Desolation row

No American writer since Faulkner has wandered so willingly into the swamp waters of deviltry and redemption; the best of McCarthy's ``later" novels -- ``All the Pretty Horses" and ``The Crossing" -- have suggested a turn toward some kinder piece of naturalism. But the problem with a talent so large-spirited and idiosyncratic is that it lends itself to parody. In his 2005 novel, ``No Country for Old Men," he delivered a bone-chilling morality play about a psychopath stalking the good guys with a cattle gun; the scant hope of the novel belonged to a reactionary sheriff who longed for the old days and his wife's cooking.

Sheriff Bell would be a whole lot sadder still were he around to witness the world of ``The Road," a post apocalyptic horror story set to a dirge. Unfolding in a spartan, precise narrative that mirrors the bleakness of its nuclear winter, the novel follows a nameless man and his son through the wrenching specifics of trying to live through one day, then the next, for no reason beyond each other. It's Beckett at its most gritty: You-must-go-on-I-can't-go-on, with ash in the skies and dead oceans and cannibals roaming the ruined earth.

Yeah, the cannibals got to me too. A post apocalyptic novel can obviously only take you so far, and there are moments in ``The Road" that don't seem so much preposterous (granted, we would have to eat something) as they do hokey -- I kept seeing zombies in my mind's eye, which is not a good image recommendation for serious literature. Still, beyond the inherent technical difficulties of concocting the unthinkable, McCarthy has rendered a greater and more subtle story that makes ``The Road" riveting. The exterior action is swift and direct: How far will they get that day? Will they find food or escape the treacherous wind on a freezing beach at night? This essentially spare and unsparing landscape carves the way for the more important interior story: As the man's memories leave him -- he abandons a photograph of his beloved wife, now dead, and then regrets his action -- the essence of life itself begins to leak away.