“It’s okay”

Abstract

This chapter offers a reading of Cormac McCarthy’s 2006 novel The Road—the story of a father and son traveling together in a world that has suffered an apocalypse of devastating magnitude. The novel puts father and son on the road together—in ways that the Odyssey may gesture at but never actually achieves—in order to consider a way for men to keep house on the road, in contrast to the way in which Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping tries to imagine a way for women to keep house that also allows them to travel. The male version of housekeeping it articulates differs from that of Penelope, who famously stays by her son, and has more in common with the wayfaring of Odysseus—it is a provisional kind of housekeeping, with father and son pushing their cart, carrying the fire, hoping to find some other good guys down the road: keeping going and making do.