The Haunting Art of Cormac McCarthy

I was going to write about humor on this perfect spring day, but I can't find my Dave Barry books. So I reached at random into my Great Sentences folder and pulled out the opening of The Road, about as far from humor as it's possible to get. Even when what's being described is the lifeless, lightless world that remains after an unspecified apocalypse, McCarthy's prose is worth studying. Its stark imagery, no-nonsense sentence structure and punctuation, and subtle sound effects evoke the setting so vividly that I shudder every time I read it. But I keep reading. The novel opens with this riveting passage:

"When he woke in the woods in the dark and the cold of the night he'd reach out to touch the child sleeping beside him. Nights dark beyond darkenss and the days more gray each one than what had gone before. Like the onset of some cold glaucoma dimming away the world. His hand rose and fell softly with each precious breath. He pushed away the plastic tarpaulin and raised himself in the stinking robes and blankets and looked toward the east for any light but there was none. In the dream from which he'd wakened he had wandered in a cave where the child led him by the hand. Their light playing over the wet flowstone walls. Like pilgrims in a fable swallowed up and lost among the inward parts of some granitic beast. Deep stone flues where the water dripped and sang. Tolling in the silence the minutes of the earth and the days of it and the years without cease."

In the first and last sentences, series of short phrases evoke the awful rhythm of the hopeless gray days the unnamed father and his child must keep slogging through. The similes, "like the onset of some cold glaucoma dimming away the world" and "like pilgrims...swallowed up and lost," make us feel the weight of the man's despair.

Like many contemporary writers, McCarthy uses sentence fragments freely, preferring shorter, unpunctuated half-sentences to longer, more complex ones. His images don't flow smoothly past our eyes; rather, each punctures the darkness for an instant, then is swallowed up again.

But there's music here, in the sound of the water that sang and in the sounds of the words themselves: woke in the woods; days more gray; cold glaucoma; wakened...wandered...where the child led him; flowstone. (I thought McCarthy had made up that last lovely word, but it's in the dictionary.)

The scenario of The Road  is so depressing that I wanted to close the book after the first page. Why didn't I? It's McCarthy's stark, hypnotic style that forces us to stay on this terrible journey.