“The Road” Lost Scene

Filed Under Books

I started reading Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road” — soon to be a major motion picture! — this evening. I haven’t picked up any of his other titles, though I did very much enjoy the film adaptation of “No Country for Old Men.” At the moment, I’m 50 pages in and will probably finish it over the long weekend.

Being a bit of a grammar Nazi, a grammar Nazi who also failed to assassinate Hitler, it took me a few pages to get used to McCarthy’s style. Contractions don’t have have hyphens, dialogue isn’t in quotes, and so forth. Almost all the paragraphs are separated from one another by triple spacing, which is an odd stylistic choice because I thought that was only done to shift the point of view or suggest a passage of time. Here it just sort of pads things out.

At any rate, McCarthy also has a very, very dreary tone. The book is set after some time after a catastrophic event (my money’s on Sarah Palin’s 2012 presidential bid) turned the planet into a giant charcoal briquette, hence the melancholia. But I find McCarthy’s narrative voice bordering on self-parody. It’s so morose, yet the heroes — a nameless father and his nameless young son — are somehow able to cope with all the horror going on around them as they travel down an empty road, heading south. And boy, isn’t how understated everything is that much more profound?!

So without further ado, what follows is my attempt at biting McCarthy’s style in a lost scene from “The Road:”

It was very cold, very wet, and very, very gray. The man wakened shortly before dawn broke. His boy was still asleep in his arms. Shivering and rail thin. He was so very thin. Rain marched heavily on their lean-to. It was cold. Wet. And gray.

Very gray.

The man silently left the tent. Cold, wet, gray rainfall was falling from the black sky. Black as a gravedigger’s cornhole.

He heard the boy calling out to him from inside the lean-to. He said: Papa, you there?

I am, said the man.

Rain still gray?

Grayer than all get out.

Im okay with it bein gray.

Me, too.

They were each other’s world entire.

-Brad Lohan

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