Reading Cormac McCarthy's The Road in the Rodin Gardens at Stanford

The day could not have been more perfect: bright sunlight streaming down in the garden, folks sitting around on benches, eating lunch, talking and taking in the good weather while tourists poked around at the feet of the statues. There they were: the Gates of Hell in full view, the work of the great French sculptor Rodin in the Cantor Arts Gallery at Stanford. An odd juxtaposition, indeed. Especially since my wife and I were toting McCarthy's novel under one arm, our lunch under the other.

If a book has somehow been true, if it connects at some level, it'll follow you around like a dog on a leash. The Road is that kind of book.

Twice before, I've plunged deep into the guts of the novel but truly never quite absorbed its full impact, which is beyond anything anyone could possibly imagine. Probably, it's the way I've been reading McCarthy's work before, namely, always cringing at his run-on sentences, the sentence fragments, the self-conscious language always obsessed with describing objects, part by part, like a mechanic disconstructing an engine and preparing to part it out for resale.

All those years in graduate school, years spent in the library, in alcoves, buried in books -- the budding young scholar at work (sorry) -- had doubtless made me a bit of a linguistic purist, as far as adherence to the basic rules of grammar and what I deemed good writing: no run-on sentences, for one thing, no fragments, proper punctuation, and so on.

McCarthy does not adhere to those rules, never has, never will. So be it.

Deliberately, I avoided seeing the movie version, even though Vigo Mortensen is one of my favorite actors, perfect no doubt in the role as the father of the boy in the story. Once you see an actor playing the part, you can't read the book the same way. You see the actor as the main character. And that's that.

Days before, during a break from work, my wife spontaneously, as if out of nowhere, picked up the book out of our library of several thousand books scattered across the house, upstairs, downstairs, all over the place. She glanced at the cover, which showed Viggo Mortensen and a boy, a still image from the movie version of the novel, and said she was curious and wanted to read it. She liked Mortensen the actor because he was good with kids, a loving father, a loyal and true man, true to his beliefs.

And it happened: we began reading it aloud to each other, taking turns after a dozen or so pages, trading voices, hearing the dialogue between the man and the boy in each others' voices, adding our own inflections, cadences and rhythms to the prose.

Hearing it read aloud by my wife, who's all emotion, feeling the lives of the main characters, unnamed, the father and the boy gave me another experience of the book that I hadn't had before.

McCarthy breaks from the science fiction formula: we don't know how or why this monster disaster on Earth occurred. Nor do we know the geography of where the father and son are headed. But there's the promise of the blue ocean, the promise of seeing wildfire, of seeing birds, all those things the man promises the boy. And they're all gone.

Being in the Rodin Garden, taking in the Gates of Hell as depicted in the contorted bodies of the statues in front of us, and continuing to read The Road -- well, my head began to spin. McCarthy's imagery does that, it dances in your head, takes you on a ride to the dark side you can't believe, yet there's still that naive hope in American innocence, in we're the Good Guys and we'll defeat the Bad Guys, if we're smart and get lucky.

So lucky we were to hear the voices The Road and Rodin's sculpture speaking its own language to us. All of it still dances in my head. Both of our heads, I figure.