False hope is a delusion, a siren song that distracts from the singular focus required to survive in a dangerous world. If McCarthy intends to imply the futility of anything, it is the futility of false hope. Family and friends are welcome to leave their condolences on this memorial page and share them with the family. In The Road these are false hopes, relics of a fragile and fleeting civilization, insubstantial as dust and ashes. It is with great sadness that we announce the death of William McCarthy (Cambridge, Wisconsin), who passed away on July 28, 2022, leaving to mourn family and friends. I’m not talking about happy-sappy Disney hope, where the world is sanitized to the point of reassuring simplicity, or the kind of hope that presupposes a benevolent universe ordered for the benefit of humankind. Hope is the fire we carry to light our way in the darkness. He is saying hope is the most important part of being human. McCarthy isn’t saying hope is for chumps.
And yes, I understand how that feeling translates into an assumption that McCarthy’s message is, as fellow Unbound Writer Amanda Baldeneaux put it in a recent post, “hope is for chumps.” I understand all of this, but still I’m arguing the opposite. Yes, I understand that many people come away from it feeling traumatized. Yes, it is dark and violent, and on its surface it is bleak almost beyond description. I believe The Road is a profoundly hopeful book. To read this book is to peer into the all-consuming darkness that lies beyond the faint and flickering light of the stories we tell ourselves about life and death and good and evil and humanity and God. Things for which there should be no words.Īnd yet McCarthy finds the words, rendering his nightmare vision in prose as haunting and unsparing as the vision itself. They encounter unspeakable horrors, things no child or man or woman should ever see or even imagine.
The man and the boy are in constant peril, at every turn contending with the dangers of a vast and indifferent universe, and with the violence that lurks in the hearts of men. A man and his young son follow the roads of our lost civilization across the American Southeast from Tennessee to the Atlantic Ocean. He was an avid golfer and worked in the Carpenters Union for over 50 years. This is our world in a not-too-distant future, the earth cold and dying and fading into darkness after an unnamed cataclysm has destroyed the biosphere. From the first page to the last, The Road unfolds in a bitter landscape choked with grief and ashes. Add a photo or a video There is no photo or video of William McCarthy. If you’re familiar with the novel, or with McCarthy’s work in general, you might think this is an impossible task. It is with great sadness that we announce the death of William McCarthy (Cambridge, Wisconsin), who passed away on July 28, 2022, leaving to mourn family and friends. The challenge: to find hope in Cormac McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic masterpiece The Road. To plant memorial trees or send flowers to the family in memory of Janice Windh (née McCarthy), please visit our flower store.A gauntlet has been thrown down on Fiction Unbound. She is survived by her children Jennifer (Michael), Jessica, and Randall, her grandchildren Evelyn and Adam, her former spouse Steven, and her siblings Ann, Marjorie, and William (Anna Marie).Ī memorial service will be held on Saturday, July 9 at 3:00 pm at Dopkins Funeral Chapel, 2200 S Reed Ave, Reedley, CA 93654.
Jan is preceded in death by her parents William and Anna McCarthy, her father and mother-in-law Sivert “Ron” and Arlene Windh, and her grandson Thomas Hammill. Jan lived out her days on the ranch she loved-relaxing with her dogs, growing abundant flowers and vegetables in her garden, and listening to the cries of the hawks. In 1999, she settled on her dream ranch in Reedley: 40 acres of vineyards on the Kings River in California’s Central Valley. Jan received a bachelor’s degree in animal husbandry from Delaware Valley University and worked with farmers for several years before pursuing further studies in agricultural economics at Texas A&M.įollowing graduate school, Jan moved all over the country raising three children and renovating houses in California, Idaho, and Ohio. She loved dogs and horses and rode show jumpers competitively. Jan grew up the youngest of four siblings on Long Island. She died at the age of 65 surrounded by family. Janice Windh (née McCarthy) was born Decemin Queens, New York.
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