A Tale of Two Fathers

The Road
by Cormac McCarthy
First Edition
As New
Knopf, 2006


Finn
by Jon Clinch
First Edition
As New
Random House, 2007



Yes, that's me in the mylar. The protective covering detracts a bit from McCarthy's jet-black dust jacket.
So I read these books one after another, with Finn first and The Road to follow, as that's the order in which I received my reader's copies from the library. Having read them in such a close time span, I thought I'd cover both titles in one blog, thus propelling myself farther into my library.
I was anxious to read Finn. As I have already stated, I'm a high school English, or as we're called now, language arts teacher and as such I've taught from The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn many, many times. I read a review of Clinch's book and began salivating at the idea of reading a book from the perspective of the bigoted, racist, alcoholic Pap Finn.
The review I read was from the New York Times and while I enjoyed it, it released a plot spoiler (which I'll try not to give away here) with almost no warning. The review dropped a big bomb and didn't leave me ample time to shield my eyes. The incident occurred in a manner such as this:
"Clinch creates a dark and dramatic world, a world of moonshine, murder and masturbation. Like watching a train wreck, one feels compelled to push these images out while glancing to the side for more. Spoiler alert: the woman is really a man."
OK, that spoiler would have been for The Crying Game, but you get my drift: if you're going to let go of one of the book's major surprises, give the review reader a little time to put on the breaks, lay down the paper and think about whether or not she or he is going to actually read this book one day.
With that said, the ruined twist was really intriguing, offering a whole new avenue for possible discussion next time I teach from the Huckleberry Finn text, though I don't dare bring excerpts from Clinch's book into the classroom least I have a hunkering to hear from a dozen or more perturbed parents. Perhaps I'll just show the book to the students, tell them what it is about and forbid them to read it in my class. Then I'll make sure it's available at the library.

Over to The Road:
Believe it or not, this is my first time reading anything by Cormac McCarthy. My wife has read most of his other books, even though she doesn't really like them, dismissing them as overly masculine, terse, and (in her words, not mine) too Hemingwayesque.
I read the book in one sitting. I was drawn in by the eloquence of the language and the dramatic circumstances of the plot. Even though I pretty much knew what was around every corner for the father and son in McCarthy's book, I had to read on, least my inattentiveness allow marauders to capture to duo.
I know there are critics of McCarthy's lack of punctuation and simple sentence structure, but I think that if ever these devices were called for, they are employed here superbly. McCarthy's post-apocalyptic world is one where language is dying out along with the populace of the world. The father in this book often reminds his some that the son has to keep talking, as if the lack of spoken word would break the father and son apart, turning them both into the barbaric animals they are trying to avoid.
When the father and son are traveling, they occasionally come across collections of books. These artifacts, much like common speech, are rotting away, unused and unwanted, and these books in conjunction with McCarthy's language demonstrate the death of communication in an increasingly hostile world. I see it today in families that let the television be the thing that ties them together; I see it in the monosyllable mumblings of teenagers on the street corners of Eugene. As the world grows colder, it grows more silent.
Both Finn and The Road are about fathers and sons, and both are about giving someone up for their own betterment. The correlations between Pap Finn and the father in The Road are almost humorous because the one is so caring and a tremendous model of a good, patient father, and the other is a horror of a man, the village idiot having procreated. Both struggle to survive and, well, I'd tell you more, but I'd have to put it under a spoiler alert.