The Crossing by Cormac McCarthy

I noticed many parallels between the Biblical story of Job and Billy Parnham. He's a teenager of utter loyalty and honesty, but everyone he loves is taken from him. By the end of the story he can't even feel like a good person, and he's wandering through Mexico and the Southwest in solitude. I noticed that many of the people he met liked to give him long philosophical treatises like Job's friends. Some were profound, but not once was Billy allowed to talk about the painful experiences in his life. He only tried to do it a couple times, and each time the other person would shut down the conversation.

I found it interesting that the book was bracketed by his killing of a wolf and his throwing rocks at an old dog. Each time he felt immense remorse, and the book ends with him weeping in the highway.

About another Job-like figure Billy hears about:

Need one say he was a man without politics? He was simply a messenger. He had no faith in the power of men to act wisely in their own behalf. It was his view rather that every act soon eluded the grasp of its propagator to be swept away in a clamorous tide of unforeseen consequence.

About a priest who had given trite religious advice to someone in suffering:

   And the priest? A man of broad principles. Of liberal sentiments. Even a generous man. Something of a philosopher. Yet one might say that his way through the world was so broad it scarcely made a path at all. He carried within himself a great reverence for the world, this priest. He heard the voice of the Deity in the murmur of the wind in the trees. Even the stones were sacred.He was a reasonable man and he believed that there was love in his heart.

   There was not. Nor does God whisper through the trees. His voice is not to be mistaken. When men hear it they fall to their knees and their souls are riven and they cry out to Him and there is no fear in them but only that wildness of heart that springs from such longing and they cry out to stay His presence for they know at once that while godless men may live well enough in their exile those to whom He has spoken can contemplate no life without Him but only darkness and despair. Trees and stones are no part of it. So.

A blind gravedigger had some advice for Billy:

He said that while one would like to say that God will punish those who do such things and that people often speak in just this way it was his experience that God could not be spoken for and that men with wicked histories often enjoyed lives of comfort and that they died in peace and were buried with honor. He said that it was a mistake to expect too much of justice in this world. He said that the notion that evil is seldom rewarded was greatly overspoken for if there were no advantage to it then men would shun it and how could virtue then be attached to its repudiation? It was the nature of his profession that his experience with death should be greater than for most and he said that while it was true that time heals bereavement it does so only at the cost of the slow extinction of those loved ones from the heart's memory which is the sole place of their abode then or now. Faces fade, voices dim. Seize them back, whispered the sepulturero. Speak with them. Call their names. Do this and do not let sorrow die for it is the sweetening of every gift.

Billy had a conversation with a girl who was in love with his brother Boyd:

He asked if God always looked after her and she studied the heart of the fire for a long time where the coals breathed bright and dull and bright again in the wind from the lake. At last she said that God looked after everything and that one could no more evade his care than evade his judgment. She said that even the wicked could not escape his love. He watched her. He said that he himself had no such idea of God and that he'd pretty much given up praying to Him and she nodded without taking her eyes from the fire and said that she knew that. 

Here's an example of one of the two times Billy tried to reach out, this time with his brother Boyd:

Talk to me.

Go to bed.

I need for you to talk to me.

It's okay. Everything's okay.

No it aint.

You just worry about stuff. I'm all right.

I know you are, said Billy. But I aint.