The Road Less Unraveled

This includes the end of Cormac McCarthy’s book The Road, so if you haven’t read it and don’t want spoilers you should stop reading now.

To talk with someone about Cormac McCarthy’s work is to hear iterations of the words dualism and brutality many times. It’s all very complicated, they’ll tell you, and there likely are not enough barstools in Silver Lake to hold up all the dudes for whom Blood Meridian is the only book on earth. It often feels as though his collective works exist for many as a totem of their own aspirational or experienced alienation, and the violence in them is at intervals magnetic and overwhelming. Always wrenching at the edges of both modern sensibilities and the masculine bravado around what we would do if we had to. And in that way, much of McCarthy’s writing comes off as Mike Tyson’s quotable punch in the mouth. At the very least, you certainly had a sense of your place in the world before you started reading it.

But much like the man himself, McCarthy’s work is best when left alone. Our exegetical obsession surrounding the written word is understandable, in some sense we read in order to know we’re alive, but beneath the architected flesh and bone of the very best modern fiction lies an undeniable and organic thump of life. A brute fact of painful awareness of the way things are. And that doesn’t require a degree or a thesis or a lit bro to understand.

Which is why I’ll stop talking about it and will leave you with this: McCarthy was nearly invisible, becoming even harder to find after the beginnings of his success than he was in obscurity, and he once turned down $2000 for an interview after All The Pretty Horses launched despite the fact that he and his ex-wife were broke because he didn’t have anything to say that wasn’t already written on those pages. He hated talking about his own writing, and felt like it should be allowed to speak for itself. So to that end, given his recent passing, I thought I’d send you with my favorite passage of his which happens to be the last paragraph of The Road.