In a brilliant take on the late novelist Cormac McCarthy, who died this month, the writer Kathryn Jezer-Morton describes The Road as being the best parenting book of all time.
It’s an unlikely angle and one that might at first seem facetious. The Road, McCarthy’s odyssey about a father and son walking across a post-apocalyptic landscape in the wake of an unspecified disaster, is more generally celebrated for its spare prose and vivid expression than as a viable alternative to nap-training manifestos and toddler-taming manuals.
But for Jezer-Morton, who was caught up in the infrastructural collapse of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, the novel’s brilliance (and its most valuable lessons) is found in its immortal “relevance”. As she writes: “It eschews the typical narrative terrain about heroic American ingenuity in the face of adversity and, instead, focuses almost exclusively on the emotional work of being loving and brave while fearing for your life.”
I have never been caught up in an infrastructural collapse, and read The Road while lying on a comfortable bed. But, as with Jezer-Morton, it stirred in me an almost primal fear. As I reached the book’s conclusion, I put it down, crept into my then five-year-old daughter’s bedroom, picked up her sleeping body and put her in my bed. McCarthy’s novel of dystopian survival had been so terrifying, the only comfort I could think of was to hear my daughter breathe.
Every day I’m grateful for that privilege. The most fundamental hope for any parent is to see their children thrive. As parents we are all on the metaphorical road, trudging towards some distant “safe place” in which we can dispense with all the worry associated with taking care of other human beings. And if we’re lucky we will never reach it, because the very act of worry is an indicator that — right now — everything is basically OK. One hopes the hazards on our road will be small, innocuous dangers especially when for so many others, escaping warzones or natural disasters, the road can be a fact of daily life.