"Brad Burke allowed I could read over and re-work this interview before its appearance in the Peoria Journal Star, and I’d declined. I thank him for his help in allowing this full-text interview—and with some smoothing-out—to go on record."

John Sepich - 31 May 2007

Peoria Journal Star
Date: April 26, 2007
Section: CUE
Page: C2

Headline: 'The Road' unraveled: Scholar John Sepich on Cormac McCarthy's new, Pulitzer Prize-winning novel

A bleak tale about a father and son wandering a barren, post-apocalyptic wasteland doesn't exactly scream "mainstream appeal."

But mainstream is what you become when Oprah Winfrey selects your book for her wildly popular book club. This month she chose Cormac McCarthy's Pulitzer Prize-winning "The Road," a move that undoubtedly will give countless readers their first taste of the celebrated author.

To help them out, we tracked down central Illinoisan John Sepich, 55, a friend of McCarthy's and the author of "Notes on Blood Meridian," an acclaimed book on the sources and processes McCarthy used to write his 1985 masterpiece, "Blood Meridian."

Move over, Oprah. We've got our own book club going in this week's Cue & A.
- Brad Burke

CUE: What would you say about "The Road" in regards to how it relates to McCarthy's other books?

SEPICH: It's a perfectly interesting book. I almost thought, seeing the end of "No Country for Old Men," that that might be his last book. To see this follow it, in a way, makes perfect sense.

CUE: How so? What stands out about this story?

SEPICH: If you will, the strongest character in the book is the setting, the nuclear winter. It's almost overpowering. ... It took me a while to read it. I could only read a few pages at a time. There are some pretty ugly little things that go on in "The Road," and taking it in in small bites seems to be the way I could do it. The other factor was that it was winter when I was reading it, and it continued to be winter for months afterward. And the thought of losing all the things that are
lost in that book—birds, fish, the trees fall over in a snowstorm—to imagine all those things gone out of something that's, in a sense, outside the story, it is really frightening. And “The Road” shows me that McCarthy's always looking at the presence of evil in the world, and that's a fundamental
part of (how) “The Road” fits into McCarthy’s other books. And it throws light on the fact that, really, no matter what other book you look at, he's looking at children, a kid. Whether it's his first book “The Orchard Keeper” and the young John Wesley Rattner, “Outer Dark” and the siblings’ baby, even "Child of God," which has virtually all adult characters (yet Lester is the title’s “Child”), or “Blood Meridian’s” kid, the novels all have babies or kids in relation to adults.

CUE: What do you think McCarthy envisioned when he conceived this tale?

SEPICH: If I had to guess on what the book is, it's a take on the expulsion from the Garden of Eden. ... They had a beautiful world, and the twist here is that the people trying to survive are not the ones who pushed the button: the novel begs the question “What do you do when you lose the Garden of Eden for a second time?” What do you do? How do you behave?

CUE: Oprah and McCarthy seem like a strange mix. Any guess as to why she selected "The Road" for her book club?

SEPICH: To the absolute wonderment in this story, Oprah picked McCarthy before Columbia University did with its Pulitzer. Still, I know why (or I say to myself I know why) Oprah
picked it, why McCarthy said that he would be interviewed by Oprah…it’s because she has a great heart for people…her’s is a human heart. She seems to recognize that there’s a heart in his book "The Road" that's rare.

CUE: What should first-time McCarthy readers be looking for?

SEPICH: What McCarthy has always been known for his talent with the language. He knows so many perfectly tuned words for virtually every situation. It's really hard to find him choosing the wrong word. ... If he were a singer, it would be his range and his ability to tune the phrasing that's always been remarkable. In "The Road," that sort of thing is slightly reduced because you're
working with a father and son, and so you can't have quite the pyrotechnics you can in other places. Everything is gray. Somebody asked me at some point how many times I thought the word "gray" was in that book.

CUE: Does that make "The Road" an uncommon selection in the McCarthy canon?

SEPICH: It would be slightly unusual out of his work. Nevertheless, it's not unusual because it shows the empathy, the caring that the father has for his son, and the trust that the son has for the father. ... It is, I guess, what they would call a picaresque, a story in which somebody is traveling and this-and-that happens to them, and they travel some more, and another event happens to them. The story has s a pretty traditional sort of shape. What was terribly surprising is that in the end the
son—in a world of, almost literally, dog-eat-dog—finds a family that will take him in and, best as they can, protect him.

CUE: So it's that respect for the law that readers recognize as a common McCarthy theme, right?

SEPICH: The thing to say about "The Road" is that McCarthy was born into a family where his father was a lawyer, and he has at least a brother, if not others, who are lawyers. And he's got lawyers in some of his books, "Blood Meridian" in particular. In "The Road” there's an
interesting thought, an echo of an interesting kind of a phrase: I remember a couple of lawyers having surprised me by saying: "Oh, they can't kill you and they can't eat you," you know, trying to buck me up that some event wasn't the darkest moment. In "The Road," literally, LITERALLY, the
wife (just before she exits the book) says to the man, the father, Papa, "If the others get ahold of us, they'll rape me, they'll rape him (the boy), they'll kill us and they'll eat us." And so throughout “The Road” a related question is raised many times by the kid, by the child, and the father always answers, "No, we don't eat people." That's a big distinction in the book. In the big picture of
that book, it's a literal thing. But taken throughout McCarthy's work, it's a question of law, of some kind of authority beyond a lack of food and a kindly treatment in situations that don't necessarily demand it. I remember at the end of "The Road," the father had died, and a kind man comes along and is going to help the boy. The child wants a blanket put over the father's corpse. The man goes over and does that for the father. The child then, by himself, goes back to that place, and as a matter of fact the blanket is over the father, which is something that doesn't necessarily have to be there. For a McCarthy moment, if we're talking about how he has done things in other books, the dead are treated with respect at that moment. (It) comes back to, in my mind, the idea of somebody who has a sense of a higher something-or-other, whether it's a god or a sense of law. But there is a respect for the humanity of the heart in that blanket. The father kills people in the book, in "The Road," shoots them in the head, gets the kid all covered with brains. It's not pretty, but it's defensive, it's not done in order to eat.

CUE: Given the gravity of those themes, what advice would you give Oprah followers who will be reading McCarthy for the first time?

SEPICH: I couldn't pretend to know how somebody who has never read McCarthy before is going to come into that and find their way through it, what they're going to say about it. Hopefully, they'll come out thinking that heading toward nuclear winter is not a good thing. I'd prefer not to lose the world into grayness and where the trees fall over and you don't know what color the ocean's going to be, because it's not going to have any life in it. We’re at three-minutes-to-midnight on the Doomsday Clock. Seeing clearly the results of nuclear war is a good reason to read McCarthy’s “The Road.”

CUE: Your "Notes on Blood Meridian" is going to be republished next year by the University of Texas Press, and with two new essays. Are you excited?

SEPICH: I'd like to quit thinking about it. I didn't think about it for a long time. I had, in a sense, put it in the drawer. Still, republishing allows the newer material, a couple of essays that I put together in the last few years. Notes are one thing; they're just notes. I'm trying to bring my contact with his novel to some kind of resolution, not necessarily an explication, but a resolution. Getting it back in print seemed like a good thing, seemed like a way to say, "Yes, I am done with this thing."

CUE: Some copies of "Notes" sell for hundreds of dollars online. Does its popularity ever surprise you?

SEPICH: The Internet prices (are) dumbfounding. For literary criticism that's ten years old to have copies offered on the Internet—God knows if they sell—for anywhere between $400 to, let's say, $800 ... it's dumbfounding. It has nothing to do with me, with what I did. It has to do with people wanting to know more about McCarthy's "Blood Meridian" and—if you will—how McCarthy’s talent works.