First Long Weekend of the Belle Saison: People Think of Hitting the Road

The traffic reports on Friday told of long line of vehicles on the highways heading out of town.  This is the first long weekend of the holiday season, and the forecast is for good weather.  No wonder people are thinking of hitting the road.

Which made me think about "road" books.  They are not the same as "road movies'  which tend to be escapist viewing.  Road books, on the other hand, are usually quests of one sort of another, where frequently the most important journey is spiritual. I'll write more about them later this summer, but there is one book that must be considered right away,   Cormac McCarthy’s Pulitzer prize-winning novel The Road.

The book has enjoyed great popular and critical success, particularly among men. I found it just terrible, though.  So did my friends at a reading circle that's been meeting monthly for more than 25 years, and those in my cousin's Cathy's book group in Reno.

The story is basically about a man and his son travelling through a post Apocalypse world  in which nothing is growing.  Their journey is threatened by hordes of humans gone cannibal.  They subsist on canned food, they have no idea if they're going toward help or not.

In short, they are in a bad way. The details are harrowing, but two of the underlying premises  seem to me to be deeply false. 

The first is the way the man's wife chooses not to live as disaster rains down on the world even though she has just given birth. The second is complete lack of growing things the man and his son encounter.  Neither one rings true: women are far more likely to fight ferociously to protect their newborns, than to give up.  And anyone who has lived in a city or seen a plaee scoured by disaster knows that within a very short time green returns against what seem to be extraordinary odds.  


But, as my friend Rolande (a woman of great artistic sensiblilty but not a writer or a psychologist) says, the whole story has something that appeals especially to men, which may account for the novel's great popularity.  Its core is a  tender relationship between a man and his son which is something many men lack and most men crave although they may be loath to admit it for fear of seeming sissy. Here, however, the context is the horrors of the  end-of-world, so liking the novel can’t be construed as liking something sentimental.  

Is this another indication that there are real differences between men and women that show up in the most surprising ways? I think not, because male reactions to the book show that tender feelings are there, it’s just that most men have a long way to go before they can admit to them openly. The Road may be simply a path they must take before they get there.