Which book’s world would be the absolute worst to live in?
Everybody answers this one with 1984.
I get it. The surveillance, the boot stamping on a human face, forever. Bad deal. But let me tell you something about being a roofer: nobody surveils the guy on the roof. In twenty years, the most attention I’ve ever gotten from an authority figure was an insurance adjuster with a clipboard who didn’t want to pay for ridge vent. 1984 is a nightmare if you’re a poet. I’m not a poet. I’m a man with a ladder.
The Hunger Games? Also no. Too far from anything I know.
No — the book world I’d least want to live in is Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.
For those who haven’t read it: the world burned. Nobody knows why, and that’s the scariest part — McCarthy never tells you. The sun is behind ash. Nothing grows. A father and his son walk south through the ruins eating whatever they can find in abandoned houses, and the people they meet are either starving or worse. I read it in 2009 and I still think about it every time the sky does something weird. Which, as a roofer, is about twice a week.
Here’s why it’s the worst. Not the cannibals — although the cannibals are bad, don’t get me wrong. It’s the part nobody talks about: there is nothing left to fix.
My whole life is built on one premise. A roof leaks. I find the leak. I fix it. The water stops. Order restored, invoice sent, fourteen chickens alive and well. That’s the deal I’ve made with the world: things break, and I can put them back.
In The Road, nothing goes back. The houses are shells. The roofs — my roofs — are caved in or burned through or gone entirely. There is no work. There is no trade. There is no calling the supplier on Monday and getting material by Wednesday, because the supplier is dead and so is Wednesday. A roofer in McCarthy’s world is just a man standing in ash with tools for a job that no longer exists.
And then there’s the father part.
The man in the book has one kid. One. I have three, all under seven, and I can tell you exactly what The Road looks like through a father’s eyes: it looks like an empty pantry that never fills again. My whole morning — the 4:45 alarm, the Mr. Coffee, Folgers, black, two mugs before the detonating starts — runs on one assumption. That there will be food. That the grocery store is a permanent feature of the landscape, like Georgia clay. McCarthy takes that assumption out behind the house and shoots it on page one.
Run it through Kirk’s drill. Does it last? No — that’s the entire book; everything is ending and nothing is starting. What does it cost when it doesn’t? Everything. The shingles, the house, the S-corp, the mortgage, the three small people. All of it.
Most dystopias give you a villain. 1984 gives you Big Brother. The Hunger Games gives you the Capitol. The Road gives you weather. Permanent, hopeless, ash-falling weather — and a roofer who can’t do a thing about it.
So no. I’ll stay here.
This world has Georgia Julys, insurance adjusters, a truck that only starts when it respects me, and three kids who detonate like smoke alarms at 6 a.m. It’s a mess.
At least the mess has roofs.
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