Writers on the Storm

By Lev Grossman

These days, the end of the world isn't a terribly classy affair, but it wasn't always all zombies and asteroids and Mel Gibson. It has a long and distinguished literary history. As early as 1826, Mary Shelley--who also wrote Frankenstein--published a novel called The Last Man, in which a plague whittles humanity down to a single final specimen. In Samuel Beckett's play Endgame, crippled wretches crouch in a miserable bunker after some ambiguous, eschatological catastrophe, swapping gallows one-liners as their supplies dwindle.

Charles Frazier's Thirteen Moons (Random House; 422 pages) isn't about the end of the world, just the end of a world. Frazier is something of an ambulance chaser when it comes to historical disasters--his best seller Cold Mountain was about the fall of the South in the Civil War. Thirteen Moons, Frazier's second novel, consists of the late-life recollections of one Will Cooper, an orphan who at 12 was put in charge of a remote trading post on the outskirts of the Cherokee Nation. There Will encountered two father figures--the wise, laconic chief Bear and the violent but entertaining hothead Featherstone--as well as one flirty half-Indian hottie, name of Claire.

In Will's erratic trajectory through the 19th century he accumulates lots of money and power, first as a trader, then a lawyer, then a politician, and he blows it all in a quixotic attempt to preserve his adopted tribe and its homeland. It's a picaresque and pulpy story, pure pleasure at times, full of duels and hunts and treks and sweaty, historically accurate sex (although Claire, the book's weakest link, never becomes more than a compilation of crackpot feminine ideals). But it has a sad heart, and in the end an elderly Will is left wincing in the glare of newfangled electric lightbulbs and mourning the passing of the Cherokee way of life. "All I can say," he sighs, "is that we are mistaken to gouge such a deep rift in history that the things old men and old women know have become so useless as to be not worth passing on to grandchildren." (Absolutely true, although one wishes Frazier had held off on his sappy caveat, namely, that "desire trumps time," which smacks of a musical number by Andrew Lloyd Webber.)

Thank the cruel, vengeful gods for Cormac McCarthy, who delivers a much more comprehensive apocalypse in The Road (Knopf; 241 pages), which is about half the length of Thirteen Moons but 20 times as ruthless. The scenario: a man and his son push a shopping cart with a wiggly wheel through a landscape from which all plant and animal life has been scoured by some undefined but definitive calamity--we know only of "a long shear of light and then a series of low concussions" that left survivors "sitting on the sidewalk in the dawn half immolate and smoking in their clothes." Game over, and no more quarters.

Man and boy walk among unburied corpses, live on canned goods scavenged from wrecked houses, and hide from cannibalistic gangs--"men who would eat your children in front of your eyes"--who are all that's left of human civilization. The man's only goals are these: to remember a happy day on a lake with his uncle, to resist the temptation of suicide (the boy's mother gave in to it), and to crush all goodness and empathy in his son, so he won't waste their precious resources helping fellow survivors.

Sure, it's all very earnest. McCarthy doesn't name his characters--they're just "the man" and "the boy"--`a la an Old Man and the Sea parody. And he's given to using precious archaisms--sometimes you wish he would just say "with his arms held out" instead of "with his arms outheld." (Outheld?) But none of this really matters. The Road is a wildly powerful and disturbing book that exposes whatever black bedrock lies beneath grief and horror. Disaster has never felt more physically and spiritually real.

In a way McCarthy is the last survivor of a vanished world. He is, essentially, a modernist, miraculously preserved like a literary coelacanth from the age of Hemingway and Faulkner, writers of high style and high purpose without an iota of aw-shucks relatability. The future probably belongs to the Fraziers, the entertainers, who serve up their profundities with humor and sex and fisticuffs so they go down more easily. McCarthy would never stoop to entertain us, but there's a stripped-down intensity to his work that is just awesome. You sense that The Road, with its world empty of values and wisdom and human graciousness, isn't about the future at all. The Road is what the world looks like to McCarthy right now.