Ah, some bookblogging at last.
I probably should reach back a few months and mention the book I keep forgetting – The Road by Cormac McCarthy.
When The Road was first published, I got the impression from the reviews I skimmed that the thematic focus of the book was a  possible messiah-child trekking through an post-apocalyptic, dystopian landscape, with the emphasis on “messiah-child.” I really did think it was the central conceit of the novel, so I was surprised when I read it to find that it really wasn’t so. There are certainly implications here and there that this child might be such a thing, but there are other ways to read it, as well – that he, simply by being a child and being alive represents hope.
(Which is what all children represent.)
So anyway – I read the book on one of the legs of our Florida trip – it’s a quick read. (I passed on to Katie, by the way, who liked it – it’s quite suitable for adolescent reading. A bit gruesome at times, but nothing like the violence you find in some of McCarthy’s other work.) As you can tell what I’ve already written, the novel centers on a father and son, traveling through a wasteland of the earth. The United States, we presume, wasted by something – a flash of light is mentioned, everything is burned, smoldering, but we are never sure if the disaster was humanly-concocted or natural. The point is that the earth, as far as the father and the boy are concerned, at least, is almost utterly destroyed. Nothing grows, food can only be scrounged from abandoned stores or hidden shelters (or, in the case of some roving groups, cannabalism).
The two are on a journey to the sea, the father being intuitively convinced that there, some sort of life, something other than what they know, will be discovered, or a way to it found.
I liked it, although it’s one of those books you are impressed with as you read, but then you put it down and a day or so later, you suspect there wasn’t as much to it as you perhaps thought. The power of it lies in two aspects: First, the descriptions (naturally), which are vivid, poetic (the sun circles the earth “like a grieving mother with a lamp”)  and painfully absorbing and secondly, and, to me, more importantly, the relationship between the father and son.
This is essentially a book about parental love. It is about the instinct to protect,  the joy and satisfaction that comes from meeting the needs of a child, what parents do to assure their children that all is well, that everything will work out, even as the line between hope and deception blurs. It’s about sacrifice. It is completely absorbing on both a physical and emotional level, and a book I found very hard to put down.
But what of the religious aspect? There is plenty of Christian and specifically Catholic imagery in the novel, there is the hint that this boy contains some sort of spark that must be protected and preserved.  The father believes, “If he is not the word of God God never spoke.” There are a few other hints, as well. Near the end of the book, there is more explicit God-talk, which James Wood sees as an uneasy fit with the rest of the book:

So the boy is alone, but not for long. He meets a man on the road. “Are you one of the good guys?” he warily asks him. Yes, says the man. “You dont eat people,” says the boy. “No. We dont eat people.” So he joins the man’s group, and in the novel’s penultimate paragraph, a woman is seen embracing the boy and saying, “Oh…I am so glad to see you.” It is the only moment in the book in which anyone other than the boy’s father has embraced him.

She would talk to him sometimes about God. He tried to talk to God but the best thing was to talk to his father and he did talk to him and he didnt forget. The woman said that was all right. She said that the breath of God was his breath yet though it pass from man to man through all of time.

There are several ways to read this passage. The woman seems to affirm that God, or some kind of God, still exists, and is not annihilated by the end of His creation. In this reading, the boy is indeed a kind of last God, who is “carrying the fire” of belief. (The father and son used to speak of themselves, in a kind of familial shorthand, as people who were carrying the fire: it seems to be a version of being “the good guys.”) Since the breath of God passes from man to man, and God cannot die, this boy represents what will survive of humanity, and also points to how life will be rebuilt. The more pessimistic account is that the woman is just saying something to soothe the bereaved boy, and that he is both the last boy and the last God, and neither can survive in this charred world. The novel’s penultimate sentence — “Not to be made right again” — is suggestive of such a reading.
There is no obligation for The Road to answer an unanswerable dilemma like theodicy. It is a novel, not a treatise. But the placement of what looks like a paragraph of religious consolation at the end of such a novel is striking, and it throws the novel off balance, precisely because theology has not seemed exactly central to the book’s inquiry. One has a persistent, uneasy sense that theodicy and the absent God have been merely exploited by the book, engaged with too lightly, without enough pressure of interrogation. When Ely says that “there is no God and we are his prophets,” the phrase seems a little trite in its neat paradox of negation.

I rather agree with Woods here. As we’ve read the novel and traveled this destroyed land, we are naturally led to ask “why?” in two senses, one proximate, as in “What caused this?” and another more philosophical and theological, as in, “What does this mean when the Creator’s work is destroyed? What is the purpose of life in a world of decay and ruin, which, in a way, is our world?”
But the characters themselves do not seem to struggle with this specific question – their concern is, naturally enough, survival. In that sense, it does come a bit out of the blue. However, I suppose the other way to look at is to suggest that in the end of the book, all of the implicit questions that have arisen are finally brought to the surface – that in the love of father and child, in the physical life that is passed on at the beginning, and the love that sustains as life continues – there dwells a divine spark, because God is love.
What did you think?
(By the way, Woods is an atheist, although a fair-minded one. He wrote a novel – somewhat autobiographical, it seems – called The Book Against God , which I enjoyed, despite its occasional talkiness. The irony of the thing is that in this novel written by an atheist, in which an unbelieving son rebels against his clergyman father, it is the latter character who emerges in the far better light. Woods now writes for The New Yorker and reviews Robert Alter’s translation of the Psalms here. I’ve not yet read it…)
Oh, one more thing about the review: Ross Douthat said, “Well, nobody’s perfect” when he found some serious misstatements in Wood’s review regarding the content of some other apocalpytic-type novels.
Oh, one more thing about Cormac McCarthy…we’re alumni of the same high school – Knoxville Catholic. Okay, so he went there thirty years before I did, and it wasn’t even in the same building. And it doesn’t seem any of his talent remained behind for me to absorb, which is really too bad. Here’s a brief article (pdf) about McCarthy’s teen years.

At the end of his junior year in high school he was chosen as Artist for the staff of the school newspaper. In introducing the staff, the paper said, “Charley [sic] McCarthy, certainly not similar to Edgar Bergan’s [sic] ‘Blockhead,’ in any respect, was the man chosen for the drawing ability and keen sense of humor necessary to make a great cartoonist” (“Meet the Staff” 3).
Perhaps most importantly, during his senior year, Charlie McCarthy published a five-verse poem titled “Autumn’s Magic,”which is the earliest known example of his published writing(McCarthy, “Autumn’s”). It easily predates his first published short story, “Wake for Susan” (McCarthy, “Wake”), which is often mentioned as his first published work. The poem begins
The sun was slowly breaking
Thru the chilly, misty dawn
And the fog upon the river
Lifted, faded, soon was gone. 
The newspaper also printed some examples of cartoon drawings in his senior year, although I found none that were signed or specifically attributed to him.
 He sang in the high school choir and was a member of a quintet that sang the Proper by Rossini at a Christmas Eve midnight mass at the Church of the Immaculate Conception. The event was mentioned in the local newspapers (“High School Choir Will Sing Mass” 8; “Immaculate Conception” 2), and a picture of the group rehearsing appeared in the school paper as well (“Quartet, Pianist Practice for Proper” 1).

My school! My parish! (And even the school newspaper I edited!) I see from the piece that both figure in Suttree, which I obviously now obligated to read.