A trackless waste.(The Road)(Book review)

Cormac McCarthy The Road. Alfred A. Knopf, 256 pages, $24

When our civilization ends, be it with a bang or a whimper, what will follow? The prospect of a post-apocalyptic wasteland ought to be fertile ground for any writer, but very few memorable works have sprung up from its craters: Nevil Shute's On the Beach, Doris Lessing's Memoirs of a Survivor, and a handful of science fiction classics by the likes of Philip K. Dick, Robert Heinlein, and Ray Bradbury.

There certainly has been no shortage of movies on the subject, from masterpieces like Mad Max and Planet of the Apes to mercifully forgotten dross like Def-Con 4 and Hell Comes to Frogtown--in which the professional wrestler "Rowdy" Roddy Piper must save humanity by rescuing the last fertile women from mutant amphibians. Perhaps there is something so unthinkable about the decline and fall of human empire that it tends to inspire the merely lurid or ridiculous. But it isn't unthinkable--not any longer, not with suitcase nukes waiting in the trunk of the Hidden Imam's welcome wagon. It won't be long before the real "day after" gains an insistent grip on the imaginations of our best creators.

Cormac McCarthy should be just the right Virgil for a tour of this Last Judgment. At a time when many writers bury their heads in sands of frivolity and childish fantasy, he retains the understanding that we live in a postlapsarian world, peopled with violent, unpredictable creatures. His previous book, No Country for Old Men, was not good, but it was admirable in its intent, to show that, as I once heard it chillingly phrased, "evil is real, and evil walks this earth like a natural man." Child of God, a stranger and more thoughtful monster's-eye-view meditation on the problem of evil, is highly recommended, as is his classic Blood Meridian.

But McCarthy's latest effort, The Road, is a missed opportunity. It tracks the movements of a father and young son through the scorched ash-heap that's left of the United States. Why a father and son? To allow McCarthy to show us, as some ink-stained wretch doubtless will put it, the indomitable power of love in the face of even the most tragic and trying ...

Yes, but that's something that many of us take for granted: It is thus a rather cheap way of ensuring, or of trying to ensure, the book's emotional heft. As it stands, the setup yields only a repetitive pastiche of survival memoir and horror movie. For most of mankind's remainder, rape and cannibalism are the order of the day. (In a scene that is far too macabre to be affecting, the survivalist duo comes upon a campsite where an infant has been roasted on a spit.)

Neither the man nor the boy is named, presumably that we might see that this fate could befall any one of us. But this is one of the book's big failings--its insistence on stripping its heroes of any distinguishing characteristics, any personality. They are reticent, even sullen, which, however ...