The Road by Cormac McCarthy

23:14Rebecca Schinsky:Because like suddenly no kind, like the stuff, other stuff he does is pretty specific when you think about it. You know, the motels and what people are wearing and like where the guns are. And Blood Meridian, I guess, is closest to this in its fable-like terms. But this, we don't know where they are, right? They're maybe headed towards the coast. The only clue about geography at all is that they pass a billboard that says Sea Rock City. And I only know about this from my childhood, taking road trips from the Midwest to the south, where you drive through towards Rock City is a tourist attraction in Chattanooga, Tennessee.

23:52So I was like, OK, there's somewhere in the south and they're headed toward the coast. They're trying to get warmer. They don't even know if it's going to be warmer there because everything is covered in ash. And there's that hint that they haven't seen the sun since this event happened because the boy asks at one point, could a bird fly high enough to see the sun? Right. Yeah.

24:13Rebecca Schinsky:And the Rock City, I think you're right. I think probably it is that, but also Rock City is a generic enough like roadside attraction name that's sort of everywhere. But if you had to guess, they're probably headed towards the Gulf. Yeah. down somewhere that would be my guess in there. So that, I think it makes sense. I don't think it's hyperbole to think about it this way. And you have here that's dedicated to a son. We're going to talk more about, let's save talking about a son and the things that come in when we get to it here. McCarthy himself, born in Providence, Rhode Island, 1933, raised primarily in Tennessee.

24:48Rebecca Schinsky:Hardscrabble life. He went to the University of Tennessee, joined the Air Force, read a bunch of books in the Air Force. It sounds like mostly what he did in the Air Force, then goes back to school, drops out, starts writing, wins some awards, and wants to be a writer, Rebecca. I think it's as simple as that. He debuts with The Orchard Keeper in 1965. This is the story of a lot of writers who publish several well-regarded books in a row. They get published, they have someone at a house that cares about them, but it's not really happening. And then they break through. I mean, Franzen and McCarthy are so different in so many ways, but I think they have become symbols of something and differently.

25:30Rebecca Schinsky:But they have this thing in common where they're writing these early novels that got positive reviews and then nothing happened. And then only later does something happen for their careers. Nothing happened for a long time for Cormac McCarthy. And there's a way of looking at his career that is kind of a microcosm of what he's talking about in the road of like, just keep going. Yeah, that the debut is 1965. In 1981, he wins a MacArthur Fellowship, the Genius Grant, as we call it colloquially. Fund the arts. Ring the bell. Fund the arts. Fund the arts. And then in 1985, Blood Meridian comes out.

26:07And that is the first big Cormac McCarthy moment. But that's 20 years after his debut. And he did just keep running up that hill until it happened. But he would turn down paying gigs because he had enough living on what he called simple accommodations.

26:26Rebecca Schinsky:This is my line. I won't make you say it. But the man knew from canned food, which he builds into the road. Big look for canned food in the road. But the phrase he's built different gets tossed around but I think McCarthy really was built different where I don't think and I don't know the man but he was alive he I don't think his I don't even think it was disdain his disinterest in literary celebrity was real like he wanted to write books and think about things and live his little life and not be um distracted by the world and so he wrote seriously and also I think it helps to cultivate the kind of idiosyncrasy that can lead to durable legacy because you are different because you are kind of evolving on that on it's like there's all these weird animals in madagascar which is just off the coast of africa right because they've been sort of evolving for millions of years by themselves right and so you get ring-tailed lemurs that jump on spiky trees that no one else can possibly live on and he's a weirdo man and you know another ring the bell for weirdos.

27:32Rebecca Schinsky:But by 92, oh, sorry, go ahead. I would say he just wasn't interested. Like, I think he wanted to be a writer, but not a capital W writer. Like he wasn't interested in running in the writerly circles, in the glamorous parts of writing. He definitely was not interested in the publicity parts. He just wanted to do this work. And he spent the last couple decades of his life living in the American Southwest in and around Santa Fe and was deeply connected to the Santa Fe Institute, which funds a lot of scientific research. And he's on the record in the few places where he was ever on the record, talking about how he really did not care for being around other writers.

28:08He was much more interested in talking to scientists and talking about like real tangible things and kind of intellectual approaches to the world and ideas, but not through the lens. Like he didn't want to talk about his art. This is not like black turtlenecks and bongo drums with Cormac McCarthy.

28:27Rebecca Schinsky:And, you know, I think there is a double recursive effect there, which he wasn't interested in through the literary circles. You know, he didn't live in New York. He's not an MFA. He's not sitting on awards panels and participating in that literary economy, neither reaping the rewards nor paying the price, so to speak, of exposure to it. and then in by 1992 all the pretty horses wins the national book award wins the national book critic circles with award it sells well there's two more books in it this is one of those things if it's called all the horses and not all the pretty horses or just wonder the horses yeah by Cormac McCarthy it is it's it's quite good um I really call the pretty horses I think I've read the other two in the Border Trilogy, but I don't remember.

29:15Rebecca Schinsky:It's been 25 years at this point. Don't at me. And then in 2005, No Country for Old Men, which then gets turned into the Coen Brothers 2007 movie, No Country for Old Men, which is excellent. It has become itself, it is one of the great movies of the 21st century. I'm sure when Gilbert gets around to those, that will make an appearance on the list. Yeah, the movie overall has a better reception than the book does. Mixed reviews for the book, No Country for Old Men, but the film is considered one of the best of the early 21st century. Yeah. And McCarthy, for all of his disinterest in literary stardom or that, Milou, he did write plays and he did write screenplays.

29:57Rebecca Schinsky:He was interested in movies and wrote for them. So he liked to work, but he also could have just, I've never seen him comment to like, what is it he liked about movies? Why write The Passenger? Why do some of these other things? What's Cormac McCarthy's Letterboxd? Yeah, wild stuff. And No Country for Old Men apparently was originally conceived of as a screenplay that he turned into a novel. And so it is mostly dialogue because screenplay is like mostly dialogue with some description. And that could be a good description of No Country for Old Men. His personal life, Rebecca, we need to talk about it a little bit.

30:32Rebecca Schinsky:Thrice married, thrice divorced. Over time. One short marriage, one long marriage, one median marriage. Maybe most germane to an ongoing conversation and reckoning with McCarthy is, was it two years ago this story broke? That when McCarthy was 42, he began a relationship that turned physical with a then 16-year-old girl named Augusta Britt. They were in connection for the next 47 years. She revealed this story, called herself his muse in a Vanity Fair article. And her description of it, Rebecca, we talked to this on the Book of Red podcast is broke, was... Is it fair to say it was a positive description?

31:16Rebecca Schinsky:Like it was an affirming? Yes. It doesn't fit neatly into boxes about how we might understand this relationship. I find it myself quite difficult to reckon with. And I think that is okay to be difficult to not exactly know what to do with this. Yeah, I think that we want to believe women about these things that happened to them. And that extends to believing Augusta Britt that a relationship that began when she was underage was something that she experienced as positive and meaningful, that even after the romantic and sexual portions of the relationship faded away and McCarthy was married to multiple people during these 47 years that they were connected to each other, they did stay in connection.

32:00And she valued that relationship with him. That seems to have been, I think, received generally by the public. Like there hasn't been a big call to cancel McCarthy. Maybe some of that is because he was dead by the time the news came out. I think that some of it does stem from the way that Brit characterizes the relationship. And, you know, I mean, Barack Obama has got all the pretty horses on the list of six of the books that changed his life and is devoting a whole podcast episode on his podcast that's upcoming to it. So that, I think, really tells us something about how we, the American readers, have decided to receive that bit of information about McCarthy.

32:42Yeah.

32:43Rebecca Schinsky:But I still think for people who, you know, maybe are listening to this episode because they want to know what the deal is, you should know. I think I don't also want to, that maybe we collectively decided to continue to engage with the work of Cormac McCarthy. I also don't think it's a authorization of this behavior. Like he probably should have gone to jail, right? You know, like he probably should have gone to jail, Rebecca. Like he should have. Don't start, when you're 42, don't start a relationship with a 16 year old. Don't do this. End of sentence. End of sentence. And this is, I think, the first time that we've had an author with something like this come up on the show, but it won't be the last.

33:16And we do want to reckon with great works by people who maybe either weren't great or did some things that were not good. And we are troubling that line and working through how to understand the division between the art and the artist all the time, just as everyone else who engages with any kind of art is. We don't have a solid answer. We've been all over the map and kind of moved around our solutions to this and our responses to it in our almost 20 years of doing this kind of work, both together and individually. So as we approach these kinds of authors, we will sometimes talk about people who have not great stuff in their pasts, and we want to put it on the table and also allow ourselves to consider it in the context of the work.

34:05Yeah.

34:06Rebecca Schinsky:And if it's the kind of story in which you're like, you know what, that's a no for me, dog. I understand that, too. Totally fair. I absolutely do at the same time. After he passed away, he left a collection of 20 ,000 books and 2 ,000 of them with personal annotations. I guess when all you do is write and really don't do much else, you're reading a lot and you've got time with a pen in hand to read. There is a work underway to digitize that somehow. I would love to see his notes on other kinds of things. Marginalia by authors. My own marginalia is interesting enough that I can only imagine actually having sort of scannable access to the marginalia notes of the writers that I know and care about and what they said about each other in the margin when no one was looking.

34:53Rebecca Schinsky:It is interesting that we were just doing Franzen because they're writing in the same time. So they were having similar sort of strike points. Six years after the Franzen ruckus, Oprah selected the road for her book club on the heels of its Pulitzer win. So it had already won. So that's interesting. Early 2007 when this happened. And he decided to do the show and did the show. I would guess at this point, after the Franzen ruckus, the bookers of the Oprah situation gets a yes, you will come on the show if we call your name. Right. Sort of like a pre-handshake handshake, Rebecca. And not for nothing, this is the first yes Cormac McCarthy ever gave in his career to a TV interview.

35:42And you can watch it online. I had a great afternoon earlier this week.

35:47Rebecca Schinsky:You have charming in all caps here. Like, give us the vibes on CM, on Oprah. All that I knew of Cormac McCarthy before this was what I know from Internet discourse and from the way people talk about him and the sort of aura around the work. Which is the worst way to know. Anyway, yeah, it's terrible. It's the worst way. But they're, you know, like they're sitting in a library at the Santa Fe Institute. They're in like big leather. She went to him. She did go to him. They're in big leather armchairs. And McCarthy, like, he looks comfortable. It's kind of a like chambray shirt, slacks, cowboy boots.

36:22And he's kind of slumped. He's slumped in his chair, not in a disinterested way, but in just like he's comfortable. Like he just plopped into the chair, put his chin up on his fist and they're just chatting. And I found him to he comes across at least as very comfortable in his own skin, thoughtful about his responses, sure of what he wants to say to her. like it did not I've watched a lot of author interviews and there's not any posturing like he's not trying to prove anything to Oprah or to the people watching Oprah but he shows up to you know kiss the ring for the Oprah book club and he engaged with it in a way that I found to be like for all of the like manly men doing manly things of the McCarthy aura I just found him to come off as like warm and charming and thoughtful and a good conversation partner.

37:12And it was quite surprising in a way that I was delighted by.

37:16Rebecca Schinsky:That's fascinating. I wonder why he did it. Probably because at that point, they know that if you say no to going on Oprah, the press backlash. But do you think that would have come out? Like just what I did. I mean, I'm assuming there was some sort of pre-handshake, handshake. It's also different of Franzen saying no, who's out there like doing all these like small interviews. Like it's a different kind of no. Yeah. You know, and I think McCarthy. I don't know. I do think they're different. Like Franzen, you know, wanted to be perceived as literary and cares about that time cover. Yeah. He did not want to be, you know, lumped in with what he considered to be like schmaltzy fiction that Oprah picked.

37:58Certainly by 2007, when she makes this choice for The Road, she had picked some high art literature. Like Anna Karenina has been a pick. Faulkner's been there. Morrison has been on. But I just think McCarthy was uninterested in all of that. So it was probably like he's in his 60s at that point. He definitely doesn't have anything to prove. Why not? Maybe it's as easy as why not? And she's willing to come to him. And when she asked, she says to him, like, this is your first TV interview. How come you don't do these? He says, if you spend a lot of time thinking about how to write a book, you shouldn't be talking about it.

38:34You should be doing it. And Oprah is like, okay, so you don't have anything against the press or media or anything. And he says, no, just you work your side of the street and I'll work mine. And it's delivered in this like warm, natural, like he just doesn't have a dog in the fight. It was delightful. I really encourage you, if you have any interest in this or you need to like bust your own myths about Cormac McCarthy, go watch those Oprah interviews.

38:59Rebecca Schinsky:I think you work your side of the street, I'll work mine. We could use a little more of that in a lot of different ways, but I'll leave that as read. And then again, died recently. I mean, within the last three years, complications of prostate cancer at the age of 89. He's 89. Really only, I don't want to say only, but the last major addition to the McCarthy corpus is this very strange double volume release of the passenger and still a Maris which I found amazing and strange and difficult to wrap my arms around in all the ways that I guess I want McCarthy or really anyone to do has only grown in the estimation of my mind We have like five McCarthy's to get through on Zero to Well-Read, so it's going to be like 70 years if we're still doing this that we'll get to the patches you're in Stella Maris.

39:57Rebecca Schinsky:But it is not a minor sort of last gasp work. It is the result of something. It's much nerdier. There's a bunch of math in it. You can tell he's been dining in whatever the mess hall of the Santa Fe Institute because there's a lot of cross-pollination of different fields and combinatorial mathematics and biology. It's very, very strange. but there is there is a through line I'll talk about here in a minute when we get to some of the themes of the road and then the passenger and Stella Maris um all right Rebecca I'll clear out for you this was your first time reading Cormac McCarthy's The Road it was and as I said at the top like I mean I loved it this is I think going on my Mount Rushmore of reading experiences just individually the biggest delta between what I expected and what the book actually is but it's vivid and visceral and heavy and quiet and so compelling like it doesn't feel like a page turner but I didn't want to step away from it like once I was in that world I just I felt like McCarthy had me by the throat and just like you're gonna be in this chair until we're done here, lady.

41:11Rebecca Schinsky:Because you want to know what happens. I mean, you want to know, you know, we're going to spoil it. We haven't quite spoiled the end yet, but we will in the talking about it because you have to because that's part of the book. It's like you want to know what happens and it has its own momentum and gravitational pull to sort of be in here and see what happens to these two people and how they negotiated themselves. Yeah. And I think the structure of the book really contributed to that for me. There are no chapter breaks. It's just one long story where there's a few open lines between different vignettes or like the big sections.

41:42But it adds to the impression that you're in one ongoing kind of never ending slog with these people. And the book, the reading does not feel like a slog, but they are certainly experiencing a slog. I don't know how he does

41:56Rebecca Schinsky:that, by the way. That's the thing you just described. I don't get it. I don't get how it works yeah and i'm guessing the delta i'm guessing the delta if if anything is the the beating heart tender core of the book yes is a surprise to most people who haven't read it yeah that i think of mccarthy as really muscular prose anton chigur you know yeah yes yeah but i actually and i think he gets lumped into the conversation about like late 20th century early 21st century old white guys concerned with maybe a toxic version of masculinity as we think about it now but i actually found this to be quite a positive presentation of masculinity that the man is soft the um really gentle with his son very loving they hold hands a lot there's a lot of like reassurance and comfort.

42:52And the father is the one who stays. It's not the mother. And almost anybody else would have written this as the father peaced out and the mother is there, which is a valid story to tell too, but that's a, that is a choice. That's a choice.

43:05Rebecca Schinsky:Yeah. You know, and you get stories that do the, you know, the wolf and cub trope is a common one going back where you have a older, usually man, like I think the wolf and cub may be an exclusively sort of gendered dynamic of tough guy samurai you know mandalorian and grogu is wolf and cub like you see this over you know wolverine and jubilee though jubilee has powers and his cub is not quite fair and so that's a trope that you get over and over again but the what you don't get in those you get like glimpses of tenderness like it's a begrudging like i've come to love you and you know because and that you're seeing the the the man in the metal melt That's a weird alliteration there.

43:46Rebecca Schinsky:But in this one, it's there from the beginning. Like that's where we start. And it's not called upon. It's not a mercenary. It's not accidental. It's chosen. It's intentional. It's durable. And then combined with that, it's contingent, it's fraught, it's existentially painful and opens up the question of what does it really mean to care for this person? And the range of possibilities of care extend to things like, I've got two bullets in this gun and maybe that is the fatherly, parental, humane thing to do. The book doesn't want to say yes to that, but it doesn't want to say no. the whole time.

44:30Rebecca Schinsky:And the father is always wondering, should I do this? Should I do this? Should I do this? Up until his very end, Rebecca. Yeah. It's a permanent question across the text. I know you read this when it first came out, and you told me yesterday that it was your first time revisiting it since having kids. So what's it like now? Do you remember your first reading? I do. I misremembered the end a little bit. And this is where I'll spoil it. I thought the dad kind of handed him off like a baton to the group, but he actually dies. He doesn't know the kid gets handed. It happens pretty quickly for us. Like we don't have a lot of, oh my God.

45:14Rebecca Schinsky:And it couldn't because the nine-year-old is not going to last that long. And so that came as a surprise to me. And I don't, again, since I had read it, I don't know what it would be like to read it for the first time now with kids. I can experience it this way. I knew what I was in for, I guess what I'm saying, Rebecca. So I could kind of, if not shield my heart, gird my fatherly heartloins for it. I don't know that it's that different. I think the amplitude is increased. Like, I think there's more. It doesn't it's a difference in kind, a degree, not kind, I guess, is the best way to say that there.

45:56Rebecca Schinsky:I think that though it is a father and son or a child and parent, it's not about masculinity or it's not about masculinity, except to say that this is one version of masculine, but it could also be one version of maternity. I think it could be one version of friendship. Like there's other stories we get where there's two people. Right. Right. Like almost a Thelma and the Louise, like is a similar kind of an interesting parallel of the end of the decision they make at the end of Thelma Louise. Right. Like, is one person enough to live for is really the question at the heart of this. And and go ahead.

46:30And if you die or if you know that you're going to die, what is the kindest thing to do for the person who might be left behind? Is it to have them be left behind or is it in the case of the father and the son where the father has the power? Would the kind thing be? Yeah, he's a steward, right?

46:46Rebecca Schinsky:He's a guardian in a way that a peer, you wouldn't make that decision for someone that's sort of your own age or something like that. Would the greatest expression of care be to also end it for his child? And there are these moments through the text where he promises the boy, like, I'm not going to send you into the darkness alone. Alone. Yeah. It's not that I'm not going to send you. You're not going to go alone is the promise. Yes. And we come to understand, like, over the course of the novel, that what that means is that the father has been planning when he knows his life is ending to also kill the boy.

47:15And he ultimately can't make that choice. He can't do it. choice.

47:19Rebecca Schinsky:Yeah. And they, they trouble the line over and over again. And that piece is more intense. I think that my kids are a little older matters because there's something about an eight or nine or 10 year old that is tender. They're so tender, but they're also seeing things, right. And they're processing things differently. And you can't really lie to them. Um, we were never parents that did lying to our kids, we would maybe omit or deflect or hold in a band sometimes. And the father doesn't lie to his kid here either. He maybe is overly optimistic or feigns optimism in ways he may not feel, but it's not a lie.

48:05Rebecca Schinsky:And in caring for the boy and understanding the terrain of his care, you know i think he kind of rediscovered he kind of re-establishes what it means to be a human person right um and it can be built you can reconstruct humanity in the the upper or maybe the lowercase humanity with one grain of sand and as that is you and me and we're getting through it and that's all you need that's all everything else is predicated upon that everything else This is a predicate upon that. Yeah, that there are so many moments in this book that are like really spare and bleak. There are moments of just gut punching horror.

48:48And then it's all punctuated by these glimpses of quiet beauty. And those are the moments that make the rest of it bearable. And as you were saying at the top of the show, that is also what it's like to be in the world that they're in. It's like we as readers get a little, there's a little postmodernism happening. Yeah.

49:07Rebecca Schinsky:Yeah. Can I do the trick of making you feel the thing that's being felt in some way that's possible in this medium? Yeah. And those little bits of beauty are enough to keep them going and are enough to keep the man like pushing forward and trying to care for this boy. The book is, on the whole, just, like, so much more human and so much more humane than I thought. And McCarthy gives us this, like, full spectrum of human responses to a cataclysm like this. Like, you can be the man and the boy trying desperately to be the good guys. They don't want to hurt anyone. They don't want to take so much food from someone else's store that they would end up inadvertently or sort of by a product of it killing those people.

49:52But they also encounter people who have taken slaves. And as they work their way through the American South, they do end up on a property at one point that in the way it's described sounds like it was a plantation of a big house with some cabins behind it. And McCarthy is wrestling with all of that, with the evil things that people do, not just in a moment like this, but the evil things that we did when the world was still the world as we knew it. Yeah.

50:17Rebecca Schinsky:And you get the spectrum of human responses. And some of that is that you then become unhuman if you do certain things. And there's one moment, I think, which is the nadir. And I'm not going to describe it here because it's too, I don't want to put it onto a pod, honestly. because the violence, as you say here, it's matter of fact in terms it's presented as violence, but it also means something. It's like showing something. And there's this one moment that you realize that is the, whatever humanity is, that is not it, what this one group does. And we realize it, readers, and the father and son realize it.

50:51Rebecca Schinsky:And we kind of bounce off the bottom of that. And I think they kind of pass a kind of trial at some point where they realize we're not going to be those people. Whatever it comes to, we're going to use the gun, we're going to walk into the water, but we're not going to be doing the thing to survive that would cause us to lose our humanities because we are the good guys. We carry the fire. And that fire, I think, is of decency, of fellow feeling, of an idea of morality of all, of existing on a plane. I think it's maybe just one level, Rebecca. It may only be one level above existing, but is a level above it.

51:30Yes. Yeah. And I think it's important that the violence like it's never gratuitous and no one that we're close to as readers relishes it. It's always like the last resort and the thing that they are trying to avoid. And it is in service of maintaining that humanity because there are moments where the expedient thing to do for their immediate survival would be to do something horrible and violent.

51:58Rebecca Schinsky:Shoot first, ask questions later. Yes, absolutely. And they're not willing to make that compromise. It's just really like the story makes really apparent that hierarchy of needs that we talk about. Big look for Maslow. Right. Just food, clothing, shelter, and weather takes up so much mental space. And that's sort of the entire 200 and some odd pages is them just trying to manage their daily existence around those things without harming anyone else. And it's that commitment to not harming anyone else that makes the book, I think, so potent and so powerful and distinguishes it for me from a lot of the other post-apocalyptic art and literature.

52:42This is not like, you know, we've got to take them down before they take us down.

52:47Rebecca Schinsky:Or The Walking Dead or Lost where like there's some fun in the figuring it out. Right. Or there's some adventure like it's or, you know, this is there's no good piece. of this. There's no good piece. There's no part of this that's a playground. Like it's a, you know, the fan, the survivalist fantasy of everything will be stripped away and I'll be left with my hunting knife and 50 gallon jug of peanut butter and let's see what happens. Like that's not what this book is about. You get these moments of reprieve, like, you know, picking up dried apples never sounded so great. But you know, they can't last, you know, you get a little, you get small moments of them working together to figure out a situation.

53:29Rebecca Schinsky:The structure is they're trying to get to the coast, mostly because that's a place to go. And as often as the sea or rivers suggest transit and possibility in life, so there's an element of going to the water that's both expedient but also symbolic. But it's also just something to do other than sit there, right, to keep moving. And they have these series of encounters. And I was looking at it this time differently, Rebecca? I was like, okay, are these like parables of themselves? Is it like in the Inferno situation or like in the mode of the Odyssey? Are they playing with different ideas? I think less so, but kind of because each encounter has a little bit different spin of what are they going to do?

54:12Rebecca Schinsky:What am I going to do? What is the agreement that's going on here? How are we negotiating it? And it all kind of leads to the final encounter the boy has where he finally just has to give himself up to this group that he encountered because he has no he has no choices dad's dead and yeah he's got to go with these people and believe them that they are the good guys and yeah and it feels as he walks off with them like that's true it feels like he's going to be okay yes it feels like he's going to be okay and that matters for the book i think this is a situation where the end hugely matters for the book if today's episode is brought to you by jeremy robinson tiago palma and vault comics the best in fantasy sci-fi and horror graphic novels now this graphic novel i have to tell you about features a very unique pairing i personally love like the demons exorcism kind of story and that's here but like i said it's unique here we have a pure of heart nun sister josephine who gets tricked, deceived, hoodwinked into attending a deadly and disastrous exorcism.

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58:47Rebecca Schinsky:I'm not even going to talk about the things that this could have happened. I'm sure McCarthy considered them. I think you had down lower and maybe the trivia or whatever that he wasn't sure himself how it was going to end. Because the additional idea was, what does the world look like in 150 years? And he's riding along the road and how it goes. There's versions that are much more hopeful, right? I'm thinking of the end of some of our, another shared favorite book that is post-apocalyptic, but of a different degree is Station 11 in which they see lights return, electric lights return to the hill.

59:21Rebecca Schinsky:And that is an upward trajectory about all of civilization, right? Okay, if we can do this, now we can start putting things back together again. This is not that, right? All we get is the continuity of life that this particular story will go on. That's it. That's all we get. And that's all you end up needing here. Like you get to my paperback, I think, was 285 pages. And through most of it, the central tension is the tension between the man wanting to stay alive and keep the boy alive and have them be together versus wanting his suffering to end and wanting the pain of the everyday existence to end.

1:00:03And there's this wonderful passage where McCarthy writes, maybe he understood for the first time that to the boy he was himself an alien. a being from a planet that no longer existed, the tales of which were suspect. He could not construct for the child's pleasure the world he lost without constructing the loss as well, and he thought perhaps the child had known this better than he. He tried to remember the dream, but he could not. All that was left was the feeling of it. He thought perhaps they'd come to warn him. Of what? That he could not enkindle in the heart of the child what was ashes and his own?

1:00:37Even now, some part of him wished they'd never found this refuge. some part of him always wished it to be over. And a few pages later, there were few nights lying in the dark that he did not envy the dead. Yeah.

1:00:51Rebecca Schinsky:And the answer to the question that the father doesn't know that we know is that the ashes of his own heart can enkindle, can spark in the kid. Like it does, the fire does get carried on. And I think he also doesn't know that his heart is not ash now. The last glimmer. You know, a never ending story where, like all of, I can't remember the world's name of Neverending Story, but it's all but a grain of sand is left, but that's all they need to rebuild the world. And all that's left is even the question is good enough. That's enough kindling here to build something up because he's thinking about humanity.

1:01:31Rebecca Schinsky:He's thinking about ethics. He's thinking about the well-being of another and that's enough yes that's enough and just a moment for the just incredible word choice of in kindle here kindle Like that they are the carriers of the fire, that the world is covered in ash and he is trying to light something up in his son's heart, but that he could not enkindle in the heart of the child what was ashes in his own. Like the whole book is a marvel of vocabulary. Yes. You will learn a lot of new words if you circle every time you come across something that you don't know. You're going to do a lot of Googling.

1:02:06I did a lot of Googling. I learned what rachidic means. But enkindle, incredible verb choice. Yeah.

1:02:14Rebecca Schinsky:Fascinating. And part of that goes to that this is a masterclass in understated world building and sense building because he's creating, right? He's searching for a way to do this that hasn't been done before. And it results in having a real feel for the world without really any exposition. We don't even get a character coming in even elegantly saying, well, I've been ever since the big one hit. And, you know, we just don't know everything. So everything is revealed rather than described. So you don't know the details and the specifics of what's going on. But you also realize that it doesn't. It just, in this situation, it does not matter at all.

1:02:54Rebecca Schinsky:Like the world and the style is stripped down. but then you get these little sparks, these little flares of realizations and observations and images and beauty, much like the world that I'm living in. It's like it's gray, gray, gray, ash, ash, ash, can of pears. You know, gray, gray, gray, gray, gray, can of Coke. Got that can of Coke. Yeah, I have a stray thought about that here in a minute. But like one of the parodies of like grunge music is loud, soft, loud, soft. And there's an element to that here of the modulating. But Greg, it's not unbroken, but the oasis of color or of calorie that you may encounter here is so intense.

1:03:35Rebecca Schinsky:Or just a good night's sleep of being warm. Warm, yeah, a warm blanket. So this is horror. I don't know if we've talked about this. This is a horror novel. And I'm calling it lyrical horror. Love that. To coin a phrase if that's possible. Probably someone else said something along those lines. we talked about this. He says that he considers in some ways co-authored by his son as some of the dialogue is directly taken from things he said. I can't imagine what exactly that would be. Maybe the good guys or questions. Are you going to be with me? Like some of those really like four or five year old kinds of things to ask.

1:04:10They do a lot of like, the son is upset about something and the man is saying, you've got to talk to me. And the son says, I am talking to you. Are you talking? Are you talking? Are you talking?

1:04:21Rebecca Schinsky:Yeah. Are we okay? I'm okay. Are we going to be okay? Are we the good guys? How do you know? Like the dialogue is very simple and direct. And McCarthy's son was six when the book came out. And so also notably one of the writers that we've discussed to you, like has a child later in life. And that there seems to be some particular magic that happens with a later in life child. I can only imagine. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. He stood on the book for a while after this initial idea, then wrote it in six weeks. Totally believe that. I believe that. Yeah. It joins Their Eyes Were Watching God on our Ziruwea can of things that were written quickly.

1:05:00Rebecca Schinsky:That was written in like six or nine weeks as well. So something I felt reading in Stella Maris that I didn't catch here, but I think McCarthy, unlike most writers, question marks, thinks that the universe is not necessarily chaotic, good, chaotic, neutral, and humans are the bad guys. I think he thinks that if human feeling and consciousness were taken away that the universe is not only dark but there may be something malevolent behind this. There's this image in Stella Maris of like the gates of the universe cracking open and there's something back. There's like a monster back there. Like not that it's going to come out and get us all but that cracking away and stripping away the human construction and language and feeling and culture.

1:05:46Rebecca Schinsky:we're not left with the sunshine and rainbows necessarily like there's something else back there and early in this book um this is a quote we see on the far shore a creature that raised its dripping mouth from the rimstone pool and stared into the light with eyes dead white and as sightless as the eggs of spiders it swung its head low over the water as if to take the scent of what it could not see crouching there pale and naked and translucent its alabaster bones cast up in shadow on the rocks behind it, its bowels, its beating heart. The brain pulsed in a dull glass bell. It swung its head from side to side and then gave out a low moan and turned and lurched and loped soundlessly into the dark.

1:06:31Rebecca Schinsky:So like the one real living non-human thing we see is sort of a, it's like a dread terror of non-being. Isn't this in a dream that he has? He's always having really bad dreams. Yeah. Sure. But even as a dream, like this is the nature of his dreaming. Yes. All the dreams are bad. Nightmares are the way of it in this world for sure. But I think on the other side of the human, McCarthy's like, are we sure it's dolphins only? Right. You know? Right. Yeah. So there we go. All right. I think I've gotten everything else on the main chunk of what it's about. It's necessarily going to leak into our other sections here.

1:07:08Rebecca Schinsky:Anything, Rebecca, you want to get in before we move on to straight thoughts? No, I'm ready for straight thoughts. All right. Go for it. You leave us. Okay. I'm fascinated by his punctuation choices. This is like sort of on the page with McCarthy all the time. It's in his interviews with Oprah as well. But there are no quotation marks here. And then more notably, like you can follow the dialogue because it is so simple. You know who's speaking even without quotation marks. But there are no apostrophes in many of the contractions. Did you notice this? It's like he didn't or he wouldn't. And there's just no apostrophe between the N and the T.

1:07:40And I don't know what that does other than it keeps the language looking really smooth on the page and you just kind of flow through it. McCarthy name checks Joyce and Ulysses a lot. But I just thought it was so interesting when I noticed that because I didn't know about the Ulysses of it all when I was reading it.

1:07:57Rebecca Schinsky:Yeah. Interesting. Yeah. I also just never really thought about it until I noticed how many references to dreams there are in the text. But it makes sense that in a world where you don't really have time for interior life because everything is just day-to-day survival, dreams start to loom so large. Like, we know a lot about what the man dreams about. And he spends time kind of dwelling in the dream he had last night or this dream that he remembers. It's just haunting and was an element of this kind of survival story that I had never noticed in a different one before. And there's like a survival strategy around dreams the father is passing on to the son.

1:08:38Rebecca Schinsky:It's like it's good that your dreams are scary. When you're dreaming about things being other worlds, that's when you've given up. Yeah. Right? That this thing is not survivable. There's a scene, there's a dream the boy has that he doesn't want to talk about. It's like the scariest dreams. It's the scariest dream that he will talk about. He has scarier dreams that he won't talk about. But right on the line is this dream about this wind-up toy penguin that was moving with a turner. Oh, yeah. That really freaked him out. And I lingered on that. And I think it is, again, something about the sentient, unhuman that terrifies us.

1:09:14Rebecca Schinsky:A wolf is not as scary as a toy that should not be moving by itself that we don't understand where that locomotion is originating. How is this thing moving? How is this thing working? Yeah. A little bit lighter, Straythought. You've got more. You've got more. There's this great flashback to life before where we find out that the man had been, they had a deck of playing cards early in this apocalyptic moment, and that the man had been inventing games to play with the cards and teaching them to the boy. And he's given them names like Abnormal Fescue and Cat Barf. And I just thought you would be great at this.

1:09:55This is one of your callings in life. Yeah, I do like to do this. I don't know what you're going to name your post-apocalyptic card games, but I feel like you would be in the bag for that.

1:10:03Rebecca Schinsky:I don't quite do this, but I do think here's one from the personal stash of parenting of me is that we, you know, when the kids were little, we'd go to the river and just like throw rocks and, you know, do the kinds of thing. And for some reason, every now and again, you'll find a rock that it's eroded in like three dots or a couple of dots. and I found one that looked exactly like a pig and I told my kids, oh, look at this. It's a pig-nosed rock. That's good luck. I'm like, oh my God. And they didn't realize until talking with friends later that doesn't exist. Pig-nosed rocks that are good luck are not a thing.

1:10:37Rebecca Schinsky:That's good dad work right there. That's a version of me. Do you want to talk about vocab? You will notice it. Did it ever take you out of the text? No. That's the always fear with the sorrow-fying. I don't know what it might be. It didn't, because it didn't feel like McCarthy was trying to be flashy to me. It felt like this guy just knows a lot of words and that he's reaching for them as they seem appropriate. Rachidic is over relating to rickets, but I didn't know that. Right, because you wouldn't say rickety because that implies just unstable. Like that's a different word. Weird. Yeah, just interesting.

1:11:15There were just a few moments, but it didn't seem important either. Like this is not a book or a world where having the right name for a thing really matters. It's just McCarthy's got this in his toolkit. And so he's using the words, but it didn't take me out of it. I've had that experience in other books where you're like, okay, we get it. You have a thesaurus, like got a 1600 on your SATs, sit down. But I didn't get that vibe from it.

1:11:40Rebecca Schinsky:And you can't really stack them. I remember one sentence. I don't know if I highlighted it. It had two of these in the same sentence. Like, that's maybe too much, you know, too much. Most people that have to look it up. Yeah, there's not a lot of polishing the penny. So I allowed it when it happened. How much work do you think the title does? We talked about this a little with all the pretty horses, but like if it's just called, if it's not called The Road, if On the Road had already been taken, like hadn't already been taken by Carowack, would this have been On the Road? Is it just The Road? Is it like you've got alternates here with the sun, tinned peaches?

1:12:17something more something more obtuse like station 11 well no country for old

1:12:23Rebecca Schinsky:men which is part of one of Tommy Lee well in the movie Tommy Lee Jones monologues I believe about time passing something more directly evocative or think Hemingway doing cribbing Shakespeare yeah or like World of Ashes

1:12:40Rebecca Schinsky:or even Blood Meridian which doesn't mean anything by itself which I think is if I remember correctly is also just a descriptor of the road like this is a blood meridian of like going across something I don't know I think it's well titled I think it doesn't detract I'm not sure that it adds I guess it doesn't win the it doesn't win the war but it doesn't lose it fair I don't know it's it's an interest I hadn't thought about alternate titles and for it never occurred to me moving on to me I guess in the vein of renaming this 10 peaches is there a greater ode to canned food? I wanted to go out and buy a bunch of canned food after this, just like to have it.

1:13:17Yeah. I mean, we probably all should just in case. Even if you die, someone else can come upon your stash of canned food.

1:13:25Rebecca Schinsky:You know, I'll do my best, but it's also like if I don't make it, you know, find your cash there and go nuts on Little Smokies.

1:13:36Rebecca Schinsky:If he were the kind of person to be interested in SpawnCon, John, Coke should have given some money because this is the most satisfying can of Coke ever consumed. They're rifling through a gas station. And I think he reaches his arm up into a vending machine. I don't remember the details now. Like there's one can of Coke and he gives it to the boys who never had it. And it's still fizzy. And you know what? Coke does rule, by the way. Maybe that's my hot take. Coke rules. And if I could get one treat in the apocalypse, it probably would be a can of regular full fat Coca-Cola, full sugar Coca-Cola classic.

1:14:10A good crispy Coke. Yeah. Do you have a moment like this in your own memory of like the best Coke?

1:14:17Rebecca Schinsky:No. I have my best cup of coffee. Ooh, tell me. Ames' delivery was long and drawn out and it was, and trust me, I did not have the worst experience of that particular situation. But it was overnight and I was waiting for the au bon pan in the hotel to open and I hadn't had much to drink or eat in a while. And I had a cup of coffee. And I feel like, Rebecca, I could feel the caffeine going. My powers are rising. Yeah, it was like, you know, Kal-El going up to the sun and getting reached. It really felt weird. Like I felt like I'd feel that individual caffeine molecules like going to my fingertips.

1:14:57Rebecca Schinsky:Like your nerve endings are coming back online. It was really weird. Probably more about the sleep deprivation than that particular burnt cup of coffee. How about you? Do you have one that you remember a particular kind of Coke? I do have a Coke one. I hiked the Camino a couple summers ago and it was like hot, really hot in Spain. And you're like a lot. We're just in these little towns along the coast. And we stopped just we made a stop to get snacks and went into basically a bodega. And they had like Coke in a really cold glass bottle. And I had that Coke and a bag of Lay's, like original Lay's potato chips.

1:15:34I was like, this is it. This is all I ever need in life. Like the salt and the sugar and the caffeine all in one. It was perfect. But that's what, when we get like glimpses of things like this in fiction, I'm always so glad that authors, when writers know to do it, because we can all relate to what that feels like. You know, like that cup of coffee after the longest night of your life or a cold Coke on a really hot day. It's a great detail.

1:15:59Rebecca Schinsky:Yeah. And they talk about the kids like, you have it all. And the kid's like, probably because I'm never going to have another one. And the dad's like, eh, probably not. Yeah, like the moments where the boy reveals like he really does know what's up. I think that's a true observation of having younger kids too that you may not necessarily get if you haven't been around kids. The gap between what you know they know and what they know can be surprising at certain times. And you kind of rubber band yourself up to it. You have to update your priors about your kids' awareness and their worldview and what they're actually grokking.

1:16:35Rebecca Schinsky:um let's see both narrows are overrepresented in apocalyptic works of fiction fiction for some reason this is the south there would be plenty of guns um the guns and ammo would last longer than the people um so that's another just observation here there's a scene i don't know if you clocked this a hell of a shot with a flare gun yes i think that's one thing that would strain strain credulity i don't i've seen the movie we'll talk about a little bit i don't remember this scene if it happened. But flare guns, especially if you've never shot one before at something, it's not really a precision instrument.

1:17:07Rebecca Schinsky:So that strained credulity just a little bit. We talked about the mother's decision getting that interaction. I'm not going to return to it here again, though that's where I had it noted. This is observation for me. I would like to stress test it with you. Does it feel like men write about bodies of water more often than women do? Rivers and lakes and oceans? I have never thought about this before. But gut check, does that a thing? Does it return a null result or is there anything to that to you? We are over-indexed on books about tall ships in my house. And tall ships, you know, are on bodies of water.

1:17:46Rebecca Schinsky:I mean, almost by death. Well, in this book, they could be proximate to bodies of water. It's true. Maybe. I think it's part of the grand masculine tradition of adventure is we've got to ford this river, get across this ocean, conquer this thing. Just a thought there. There are levels to post-apocalyptic. I think I've done this rant to you that there's actually no post-apocalyptic fiction because the real apocalypse, there's like nothing left. Right. But of the levels of apocalyptic fiction in which there is a story to tell, this is the uttermost end. Right. And you can distinguish it between something like Walking Dead or Station Eleven, because here the world is no longer, at least as we understand it, capable of essentially creating new calories to consume.

1:18:39Right. Right.

1:18:40Rebecca Schinsky:They have to consume stored calories of some kind. There is no, well, if we just farmed well enough or drew a line around this area and protect it well enough, we can, you know, the sun is shining and there's fish in the rivers. That's not what this is, Rebecca. No. It's gone. It's gone. And there are already people who have resorted to cannibalism. Yes. So that's happening. Because that's where calories are. Right. And they're probably never coming back from it. And the uttermost end just in the kinds of decisions that the characters have to make, the kinds of like real life and death questions that come up in an existence like this.

1:19:16Like, I don't think I'm ever going to forget the scene where the father is like he's just stepping away from their campsite for a little bit. He's going to go look for food or water. And he gives the boy the gun and says, like, you know what you have to do if they find you. Right. And a couple sentences later, you realize it's not you're going to have to shoot them. It's he's instructing the boy on how to shoot himself.

1:19:42Rebecca Schinsky:Shoot himself. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Which in a way, if you think about it, it is the last redoubt of individual agency is the decision to continue on or not. Yeah. And to have that taken from you is your most dehumanizing moment. I don't know if this matters, but I think this is probably a meteor strike. Like we get there's a series of thumps. Like we get this, there's thumps, the lights go out and that was it. But I don't – the other possibility is nukes of some kind. But there's not radiation here. We're not talking radiation and fallout and cancers. Like I think this is dinosaur-style nukes. It's ash that's everywhere and it's covering the world.

1:20:23Rebecca Schinsky:But it's not radioactive or poisonous. It's like they're putting mass in your mouth. But it's like natural. It's like dirt and whatever will be kicked up. So it's also not human-made. Like that's another thing when you're looking at poxia-lox fix. Like what is the message here? They're like, this is not humanity destroyed itself. This is the nature of nature, right? This is the grinning maw of chaotic bad. It's like, nature doesn't care. It'll just hit you with a meteor because it doesn't care. Right, which kind of goes back to what you were saying about what McCarthy might believe about just the nature of the universe absent human existence, that it's violent and it doesn't care.

1:21:00It doesn't care. These things can happen. A meteor doesn't have agency. A meteor just happens.

1:21:06Rebecca Schinsky:Yeah, it is agency. It is the penguin without a turner that will just hit you in some ways. Let's do quotes. How did Goodreads do, Rebecca? Number one on Goodreads is you forget what you want to remember and you remember what you want to forget. I mean, the most banal line in all of the road. Yes, like true about life as a person, but not the most notable thing in this book by far. I was shocked that this wasn't number one. This is what the good guys do. They keep trying. They don't give up. I really would have put money on that. Other things I really liked. There's a moment where they're early in the book.

1:21:44They are passing a very upsetting scene. We know what it is. The man knows what it is. And he tells the boy not to look and says, just remember that the things you put into your head are there forever. You might want to think about that. But then like these other moments of great beauty. It's snowing, the boy said. He looked at the sky, a single gray flake sifting down. he caught it in his hand and watched it expire there like the last host of Christendom. Come on! No lists of things to be done, the day providential to itself, the hour. There is no later. This is later. All things of grace and beauty, such that one holds them to one's heart, have a common providence in pain, their birth in griefs and ashes.

1:22:31So he whispered to the sleeping boy, I have you. holy crap help me out for a minute that made me um yeah i'll go down let's see um i guess you know

1:22:43Rebecca Schinsky:we're really honing in on that is like you and me and that you and me can be transferable but for me to be a me and be a human i need a you that i have a human relationship with um and this is a person who had no one would be well advised to cobble together some passable ghost. Breathe it into beating, coax it along with words of love. Offer it each phantom crumb and shield it from harm with your body. As for me, my only hope is for eternal nothingness, and I hope it with all of my heart. He knew only that the child was his warrant. He said, if it is not the word of God, God never spoke. and this is the end towards the end after the main action it's a memory it's a it's a recalling it's a conjuring of the world before the fall once there were brook trout in the streams of the mountains you could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow they smelled of moss in your hand polished and muscular and torsional.

1:23:53Rebecca Schinsky:On their backs were vermiculite patterns that were maps of the world and its becoming. Maps and mazes of a thing which could not be put back, not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived, all things were older than man, and they hummed of mystery. Art, Jeff O 'Neill. Good Lord, Rebecca Shinsky. Art. And that is why, while the movie is fine, that's that's not movie stuff you can't do that stuff remind me the end of um the river runs through it yeah we're looking at the river and like it is totemic and indicative something but also indicates something that's awesome in an elemental way of being worthy of awe and terror and horror and humbling um in its way you needed a break you want to get you still had you want Anything else here?

1:24:46Yeah, one more. I just really want to enter into the record a lot of these examples of how gorgeous the writing is for anybody who's been hesitating about the road.

1:24:55Rebecca Schinsky:Yeah, and notice it while you're reading it. Like, that's part of it, right? Yeah, yeah, great. It's part of the comfort. Like, they find blankets, and McCarthy gives us a really—a break in a moment of beauty. They trekked out along the crescent sweep of beach, keeping to the firmer sand below the tide rack. They stood, their clothes flapping softly. Glass floats covered with a gray crust, the bones of seabirds. At the tide line, a woven mat of weeds and the ribs of fishes in their millions stretching along the shore as far as the eye could see like an isocline of death. One vast sepulcher, senseless, senseless.

1:25:31Like it's bleak, but it's so beautiful.

1:25:34Rebecca Schinsky:So pretty. It's so pretty. Yeah, it's remarkable stuff. And I think that's one thing that can get lost, does get lost, always gets lost in these durable caricature portraits of writers especially. Because more people have heard of Emily Dickinson and Dashes and how she's a weirdo than wrestled with hope is a thing with feathers that perches in the soul. And seeing the tunes without word, it never stops at all and really stopped to look at it that way. Is it for you, Rebecca? I'll do the for you. and maybe because that's where I'm transitioning if you just heard me do it there. If you want to break through the ready-made understandings and declarations and judgments, I think breaking that internet veneer yields more here than maybe in any other one you're going to encounter.

1:26:26Rebecca Schinsky:But every one of them I think yields something. I will say that. You've got the parent-child stuff is real. All the trigger warnings, like there's images here that you've heard me not say. And I cannot say them and I can barely even think about them. But I also want to say that if you are a literary mountain climber in which you want to summit something and get to a vision and a view and a lookout that few people get to because they won't climb the mountain. And luckily this one's short at least. God, it's worth it. But what it lacks in brevity, it makes up for in tribulation, readerly and character tribulation.

1:27:10And just potency. Like this is potent and memorable. It's really rare to read a scene and have the feeling of, I'm going to remember reading this scene for the rest of my life.

1:27:21Rebecca Schinsky:Right. And there's a couple of them in here. Maybe not. You want to do the maybe not? Yeah. I mean, I think it's kind of implied here, but if kids in peril is a deal breaker for you, like just this is going to be a no go. If you really do need quotation marks or authors doing artsy things with punctuation or the lack thereof is going to bother you, just word of warning for it. And then also just, as you've noted, extraordinarily disturbing imagery. He doesn't linger on it, but those images are there. And so if you're a person who is going to read a description of a really disturbing thing and have that like stuck in your mind or really cause trouble for you, that's a word of warning about that as well.

1:28:03Rebecca Schinsky:Yeah. The immortal questions that are asked, which are the primary here? What is the good life? What do I have my neighbor? Who is my neighbor? How do I know what I know? Is this all there is? How to deal with the certainty of death? What else might there be? What's to deal with good and evil? Free will, real or no? Who am I and who are my people? And what is the nature of justice? This one, I think, sticks out like a sore thumb. Is that what do I owe my neighbor and who is my neighbor? That is where, that is a tree. I think some of the other ornaments are hung on that tree, Rebecca. What else do you think goes into that?

1:28:34Yeah, I think a less thoughtful interrogation of the text would latch on to first how to deal with the certainty of death. Because they are facing it and the man knows that he is ill and dying.

1:28:46Rebecca Schinsky:I think they sort of know how to deal with it, right? I mean, it's actually not a question here. Right. And McCarthy has shown us several different choices there. And he has implied that all of those are valid for their different reasons. So I agree. I think it's what do I owe my neighbor? Who is my neighbor? And that also your child is your neighbor. What do we owe the people that we are connected to? And the maintenance of our own humanity in there. I mean, they know the answer to is this all there is? The answer is yes. Yep, that's it. This is not about what is the good life. It's just about life.

1:29:22And so maybe the answer to what is the good life is just surviving together. But they're not trying to puzzle that out for themselves. I do think the heart of this is in what do I owe my neighbor? Who is my neighbor? And maybe kind of written underneath it, some of what's the deal with good and evil? who are the good guys and who are the bad guys and how does a good person become a bad person right um in a moment like this where you're offered the the choice between every day many times the choice between doing something that maintains your goodness and your humanity yeah

1:29:56Rebecca Schinsky:or doing something that yeah and the essential answer to that is to be human is is aligned with the good and to be non-human is bad and and homo sapiens can be bad bad and unhuman in their own way. But the line seems to be something about, I will not detract of your ability to survive for my own end. That seems to be the line. Does that sound right to you? I think that's right. Yeah. Yeah. And that's the deal with good and evil. You stay on one side of that line most of the time, maybe all the time, that's good. And if you're on the other side of the time, mostly it's bad and there's degrees of those things, but that seems to be where the line is.

1:30:35Rebecca Schinsky:Rebecca, are we sure this isn't about art and writing? I think it subtly is. The man is, yeah, it's not arty, but the man is always telling stories to the boy. And at one point he says to the boy, you have stories inside that I don't know about. And like the stories that he has told the boy about them being the good guys and the carrying of the fire, like are in one way, the engine of the rest of it. Like the engine of their survival is the belief in this story that they've told. And it's not written down, but that storytelling is a kind of artistic expression and a use of story to make life more bearable.

1:31:13So in some like pretty similar to Station Eleven in some ways, they're not putting up Hamlet in their camp at night, but they are leaning on stories as a mode of survival.

1:31:24Rebecca Schinsky:Wow. Could you get the most of the gist of watching the Signal adaptation? There is one starring Viggo Mortensen and Cody Smith-McPhee. I watched it once and I remember thinking, it's pretty good, but I don't know. It's not the real McCoy because the sentence we read did not translate to film. And there's something to the overwhelm of a movie in a story like this that I think language, I think text can negotiate the oppressiveness of the scene. Give it to us. but by having your eyeballs always on their bodies and their pain and their like it's hard to have room for the tenderness within that whereas language can juggle that a little bit easier somehow in some way this podcast is supported by quince one of the best tests for a piece of clothing i've run into lately is would i wear this in my professional headshots and apparently my answer for Quince is yes.

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1:36:16I spent the entire week trying to talk myself into watching it.

1:36:20Rebecca Schinsky:I mean, I think as an experience, it's not bad, but I don't know that it adds any layer that I want or need in that regard. And the movie is the right. We don't want to. There might be a temptation to do a limited TV series. Please no. But I think if you're going to try it. Yeah. Two hours is about max. The average movie runtime is about all I could take inside this. We're not going to entertain Muppets here. That's not what we're going to do today. No, no, no, no, no. But I am glad that this came out in 2009 before the run of like The Walking Dead, The Last of Us, Paradise, all of these post-apocalyptic trudging through the world trying to survive, like having to make it entertaining where there are like big fights and love stories and all the things.

1:37:02And there's there's something that just felt so much truer to me about McCarthy's version.

1:37:06Rebecca Schinsky:and I think the road is the reason that I am largely inoculated against being interested in post-ecloptic fiction because this does it does it in a way that in a register I don't think can be replicated you have to do something else you have to do something like station 11 which has different stakes and a different series of questions but like what do people do after the thing like I kind of have that answer when it's tough when it's gross and bad and everything else All right. Trivia adaptation, rumors, Mr. Trivia quotes and more. We talked about he didn't know how he was going to end the road when he started it.

1:37:44Rebecca Schinsky:Bloom. Back when Bloom was where you went to, Nane McCarthy is one of the four major living American novelists alongside Don DeLillo, Thomas Pinchon and Philip Roth. We may notice a couple of things about that lineup. One is that no longer I think we would think those ways. And also that Toni Morrison was alive in 2003. So what are we doing here? And had a Nobel Prize, by the way. Don DeLillo, I think Pinchon, because he's still alive and still working. DeLillo is too. I think now we might go Pinchon, Morrison, McCarthy. And I think the fourth spot might be open. That's a different exercise if we had to do four.

1:38:22Late 20th, early 21st century.

1:38:24Rebecca Schinsky:Yeah, yeah, I think so. American novels. Yeah, Colson Whitehead hadn't quite announced himself as what we think of him now. He's still got decades to go. Oh, and he doesn't have The Road. He doesn't have. He just doesn't yet. In 2003, he certainly didn't. Yeah. Only signed copies of The Road belong to his son. So when he turns 18, he can sell them and go to Las Vegas or whatever. What a dad move. Good job, dad. I know. I loved that. He's famously anti-semicolon for a guy who's so interested in punctuation. He calls semicolons idiocy, which I take personally as a great lover of the semicolon. But it's okay.

1:38:59Yeah. It's all right. And you have here, I love this, when he was living in Knoxville, he got the bricks from James Agee's house and built himself a fireplace with them.

1:39:09Rebecca Schinsky:James Agee had passed away. He didn't go ransacking, you know, the road style, rifling through his belongings and disassembling it. Yeah, I thought it was great. So there is a tendril of caring about lineage and historicity there that I wanted to mention. I mean, certainly a great reader. Yeah. He wrote on one typewriter until 2009 and then needed a new one. So he auctioned off his old one for 250 grand, which he donated to Santa Fe Institute. And then his agent bought him the exact same one for 35 bucks. Love that. Literary prestige arbitrage is amazing. Hot takes, Rebecca. You want to go first?

1:39:46Yeah. Authors should stop talking about their work. Does it help?

1:39:52Rebecca Schinsky:No. We need to look out for one where it's helped. Yeah. Just don't do it. Like, I understand the publicity machine is what it is and that it's a real privilege to exist at the literary echelon where you can just not engage. And it's kind of not I mean, it's not at all an accident that most of the people who successfully opt out of the cycle are the like old white guys. The exception that prose the rule is McCarthy. Right. But just like there is this huge delta between how people talk about McCarthy and what his work actually is like. Like, and he did not care. He did not seem, maybe he didn't even know.

1:40:30But if he was aware of the discourse, he did not seem interested at all in trying to like set it straight or, you know, speak out for himself. Just like, I would like to live in a literary world where the books just speak for themselves. And where like, if you've got to go give interviews to talk about what you were doing, then your book is not good enough. It should be able to stand on its own. But just like, everybody calm down, get off Twitter. Authors off Twitter. Get off the social. Yeah, get off the social.

1:41:00Rebecca Schinsky:Opt out. It's the greatest flex. I've got two hot takes. I think this is actually the most hopeful and optimistic book about humanity that you could possibly write. I totally agree. And I know that sounds weird. No, I totally agree. Because what could be more optimistic than the world is as bad as it could possibly be and yet? Yeah. We are still soft with each other. We still have moments of beauty. Or can be. We're still not. Can be. Yes. Can be. Yeah. McCarthy is what lip rows want to be, but they cannot because McCarthy didn't want to be anything. Right. You cannot want to be a position or posture and turn into a McCarthy or turn into a Pinchon or turn into a Morrison.

1:41:41Rebecca Schinsky:You need to be OK with toiling in obscurity for a while, maybe forever. and this aspirational I'm going to wear cowboy boots and smoke unfiltered cigarettes and write about the west is not you just you can't do you're you're you're playing at cosplay yeah when these are people that are figuring out how to sew new clothes I think I expected McCarthy to have a performance of something like Tommy Lee Jones. And in those Oprah interviews, he is so much like just warmer and he doesn't seem to be performing anything. Like that's the real, the real flex is not performing anything at all. Just do your work.

1:42:28Yeah.

1:42:29Rebecca Schinsky:When you think of something like Hunter S. Thompson, which I think gets thrown around, like that guy was taking photographs and wearing a pith helmet on purpose. Like that's not the same thing that's a performance yeah that's a performance and not that performance is bad it's just like you know call it what it is call it what it is read-alikes are tough but also if you take different angles um you have several here rebecca where do you want to go for for read-alikes on this well if you want to learn more about mccarthy there is a big biography coming out in just a couple weeks from now called cormac mccarthy a legacy revisited by tracy doherty It's out October 6th.

1:43:05She is the author of Larry McMurtry, A Life. So one of our great contemporary biographers of authors. I'm sure it will address the Augusta Brit stuff. And since McCarthy did not talk about himself very much, a biography is the way that we're going to get it. We've name checked Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel, one of the great contemporary post-apocalyptic stories about art and survival. Zone One by Colson Whitehead. There are zombies in that one, but the zombies are kind of secondary to what else is going on. Existential survival questions. I Am Legend, I think, is a more straightforward one.

1:43:41But another story about a man just kind of going through the road, trying to survive. The Stand by Stephen King. and Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood.

1:43:51Rebecca Schinsky:That's a good one. Yeah. It connects to several other titles that we've done on the show so far. Probably most obviously Parable of the Sower because it's people leaving and trying to survive and get to the place. And I think some of the, who am I? What do I am my neighbor? What is the nature of this thing? They're Old Man and the Sea. What is the human's relationship to nature? Right? How are we going to deal with this? And there's like Hemingway roots in McCarthy's writing style, I think. Stylistically, absolutely. You have Gilead here. Do you want to say why Gilead, Rebecca? I think I know, but...

1:44:21Fathers and sons, man. Old men waiting to die.

1:44:25Rebecca Schinsky:Yep. Yeah. Is the Reverend Ames the father in the road? I have beloved here. That might break me. Yeah, I have beloved here because we do have another situation in which a parent understands they have a terrible choice about their progenies. existence. Yeah. We will get to that someday. And we'll get to that at some point. I'll say no more about it here, but asking a similar question that's more political and cultural about slavery, but at its core, the same fundamental question. Cocktail party crib sheet, Rebecca, three to five takeaways. I have three here or two. I think you did the third. Yeah.

1:45:14Rebecca Schinsky:This is a one of one reading experience. Yep. It's a one of one. It's a double barreled, heartbreaking, yet non nihilistic, hopeful ending of all time for me. Those are my two. Rebecca, what do you have as well? Yeah. The sneaky truth about the best apocalyptic novels is that they're not about the end. They're about not giving up. And I was just writing about it earlier this week, thinking about Fahrenheit 451 and Parable of the Sower, that that's a thread that runs through sort of the great dystopian and the great apocalyptic literature is that like the end is not actually the end. That if you salvage your humanity, you can keep going.

1:45:54And it's the don't give up the ship of it all.

1:45:58Rebecca Schinsky:A zero to well-read score. Each one gets a score from one to 10 with 10 being the highest. Our five categories are historical importance, readability, current relevance, essential questions, book nerd, readread, and oh, damn factor. Historical importance. We have kind of have a de facto ceiling of a book that's 21st century or like the last 20, 25 years. Kind of tops out as a seven or eight. Yeah. It's hard to know what the big legacy of the road is going to be because it wasn't like the first to do this it might be the best yeah i think a seven and a half seven and a half six and a half seven and a half yeah seven let's go seven okay uh readability this is a difficult um it's both easy and difficult because as you said it pulls you through you are pulled through um by a a force beyond your kind of control as a reader um and yet it's horrible in places yeah language is readable emotionally tough but compelling like it compels your soul in a way that's special so i think the compellingness gets us over the line from the middle so it's it's higher than a five but it can't be a 10 six eight eight oh six okay it's hot i mean it's this is an emotional difference at seven seven okay yeah i mean I mean, the current relevance and central questions are like zero and 11 is one of those, right?

1:47:25Rebecca Schinsky:Because it's out of time, but of all time. Yeah. And maybe like a possible addition to the questions that all art asks is what makes us human. Yeah. And that's the big concern here. And that's always relevant. So, I mean, I'm happy. I will give this a 10 all day long. I think a 10 is okay. Okay. The book Nerd Read Cread is fascinating because I think your own experience of it shows the double bind of this, which is it feels like more people have read this and have a take on the road in McCarthy than actually have a real good take in a sense of what this is. Yes, I think more people have a take than have read it.

1:48:04Rebecca Schinsky:Yeah, absolutely. Which is true of almost all books. Yes, yeah. But you really want to earn your take on McCarthy because it will be different than what you're expecting. Eight? Yeah. I mean, I think if you've read Satchi McCarthy, that score is higher because it's earlier and longer and weirder and people don't know that that's by, but I'm okay with an eight. Okay. I think we need to think about pinging out the oh damn factor here, Rebecca. I don't know. 10 is a high bar for this. We reserve this for certain things, but again, not two minutes ago, I said one of one reading experience. So what do you do with that?

1:48:40I actually wrote O'Dam on the page a couple of times. Okay, well, there you go.

1:48:45Rebecca Schinsky:There you go. Like knowing that we were going to have this conversation. But we've read, this is now like the 45th-ish book we've talked about. Yeah. And we've both done a lot of reading in our last 20 years. But there are moments from this that are pretty singular that I know I'm going to be thinking about. And that recognition in a reading experience is rare. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, and the body keeps a sore kind of way, but for reading, this is way up there. You have sort of a PMSD, post-McCarthy reading disorder after this, where you can feel it, you can remember it, and you can feel the pleasure and horror of what it was like to do it.

1:49:28A friend who knew I was reading it texted me a couple times across the week just to be like, are you okay? How's it going with the road?

1:49:35Rebecca Schinsky:Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's a 10. Okay, Rebecca. Well, we made it. We made it to the next small group of people that are carrying the fire here on Zero to Well Read. You can follow us on the socials at Zero to Well Read podcast. join us on the Patreon where you can get guided read-alongs and membership options that include early ad-free access but also those read-alongs and then bonus episodes that we do that are special just for that membership level there you can shoot us an email zero2wellreadatbookriot.com we're always ready I'm especially interested in your The Road experiences I want all the emails about The Road yeah thanks to Thrift Books for sponsoring this season of Zero to Well Read and Zero to Well Red is a proud member of the Airwave Podcast Network.

1:50:24Rebecca Schinsky:Rebecca, enjoy your summer afternoon Coke. I'm going to go get one this afternoon. Ooh, great idea. Enjoy one. Little nugget ice cubes. Let's do it. Yeah, absolutely.