the impression is that his mother had left the father and boy so she could kill herself]... I was sure this was going to happen. And when it didn't, that's when the waterworks started for me... why? Was I relieved that he didn't kill himself? Was I sad that he didn't kill himself to join his true parents instead of joining this new family? I'm still wrestling with that.)

And all of this happens in the last few pages of the book. Two hundred pages of death, hopelessness, and nihilism. Then this deus ex machina. For some readers, this is far too easy, too simple, too pat (oh, look the family has a daughter, an Eve to the boy's Adam).

The penultimate paragraph has irked some readers as well: we hear that the mother of the family later (how much later--an hour, a week, a year--we're not sure) asks the boy to talk to God, but he can't he can only talk to his father. The irksome have found this sudden insertion of religion too much in the final pages... of course, there's been god throughout the novel, it's not the first mention... just the first positive mention. Other irksome readers have complained about this undefined future time when the discussion takes place... is it too hopeful? The man had died of a cough... was it the poisonous atmosphere that killed him? and if so, wouldn't kill everyone?

Then the final paragraph hits. And it says nothing of the man, the boy, or the family he joins. It doesn't discuss what happened to the world or what will happen. It takes a rather flowing (in comparison to the short choppy prose that has led us here), very rich (in vocabulary, again a clear distinction to what preceded it), and almost poetic view of nature.

And it ends:

In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery.

This mystery, too, has irked some readers, claiming that this insertion of "mystery" (whether it be religious [like the graph that precedes it] or New Age-y [which is really out of left field]) is heavy-handed.

The mystery doesn't bother me, but it does fascinate me: is the mystery the mystery of life ("older than man")? is it a subtle statement that life again will rise from the sea, that this is a new beginning? Is it that there were the things before man, and in this book we're seeing the end of man, but the last words send us back to nature... is it saying that man is just a blip on the radar, just a moment in time, and that continuum is something that we'll never know, because we aren't going to be there to see it all?

It IS a mystery.

Maybe that's why I can't get it out of my head.