![]() Can you do it? When the time comes? Can you?” ![]() It is soon established what the father must do if they are in danger of being captured. ![]() But the fretful tenderness and constant fear gives animal urgency to their long march. Neither the man nor the boy is given a name. “The soft black talc blew through the streets like squid ink uncoiling along a sea floor and the cold crept down and the dark came early and the scavengers passing down the steep canyons with their torches trod silky holes in the drifted ash that closed behind them silently as eyes.” Everywhere is burnt and grey, marked with ash. They move by foot, pushing a cart, scavenging through empty houses and destroyed cities, eluding gangs reduced to cannibalism and sub-human madness. We follow father and son as they travel toward the coast, fleeing the onset of winter. An end-of-the-world misery causes him to reflect “each memory recalled must do some violence to its origins.” The father, later unable to sleep, lies “awake in the dark with the uncanny taste of peach from some phantom orchard fading in his mind.” Most of The Road is his story. These events and others are glimpsed in truncated flashbacks, startling images that play on the mind. Soon after a woman gives birth to a son before she goes blind from radioactive poisoning and walks off to commit suicide. A long shear of light and then a series of low concussions.” McCarthy’s delivery of The Road barely one year later puts paid to that idea in spades as he unloads the tale of a man and his son stumbling through a post-apocalyptic landscape that might once have been America: “The clocks stopped at 1:17. It nonetheless added to malcontent amongst hard core fans who felt the old man was going soft, crowd pleasing, cleaning up his grim act for the popcorn theatres. No Country for Old Men, the tale of a drug deal gone wrong, just moved at a faster, leaner clip than his older books, turning McCarthy’s war horse into a hot rod. Given how foreboding McCarthy is, even his supposedly lightweight stuff is tough enough to wind most readers badly. It too became a best seller and was optioned for film rights by the Coen Brothers. Last year’s No Country For Old Men (2005), a genre thriller set, unusually for him, in the present, was similarly canned as McCarthy-Lite. Devotees turned away, calling it too sentimental. But it wasn’t till All the Pretty Horses (1992) that he reached the best-seller lists. The literary critic Harold Bloom acclaimed McCarthy on its release as one of America’s foremost important living writers alongside Don DeLillo, Phillip Roth and Thomas Pynchon. A psychotic dream across the page, Sam Peckinpah meets William Faulkner, its writing felt more like lava than language. Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West (1985) was high noon for this. To live in Cormac McCarthy’s world is to certainly know death in all its manifestations: from nature and wolves to man-made acts of evil or necessity, when good men do bad things to survive. So much so that you could say most of his books are about what it means to be a man – and if, in becoming a man, tenderness can survive? That theme and the power of death loom through his work, great, churning, masculine universes overflowing with Old Testament savagery and a primal mysticism indebted to the blood-drenched history of the American West. Suite 420, Denton, TX or American Heart Association.Sons and fathers are central to Cormac McCarthy’s novels. ![]() In lieu of flowers, donations can be made in Robert’s name to Trio Hospice 2214 Emery St. In addition to his fiancé and children, Robert is survived by his brother Paul McCarthy of Avon, CO and his sister, Karen (McCarthy) Balerna and her husband Gene of Bluffton, SC as well as nephews and niece, Scott, Craig, and Courtney Balerna.įuneral service and visiting hours will be held on Friday, J12-1:30pm at Mulkey-Mason Funeral Home, 740 Edmonds Lane, Lewisville, TX 75067. He was the Lead End User Support Technician at Fidelity Investments in West Lake, TX, where he worked for 12 years.Īlthough Robert has called Texas home for more than 20 years, he was a devoted Boston sports fan! He especially loved cheering on the Patriots and Red Sox. ![]() Robert graduated from Tri-County Regional Vocational Technical High School in Franklin, MA, Class of 1989 and Bay State Technical College in Canton, MA in 1998. He was born to the late Richard and Joanne McCarthy and beloved fiancé to Effie Paine and loving father to Luka, Kennedy, and Cristian. Robert McCarthy of Denton, TX formerly of Medfield, MA, died unexpectedly on July 9, 2022. ![]()
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