Word: fatherness
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...contrast to “American Pastoral,” Cormac McCarthy’s novel “The Road” has room for love, purpose, and human heroism despite being set in a post-apocalyptic world. “The Road” centers on a father and son who try to survive while traveling through a ravaged American landscape that has been destroyed by some unspecified disaster. Both the inner and outer lives of the father and son are essential to the novel’s message. The external scenes where the pair hide from...
...first chapter, which takes place years after they have graduated high school, the Swede, who wants help writing a memoir about his recently deceased father, invites the elderly Zuckerman to dinner. Zuckerman is captivated by the opportunity to explore what he dubs “the substratum,” his term for the deep and authentic life of the mind. This quest for the profound proves devastating as the Swede only discusses the happy, superficial lives of his family and does not even mention grieving for his father. During the dinner scene, Roth juxtaposes paragraphs in which the Swede...
While I suspect that the commercial success of McCarthy’s work may be due to the tropes of science fiction and action rather than its literary merits, that does not diminish the power of McCarthy’s intensely human portrait of a father and son. Where Roth and many other contemporary novelists write about an ironic and dehumanizing world that leaves characters externally disconnected and spiritually enervated, McCarthy embraces humanity in all of its weakness, madness, and strength. Some people may find detailed digressions on spiritual exhaustion profound, but this reader found it merely exhausting...
...apparent as days turn to weeks and then, presumably, into months. When Elster’s daughter Jessie comes to stay, at the behest of her mother who worries about Jessie’s new male companion, her presence offers Jimmy a new way to see Elster and her father a point of focus. However, we learn that all such points fade in and out of focus...
...crowd, a swarm,” Elster says. “We think in groups, travel in armies. Armies carry the gene for self-destruction. One bomb is never enough. The blur of technology, this is where the oracles plot their wars. Because now comes the introversion. Father Teilhard knew this, the omega point...