Literary sacrileges

I have to confess to a literary sacrilege.

I often (more in the past than now that I'm reading scholarly books for my dissertation) will peruse the pages of a novel and look at the ending before I decide if I want to read it.

Yeah, that's right. I'll first find out what happens in the end (does the girl get the guy, does the revolution succeed, does the heroine die) and then I'll determine whether I want to invest the emotional and psychic energy necessary to get through the story.

I know that for many (including my husband) this kind of an approach is near heresy. But that's also my approach to movie-watching. I'll first try to find out what happens at the end (I actually love spoilers) and then I'll decide if I want to sit through the hour-and-a-half or two-hours-plus.

The truth is that I hate surprises. I don't mean that I hate all surprises (I was quite giddy when my then-boyfriend-now-husband proposed out of the blue). But I don't like to be in the dark about things that might affect me emotionally. I like to be prepared psychically for whatever might come my way. Surprise is simply not conducive to that measure of control-freakness.

My problem is that because I feel I mustn't read any novels now that I'm on the fast track to finishing The Monster, I'm left with audiobooks to keep abreast of new writers or old writers who I've never read (or heard). And you can't fast-forward to the end of an audiobook to find out what happens with the same ease as with a physical book.

Because I didn't know the ending, and for some mysterious reason I can't fully comprehend since the book is more depressing than a long funeral mass for a dearly departed, I started listening to Cormac McCarthy's The Road.

I guess I might have picked it up because Oprah recommended it (I love Oprah!) but boy is the story a downer sin remedio. Released last year, the story follows a dying father (who's coughing up blood) and his young son on a post-apocalyptic trip down a road, possibly a highway, to the coast. On the way, the pair must survive acute hunger and cold as they avoid coming into contact with the people-eating "bad guys" that seem to be what's left of "humanity" (the book sort of questions the applicability of that term) as they trudge through a perilous landscape burned to the crisp several years before by some unknown cataclysm.

Now what leads a man to write such a story? At a visceral level, I think that this is a white man's nightmare. It seems to me that only white men are capable of coming up with these bleak, horrid tales and actually enjoy the experience of writing them. That's because anyone with black or brown in them has blood-memory that recalls many actual cataclysms (the Middle Passage, slavery, war, Removal, invasion, just to name a few) so that there's no need to explore hopelessness as a psychic exercise through fiction.

I know that's a pretty broad generalization and I'm not suggesting that black-brown writers don't explore cataclysm or apocalypse. I immediately think of Sherman Alexie's fabulous short story "The Sin Eaters." But Alexie only modernized and fictionalized the centuries-long campaign of extermination embarked on by the U.S. government against American Indian nations in this country.

Another thing that bothers me about The Road is not only the absence of anyone non-white, but also the absence of women. Early in the story we find out that the mother, tired of simply surviving, commits suicide, leading us to believe that the father and the son are the strong ones because they're willing to bear the unbearable simply to survive.

That's another male fantasy: that men are stronger than women when faced with hardship. Or that women will give up their children's wellbeing for their own.

I haven't finished listening to the novel yet and probably will get through the end today as I drive up to my apartment in the woods with the dogs. But I already know the ending. I made my husband ask a friend who read the book so I would know whether I wanted to invest the time of listening and suffering with the father and the son.

So far, I'm still undecided on whether I made the right choice this time. I'll keep you posted.

P.S. Well, I finished the novel and I have very mixed feelings. Although it does end on a hopeful note, none of my concerns are erased, especially the one about women. A woman is present in the end, but she's also a "true believer" in God in that wholly God-less world. Perhaps the novel intended that to be a salient point for her nameless character. I find it rather foolish and sad.