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tadpole rated it:

(review of isbn 0307265439)

07/27/08

bookshelves: 2008, cpl

Read in July, 2008

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here.

Wow. This may be one of the saddest books that I have ever read, yet I couldn't stop reading.

Essentially, I've been hearing rumblings on the Internet now and again that McCarthy is the Faulkner of our age, so I grabbed this book haphazardly off the shelf from the library to give him a look.

The premise of the book is pretty basic: a catastrophe has occurred and a father and son are trying to survive. One could assume that the catastrophe is of the nuclear bomb variety and that the setting...more Wow. This may be one of the saddest books that I have ever read, yet I couldn't stop reading.

Essentially, I've been hearing rumblings on the Internet now and again that McCarthy is the Faulkner of our age, so I grabbed this book haphazardly off the shelf from the library to give him a look.

The premise of the book is pretty basic: a catastrophe has occurred and a father and son are trying to survive. One could assume that the catastrophe is of the nuclear bomb variety and that the setting is America, though this is never explicitly stated. One might also assume that this is never stated because the people remaining are either unaware of the details or else it is just not important anymore when faced with the bigger picture of day-to-day survival. The boy and his father are staying close to a road that is taking them South, as they believe that the warmer climate will eliminate that particular variable to their continued existence. Their most valuable possessions are a gun with two bullets in the chamber and a shopping cart. As they travel the road, the two major concerns are the search for food and the avoidance of other people. The reason to avoid others is because the disaster has caused humanity's worst face to show itself. Any stranger brings a high potential for harm. While the nicer ones may only take your possessions and leave you to certain death, there are others (that seem to travel in groups) that have a penchant for rape or cannibalism.

There is a kind of melancholy inspiration that can be found here. The boy often echoes the words heard from his father that they are "the good guys" and "keeping the fire". What this means to me is that they choose to persist in maintaining their humanity and not degrading it like the marauding cannibal rapists or cashing out early like the boy's mother chose to do (which would be a tempting option for anyone in a similar situation).

The prose of this book is also a curious thing. It is very sparse, almost to the point of being minimalistic. Basically, it is all scenery and dialog, with only the occasional glimpses into dreams or thoughts. I didn't think that I was going to like the writing style when I first began reading, but I am now of the opinion that it is crucial in making the story so effective. It forces the reader to become more engrossed in the microcosm that is the boy and his father. If we had been given all of the background behind the disaster, etc, I think it would have detracted from the story in the long run.

My only possible complaint with this book is the way that the dialog is printed. The punctuation is also very sparse, and there are no real chapter divisions to speak of. Each paragraph is written as a block of text, and the dialog is printed within a block of text with a character's utterance starting a new indented line. There are no quotation marks and none of the ",said the boy" business that readers are used to. This caused me to sometimes lose track during verbal exchanges between the father and son as far as who was saying what. At first I also thought that the dialog was too stilted and the characters were hollow. I then started reflecting on the things that people most often chat about, such as work, school, television shows and movies. In a world such as this, where a rusty can of peaches meant more than all of the movies one has ever seen, I'm pretty sure all of our dialog would become stilted rather quickly.

Sadly, I found this to be totally believable for a post apocalyptic type novel. One only needs to look back at footage from New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina to realize that when the chips are down, human beings can get really ugly really fast. Although I loved this book, I wouldn't recommend reading it for anyone who is uncomfortable about getting all freaked out and then rushing to the grocery store to stock up on non-perishable food items. I'm going to have to look this up again, but wasn't this book on Oprah's list awhile back? If I'm correct about that, I am now totally intrigued by the prospect of how magnificiently awful it must have went over with the soccer mom demographic that we assume makes up a majority of her viewers.

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Daniel rated it:

(review of isbn 0307265439)

10/19/07

Setting aside the horrors that parade about its fallout-stricken landscape, The Road is a book about redemption.

Superficially it was one of dreariest books I've read in a while. I tried to count the number of times the word 'ash' appears, but I gave up. I bet it appears more times than 'hash' in a travel guide to Amsterdam. But there's something to be said for persistence. The grim mood is driven home with a bludgeon, and its memory lasts for days after finishing the book.

As a literary ...more Setting aside the horrors that parade about its fallout-stricken landscape, The Road is a book about redemption.

Superficially it was one of dreariest books I've read in a while. I tried to count the number of times the word 'ash' appears, but I gave up. I bet it appears more times than 'hash' in a travel guide to Amsterdam. But there's something to be said for persistence. The grim mood is driven home with a bludgeon, and its memory lasts for days after finishing the book.

As a literary work, The Road has no peers in the rich pageant of apocalyptic tales. While reserving due credit for David Brin, Pat Frank, St. John the Divine, and that guy who wrote Left Behind, The Road actually has literary merits besides a vivid imagining of the End(ed) Times. In terms of moral message and narrative presentation, the book resembles an Ernest Hemingway story more than anything else. Between the terseness, the ravaged male protagonist, themes of resignation, and the descriptions of burnt-over countryside, I saw many parallels to Hemingway's Big Two-Hearted River stories.

Both authors use earthly destruction as a backdrop for redemption. McCarthy deals in the grittiest, most tragic kind, whereas Hemingway's redemption is fresh, sublime, and much less messy. In Hemingway's short stories, the protagonist returns from war seeking solace through fishing. He arrives in Upper Michigan only to discover the charred ruins of a town and a landscape so destroyed that even the grasshoppers are black with (yep) ash. But the land embraces him, and as he fishes for the majestic trout in the Two Hearted River, he comes closer to wholeness. Is restored. The end.

Not so in McCarthyland. McCarthy's apocalypse strips the world of gods, meaning, life force. The remaining creatures become hideously mutated. People revert to cannibalism and slavery. Not that there are many of them around anyway. But the protagonist and his son, who was born several days after the mystery apocalypse occurred, find many monsters on their journey through the book. Seeking the only unknown - a source of food, shelter, non-gray colors - they walk toward the coast They see many terrifying things. They nearly starve. The man grows sickly. But he never loses focus. Eventually, he arrives at the ocean with his son.

(Note: The Road is a quick read, and there isn't much plot to summarize. As I write this summary, attempting to leave out graphic images and further landscape descriptions, I realize I've already covered most of the plot. Sorry.)

But the moral message...
In a world supposedly beyond hope, a graveyard of 'dead gods', a land of zombies and monsters, the future is almost entirely dead, and people are nearly gone with it. But McCarthy's protagonist has kept hope alive through an absolute devotion to his son. He has realized in him a (traumatized) vision of redemption. He is an inquisitive child, who has been taught a civilized moral code by his father. He is hardy and capable, and seen as an unbelieveable oddity/potential kidnapping victim by the few monsters that find him on the Road. He is one of the last of his kind, and his father carries him through hell to a disappointing discovery of the coast, anticipating nothing, really, except the deliverance of reaching some sort of destination.

When the protagonist dies on the coast and the boy is found and rescued by 'good guys', McCarthy's message of redemption - a simple act of kindness - stands out in harsh contrast to his backdrop of death and phantasmagoria. The protagonist is dead, but his only hope - the boy - has been delivered into safe hands. As he concludes the narrative with a few lines about trout, the Hemingway homage becomes clear. The survivors are redeemed. Cold comfort is shared by one and all....less

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Chris added it (review of isbn 0307265439)

09/22/07

Read in September, 2007

recommends it for: grown-ups

Once during the reading, toward the end, The Road made me sob in that dry way where no tears come but your body chokes spasmodically. By way of recommendation.

This is not a vast catalog of human lives, it is a thin line of experience traced by a man and a boy through a landscape as desolate as one of Anselm Kiefer's paintings for Paul Celan. Much is left out, and those blanks are The Road's strength. Voids in our knowledge of both past and present that bring us down in the skin of the tra...more Once during the reading, toward the end, The Road made me sob in that dry way where no tears come but your body chokes spasmodically. By way of recommendation.

This is not a vast catalog of human lives, it is a thin line of experience traced by a man and a boy through a landscape as desolate as one of Anselm Kiefer's paintings for Paul Celan. Much is left out, and those blanks are The Road's strength. Voids in our knowledge of both past and present that bring us down in the skin of the travelers, huddling with them near what's known.

Most of McCarthy's work takes place at the margins, depicting transient or dying worlds. This one like the rest, only the whole world is dying and not just a part. His huge effects, the depth and span of feeling, are helped by the distance in time, past or future, and the extreme circumstance that he renders, which allows his characters to act in antisocial ways. He prefers the antisocial to the social, and few bonds to many. Thus his stories are about small bands of folk. Those bands of men have manly conversations because McCarthy cannot or is not interested in writing females. And in general his prose leaks into his dialog and elevates it so much that we are left incredulous.

Most of the dialog between the man and the boy are fitting, but there are passages with other characters that stand out as hiatuses in taste that slipped by the editors: the conversation with the wife; the meal with the old blind man, a stock prophet full of imperfection and wisdom similar to the hermit in Blood Meridian; certain moments between man and boy: e.g. "There is no prophet in this earth's long chronicle who is not honored here today."

McCarthy has written a novel of suspense -- the reader hopes and fears almost unceasing with the pair; but those hopes and fears are often deceived, the heroes blindsided by events beyond their ken. The man spends the book worrying about his son -- that's the big driver, the son's innocence a foil to the world’s horrors. But even as the son is protected, he is growing up and away from the man into adulthood, when he will not be pure, just as the man no longer is. There is a goodness between men and their children, which smacks of nostalgia, that can disappear as those children break away. The man is saved here because McCarthy makes him die towards the end. The second, secret fear, then, which McCarthy saves his man from facing, is that of the son grown up.

The novel is not tightly coupled. One thing leads to another in a meandering way, and small mistakes do not result in huge catastrophes. The man and boy journey between disparate scenes like anyone on a long voyage, allowing McCarthy to introduce and drop elements as he does a kind of post-apocalyptic review of human nature.

There is a logic and language to basic objects useful for killing and repair that McCarthy employs as the tiny gears that move the novel forward. The wheels on the shopping cart they push break sometimes or do not. Implements are used in novel ways -- a spade becomes a crow bar; a flare gun becomes a weapon. Thus we are among things more than people, because the things lasted longer and McCarthy presumably likes them better.

One of the most horrifying aspects of this novel, aside from the cannibalism and baby-killing, was the font that Vintage chose for the paperback's page headers and numbers, some runelike monstrosity meant to evoke apocalypses. Another is the ending, which seems tacked on for the benefit of John Francis McCarthy, son of the author, and to whom the book is dedicated. In the last six pages of a 287-page book the boy is saved by a kind of mountain man ex machina belonging to a band of good guys of whom we've had no indication hitherto. Luckily, because those pages are at the end, it is a relatively simple affair to cut them out, and voila a much better book which one might sell on e-bay, fan fiction in reverse.
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Stacey rated it:

(review of isbn 0307387895)

03/27/08

bookshelves: bookclub, fiction

Read in March, 2008

recommended to Stacey by: bookclub
recommends it for: Anyone who enjoys overhyped novels.

5 out of 10 actually.

I need to premise this with the fact that it was chosen for a sci-fi/fantasy book club I am a part of. It is in no way, shape, or form science fiction.

*update* The funny thing about the above statement is the fact that a good portion of our discussion (at the book club) was whether it was in fact science fiction. I still feel it is not, but it just goes to show you how people can see things from a different perspective than you can. We are all arrogant enough to...more 5 out of 10 actually.

I need to premise this with the fact that it was chosen for a sci-fi/fantasy book club I am a part of. It is in no way, shape, or form science fiction.

*update* The funny thing about the above statement is the fact that a good portion of our discussion (at the book club) was whether it was in fact science fiction. I still feel it is not, but it just goes to show you how people can see things from a different perspective than you can. We are all arrogant enough to think we are right (and they are wrong) even if we are too tactful to say it.

I am at a loss as to why everyone is so in love this with this novel. This is one of the most over-hyped books I have read in years. It all started with my girlfriend and her telling me how amazing it was. Between that and the amount of people I have seen reading it and the amazing literary acclaims it has received, I was prepared for something really extraordinary. Instead it was just ordinary.

Let’s start with the characters. To me I felt detached from them from the beginning. Father and Son on a journey through America. It sounds nice and there were a few really nice moments here and there, but overall it was difficult for me to even stay interested in why they were doing it in the first place. Lack of anything other than them scavenging (which I know was essential) and just not really interesting dialogue between the two, which hurt the novel tremendously.

You could feel the anguish from the father and the hopelessness he felt. The kept moving on down the Road, even if he did not believe in the journey any longer. You could see him losing his faith as the book went along and his only anchor was his son.

I realize this was a harsh world (lord knows we could not handle this) but the kid just got on my nerves. It was hard to tell how old he was (8-12 was my guess), but he said "okay" to everything the father said. More interaction would have been nice. I am not saying he did not act with a child, but it the dialogue never did much to help the story. The son never did give up though and his faith in finding "the good guys" is what helped him continue the journey.

The never ending quest of finding a safe haven is not exactly a new theme, but one I can normally relate with. We all want to find a safe place to call home. A place where we do not feel threatened. The part where this novel shines was in the setting of the world. It did feel very familiar and I thought McCarthy did a wonderful job of that.

The writing style was the other thing that I did not like. This book just goes to show you that if you are a famous enough author, you can get away with writing a novel however you want. Can you say Blindness by Saramago? Ignoring all rules of grammar. If I wrote a novel this way I would never make it past an editor. I find that highly amusing, but very unfair at the same time. I also understand that since I am a bit OCD about things that this type of novel is going to get under my skin a bit.

Saying all that, the novel does have merit. The desolate setting was done very well and you did feel could see just how awful things really were in our "future". It was bleak. It was sad and a bit depressing most of the time. It makes you think about humanity and morality. A book that makes you think cannot be that bad.

Overall. A decent book, but not nearly as good as people seem to think it was. Not at all mind blowing or life changing. Just his views on what he thinks the world is going to (or already is becoming) be at some point. It is a very negative view and really lacked much hope. The novel was ok. Ordinary even. Which is sad when you were expecting something more. Just goes to show you what happens when people overhype a novel.
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Dustin rated it:

(review of isbn 0307265439)

09/08/07

Read in September, 2007

recommends it for: everyone

There are so many beautiful lines and paragraphs of prose in this relatively short book that it just isn't fair (to other writers or aspiring writers; McCarthy has already stolen the thunder, he's kidnapped the collective muse). The irony of the beautiful in this book is that it is set in a fully believable post-nuclear war earth scorched and scoured of its resources, most of its people, and its dignity. One of the bleakest outlooks depicted in a book of which I am aware. A goodreads.com friend ...more There are so many beautiful lines and paragraphs of prose in this relatively short book that it just isn't fair (to other writers or aspiring writers; McCarthy has already stolen the thunder, he's kidnapped the collective muse). The irony of the beautiful in this book is that it is set in a fully believable post-nuclear war earth scorched and scoured of its resources, most of its people, and its dignity. One of the bleakest outlooks depicted in a book of which I am aware. A goodreads.com friend of mine, Laurie Outterside, in her review of this book pens it most precisely and convincingly: "the beauty in this book is all the horror that is implied." Good stuff, Laurie!

Despite the cold utter despair among the ashes, there is still if but a carefully measured particle of hope for reclaiming the dignity of human relationships, for starting over or continuing that which is the antithesis of what has caused the destruction of the world as we know it in the first place. This is pictured in no other way than in the simple exchanges of conversation and love in the relationship of a father and son that drives the story. In the decisions the father makes for their survival, mostly for his son's survival. Again, there is nothing sappy or unrealistic about this rendering. It actually depicts what I have thought on occasion must be how a mother or father among the animals of "wild" nature must feel or think if we could ever truly know. McCarthy never slackens the tension of the constant anxiety in either the father or the son in the predicaments in which they find themselves. We are let into the father's thoughts, and they are many times resigned to let death just have its way with he and the boy. But never totally. His love for the boy if but barely sustains them both. It moves him when he thinks there is nothing else for which to move.

And that is what moves me. This whole story does. The sense of utter loss that the surroundings produce, that which we are truly capable of in our worst moments in a nuclear age where hotheads filled with greed and hatred push the buttons of "power" that can essentially make or break our world. But not just the unrelenting sense of loss (imagining what could have been and should have been), so does the one simple relationship pictured in the book. It is the flimsiest of springboards for hope in the story, indeed in our own stories, yet it appears the one that is truly essential.

Tears remained perched at the corners of my eyes throughout this book. The end does not provide much inducement to dry them, either. Both the frailty of this world as we know it and the one thing that sustains it (relationship or love, whatever you want to call it) are masterfully captured in its pages.

The road in the "The Road" is in my interpretation of the moment symbolic of the path we all must take. It is the timeline of history and human action upon which we all find a place by virtue of our existence here and now. Danger abounds on the road. It is where we run into fellow travelers in life, many who are bent for some reason or another on destroying and exploiting life. Yet the allure of the road's destination, a place in life of hope and tranquility--of sustainability for generations--forces us heed and seek its beckon call.

Read this book. I dare you to try and forget it.
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Richard rated it:

(review of isbn 0307265439)

07/11/08

Read in March, 2008

The power of Cormac McCarthy's canon alone makes this book worth going through, but I am continually amazed at how McCarthy is continually able to pull off narratives with spare and seemingly redundant dialogue, yet maintain such emotional intensity and, in a book that in its ground narrative seems pessimistic and despairing in regards to the human race, so warm in regards to love.

This book takes place in the aftermath of some great disaster that has destroyed the US and possibly the world....more The power of Cormac McCarthy's canon alone makes this book worth going through, but I am continually amazed at how McCarthy is continually able to pull off narratives with spare and seemingly redundant dialogue, yet maintain such emotional intensity and, in a book that in its ground narrative seems pessimistic and despairing in regards to the human race, so warm in regards to love.

This book takes place in the aftermath of some great disaster that has destroyed the US and possibly the world. The country is covered in ash and mummified bodies and peopled with cannibals and ragtag armies taking slaves, but through this a man is journeying with his son towards the south for a warmer climate in order to survive winter. Food is hard to come by, since there are no animals to hunt or plants, and almost everywhere they go has already been ransacked for food. But the father has made a promise to keep his young son alive, and this journey will test his devotion at almost every step of the way.

Just like in books like his Border Trilogy, McCarthy takes situations that may be highly dramatic (and even melodramatic in the wrong hands) and tones them down with intense focus on the characters involved, who are often not very verbal but highly resolute in their convictions. The father in _The Road_ may not have any monologues to teach his son (or us) what happened to the world around them, but he does plan to make any sacrifice he can to keep his son alive. But if he can't, he has a gun with two bullets left for the two of them.

As they travel, they come across many horrors of mankind, both in death and in life, but the father wants his son to maintain a positive outlook on humanity and insists that they are the "good guys" and hope to find other "good guys," but the farther they walk, the less likely it becomes that they will ever find anyone who does not have evil intentions in mind.

But this book is in no way a typical genre book--don't pick this up if you're looking for something like Stephen King's _The Stand_. Just like the Border Trilogy or _Blood Meridian_, McCarthy takes a genre and infuses a new life into it, a new life as old as the hills and the source of great literature: an examination of the human condition in extreme cases. In _The Road_, McCarthy has picked one of his most extreme situations to date, but his focus remains on the challenges of being a good father and a good person when so many others have given up and allowed the worst of themselves to be expressed. The narrative and dialogue is very spare, but through that McCarthy is able to pare down events to their barest constituents to bring the horror off the page, and his amazing use of simile is there to remind you that he always has more at stake, whether he is reminding you that God has abandoned mankind, or likening the ever-present ashy snow to the output of hell.

The general tone of horror and danger in this book is masterful. I found myself riveted to finish sections until I could finally see some danger around a bend in the road--the general level of anxiety and dread is compelling and well handled.

By the end, I found that things had diffused a little too much, and though I highly respected where this book went to in the end, the last quarter of the book or so was not so compelling a read as the first half. But even a not-so-crisp effort from McCarthy is far better than most of the work of North American writers nowadays, so no doubt this will be as much a classic as many of his other novels. It's so awful good to see the man back in the swing.
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Trin rated it:

(review of isbn 0307265439)

06/04/07

bookshelves: fiction

Read in February, 2007

Ho, boy. This is the most depressing, bleakest post-apocalyptic novel I’ve ever read. I know that sounds redundant almost, but it’s really not: most of the other bits of apocalyptic fiction I’ve read contain some kind of hope, some chance that civilization will rebuild, that humanity will continue, that there’s something worth fighting for. This book has cannibals. And no hope, not really—which McCarthy actually deals with really well. The man and his son go on because ...more Ho, boy. This is the most depressing, bleakest post-apocalyptic novel I’ve ever read. I know that sounds redundant almost, but it’s really not: most of the other bits of apocalyptic fiction I’ve read contain some kind of hope, some chance that civilization will rebuild, that humanity will continue, that there’s something worth fighting for. This book has cannibals. And no hope, not really—which McCarthy actually deals with really well. The man and his son go on because they go on, they keep surviving for as long as they can and hope that there’s meaning even in that (though there may not be). McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic setting is beautifully described—his prose is incredible, and by itself enough to tempt me to read more of his work. He does the Terry Pratchett thing (yes, I just compared Cormac McCarthy to Terry Pratchett—how awesome is that?) of no chapter breaks, but this story is easily swallowable in one sitting (with a couple of bathroom breaks)—and I suspect it may even be better like that. There’s a wonderful flow to it, almost lulling despite the horror of much of what father and son encounter. It’s like a long, slow slide into that final sleep.

Part of me wanted something more climatic to happen at the end, but I can see a million ways that that wouldn’t have worked, so I’m all right with the conclusion. Anyway, this book is more about the experience as a whole than any one piece of it, I think.

There are a couple of interesting—although mostly irrelevant—things I’d like to mention about McCarthy’s style. I like and understand why he chooses not to use dialogue tags—I’ve done that myself, and think that it makes sense in terms of the narrative here; it preserves the horrible, frightening feeling of quiet. What I don’t get, however, is whatever argument he seems to have with apostrophes. He doesn’t use them in words like “doesnt” or “cant,” but does for things like “he’d.” I don’t understand this as a stylistic choice—I don’t see how it works with anything else at all, or has any effect but to be stubborn and confusing. (Which is obviously why the apostrophe is kept in for “he’d”—because otherwise you’d look at the word and go, “Bwah?” WHICH IS WHY WE USE APOSTROPHES IN THE FIRST PLACE.) I’m all for manipulating language if it has a narrative purpose (I kind of like the conclusion of Ulysses). But I don’t get the sort of Gertrude Steinian theory that we should shorten everything as much as possible. It doesn’t make writing easier to understand; it makes it harder. And kind of ugly. AND, if you don’t respect your friend the apostrophe, you end up with a book full of weird typos (though that may have just been bad copy editing).

However, none of that affected my enjoyment of the book at all. (Well, the grammatical mistakes kind of did, but I don’t want to blame McCarthy for that.) It was creepy and tragic and beautifully written. I’m not sure why this is considered OMG LITERATURE when it’s ground sci-fi has been covering for years, but that’s a whole other “poor abused genre fiction” rant right there. Hi, I’m tangent girl today....less

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Aerin rated it:

(review of isbn 0307265439)

09/03/08

bookshelves: 2008, fiction-literature, pulitzer

Read in July, 2008

The Book that Changed People’s Lives

Consider, if you will, the following:

Blogs of People Who Loved The Road

Conduit

dewey

Gautami

Comments Inspired by The Road

“I had this book sitting unto...more

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Keatssycamore rated it:

(review of isbn 0307265439)

10/26/07

bookshelves: audiobooksihavelistenedto

Read in August, 2007

recommends it for: CHUDs/Day After fans

This is the second Cormac McCarthy book I've listened to. I tried to listen to ATPHs as well but Brad Pitt's narration sucked. Which is weird because I thought he'd be a natural. I like to listen to these because I'm a very slow reader and reading McCarthy can be even slower. He has that biblical style that gets confusing on the page.

What did I think?

No cowboys, so take a star away for that.
Cannibals, add the star back.
The Father is great, add a star.
His little boy is annoying,...more

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Jamie rated it:

(review of isbn 0307265439)

08/01/08

Read in January, 2008

The Road by Cormac McCarthy is one of those books that once you finish it, you toss it down and say "Okay, gonna kill myself now!" It is also riveting, engaging, and beautifully written, so it's worth it.

The hook is pretty simple: A man and his son (both unnamed for the duration of the book) are following a road West in the wake of some world searing apocalypse (also unnamed and tantalizingly undiscussed). Things are bleak. Really bleak, with the land bereft of nearly all plant and...more The Road by Cormac McCarthy is one of those books that once you finish it, you toss it down and say "Okay, gonna kill myself now!" It is also riveting, engaging, and beautifully written, so it's worth it.

The hook is pretty simple: A man and his son (both unnamed for the duration of the book) are following a road West in the wake of some world searing apocalypse (also unnamed and tantalizingly undiscussed). Things are bleak. Really bleak, with the land bereft of nearly all plant and animal life. Besides the occasional scavenger like the Man and the Boy who fend off starvation by hunting for hidden caches of food left over from the past, gangs of cannibalistic marauders hunt their fellow men and women as one of the last sources of food. Giant firestorms also occasionally flash through the landscape, but in general it's always cold and dark and hopeless. But the Man and the Boy plod on, weighed down by constant misery and fear because it's all they can do.

Really, if the only thing McCarthy was aiming to do with this book is to create a tone of fear, hopelessness, and misery, then he succeeded better than anyone I've ever seen. You feel REALLY bad for these two travelers, and you feel their despair. They're constantly in danger, be it either from cannibals, starvation, or freezing to death. So on one level it's a straight up and powerful adventure (or, if you prefer, horror) story.

But McCarthy manages to do more than just that. He also builds in messages about blind perseverance and survival, and how those traits take form for better or worse depending on whether they're tempered by other traits, like mercy or trust. The Man is bent on survival, and is thus reluctant to help or even associate the scant few other travelers they meet. He sees them as a threat and a drain on their meager stores when they're already faced with almost certain starvation. He is, in short, instinctively slogging along path to survival that takes him straight through cruelty. The Boy, on the other hand, still retains some of his innocence and the basic human need to comfort, help, and band together with others no matter the personal cost. Yet he is subservient to the Man and unable to act on these drives. Taken together, it's a great examination of the competing human drives to both alienate and include others as a means of survival. I won't tell you which wins out (or if, in fact, both fail), because the resolution of this conflict is probably the most powerful moment in an already moving novel. You should read it for yourself.

It's also worth noting how much I like McCarthy's prose. I can see how some people may get annoyed with him given the liberties he takes with basics like punctuation and sentence structure, but on the whole I thought that the prose was lyrical, elegant, flowing, and very much a part of the whole experience. While it's generally pared down and minimal (the book is well under 300 pages), it didn't bother me as much as say Hemmingway. It just flowed better, and in this case seemed right since this was (on the surface, anyway) a small story about two people fighting to survive in a bleak and largely featureless and barren world.

So, it's not an upbeat book by any stretch but I liked it. Quite a bit....less

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Matt rated it:

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07/22/08

Has a copy to sell/swap — Read in July, 2008

A little late on the CM bandwagon, I picked up All the Pretty Horses last summer in a little used bookstore in Provincetown. It was a faded, creased paperback and seemed the perfect introduction to this guy, and I wasn't disappointed.

With The Road, circumstances were much different. There's a weird sort of bookstore area in the middle of Menard's, a big-box home improvements store. Waiting on people to buy electronic parts, I picked it up. Full of sort of cheesy-looking quotes on the bac...more A little late on the CM bandwagon, I picked up All the Pretty Horses last summer in a little used bookstore in Provincetown. It was a faded, creased paperback and seemed the perfect introduction to this guy, and I wasn't disappointed.

With The Road, circumstances were much different. There's a weird sort of bookstore area in the middle of Menard's, a big-box home improvements store. Waiting on people to buy electronic parts, I picked it up. Full of sort of cheesy-looking quotes on the back from the Boston Globe and Time Magazine, etc.., Different ballgame here.

Anyway, enough of the extraneous details. This book is beautiful from beginning to end, not that much changes in that divide. McCarthy is brilliant at turning life and death into a long series of prolonged processes, like rickety levers and pulleys along a moldy wooden assembly line that none of the individual machines realize they're on.

Nobody is as blunt and so nebulous all at the same time while looking at seemingly a dead-end despair from as many angles as possible.

"The mudstained shapes of flooded cities burned to the waterline. At a crossroads a ground set with dolmen stones where the spoken bones of oracles lay moldering. No sound but the wind. What will you say? A living man spoke tese lines? He sharpened a quill with his small pen knife to scribe these things in sloe or labmpblack? At some reckonable and entabled moment? He is coming to steal my eyes. To seal my mouth with dirt."

I don't know. Like all of his prose, he captures an immediate feeling of doing things, transcending any kind of reality just by touching solid, greasy, textural surfaces. I know I'm doing an awful job of it when my words are multiple syllables longer than they need, and it's probably more contextual than anything, but passages like this are what keeps the book feeling vital throughout the reading:

"They pulled the morels from the ground, small alien-looking things that he piled in the hood of the boy's parka. They hiked back out to the road and down to where they'd left the cart and they made camp by the river pool at the falls and washed the earth and ash from the morels and put them to soak in a pan of water. By the time he had the fire going it was dark and he sliced a handful of the mushrooms on a log for their dinner and scooped them into the grying pan along with the fat pork from a can of bean and set them in the coalls to simmer. The boy watched him. This is a good place, Papa, he said."

See? Great, for some strange, humble reason. There's a tendency to talk about the need for hope in the desperate situation, but I'm not even sure that hope is the right word. It's more, like, a tendency or an uncontrollable need to be rationally close, to maintain a set of values despite a fear of them wrecking everything, even when the characters know there's nothing left to wreck.

"Do you think that your fathers are watching? That they weigh you in their ledgerbook? Against what? There is no book and your fathers are dead in the ground."

It's McCarthy's usual slo-mo pitiless Western superimposed on Mad Max circumstances, following some Steinbeck nobodies instead of impossible muscle car rock star warriors.
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Jason rated it:

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06/21/07

Read in September, 2006

The Time of No Time

The Road by Cormac McCarthy. Alfred A. Knopf, 2006. Hardcover, $24. A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF 2006.

The Road, Cormac McCarthy's new novel, is both a departure and a coming home. Strictly speaking, The Road is a novella, its slim frame inflated by frequent section breaks (a McCarthy first), as if the book itself is pausing for breath. Absent are the author's trademark paragraph-length sentences. Absent are masterful descriptions of men at work �...more The Time of No Time

The Road by Cormac McCarthy. Alfred A. Knopf, 2006. Hardcover, $24. A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF 2006.

The Road, Cormac McCarthy's new novel, is both a departure and a coming home. Strictly speaking, The Road is a novella, its slim frame inflated by frequent section breaks (a McCarthy first), as if the book itself is pausing for breath. Absent are the author's trademark paragraph-length sentences. Absent are masterful descriptions of men at work — on horseback, by riverboat, always moving — that only Melville can equal. But also missing is the coldness of the McCarthy narrator, who can sound like he's dictating from miles above. What we find in The Road is a totally unexpected tenderness, an emotional current that brightens this horrifying vision of post-apocalyptic America.

The Road takes place several years after a global catastrophe. The nature of the event is only hinted at, but several allusions indicate it was nuclear. In the aftermath, almost everything burned. Ash blots out the sun. Animals are just a memory. Shoes are almost as important as food. Everything not burned is grey or opaque. Through this devastation walk a man and his young son. They are walking south to the sea, as much for something to hope for as for the promise of warmer weather. Along the way they are beset by freezing weather and starless nights, not to mention death squads, the cannibalistic road agents who patrol the highways.

What elevates this tale of survival to an instant classic is the subtle evolution of the father's relationship to his son. Initially, the father's perseverance seems steadfast and morally sound. (Many, including the boy's mother, committed suicide.) But the pressure of caring for and protecting the boy warps the father's ability to see goodness in others. To the father, everyone is an enemy. To the boy, who radiates kindness and compassion, people are defined in this dying world by their treatment of others, making the boy a living rebuke of his father. Increasingly desperate, the father makes a series of terrible decisions. What we witness is a slow transfer of moral authority in one of the harshest environments ever evoked in literature. Leave it to McCarthy to explore love in what is essentially hell on earth.

The novel bears more than a passing resemblance to Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea, to which The Road might be called a darker cousin. Both books, arriving late in the authors' careers, are relatively brief but flawlessly executed. Both achieve the allegorical quality of a fable by using mythic structures to breathtaking effect. Although short, both books are fuller expressions of the author's genius than the longer, more elaborate works that preceded them. I don't think it's a stretch to say that like The Old Man and the Sea, The Road will be judged a separate and intact masterpiece, while at the same time a perfect extension of an enduring literary legacy.

www.eugeneweekly.com/2006/12/1......less

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Ryan rated it:

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03/05/07

bookshelves: fiction

Read in October, 2006

recommends it for: Everyone, though it's not for everyone

My favorite book of 2006, hands down. That great wrangler of language McCarthy bounced back from his misstep ( No Country for Old Men). From my review at the time:

McCarthy's entire oeuvre works toward a book like this: a gradual paring of language down to its essential, evolved parts. What is simple and true is best, a coda that works on every level in McCarthy's world. Punctution is used very sparingly, and never in contract...more My favorite book of 2006, hands down. That great wrangler of language McCarthy bounced back from his misstep ( No Country for Old Men). From my review at the time:

McCarthy's entire oeuvre works toward a book like this: a gradual paring of language down to its essential, evolved parts. What is simple and true is best, a coda that works on every level in McCarthy's world. Punctution is used very sparingly, and never in contractions. He knows we understand what "shouldnt" means. Take out the superfluous apostrophes and commas, because to McCarthy the evolution of language is toward a more refined, purer state, not anything more complex. A central clarity within the linguistic morass. I've often thought of him as a linguist — working like Adam to give the one true name for whatever it is he's describing. In terms of the novel, you could use the analogy of a sculptor. While early novelists like Hugo and Tolstoy would carve an authentic equestrian statue, focused and ornate (but also deeply resonant); while modernists would play with forms, perhaps creating esoteric mobiles referencing ancient shape; McCarthy whittles his stone to a single arc, a bold iron Richard Serra work that captures all feeling and entropy in something simultaneously timeless and, in its rust, decaying. It is not the typical postmodern approximation of a truth, the acceptance of relativity and subjectivity. Rather the opposite. Just like the most potent Serra angle, McCarthy says the word, fashions the sentence, makes the statement.

The writing and novel are so confident and so supremely plotted it creates a seamless narrative, at once tight and organic. There is also the relationship at the center of the novel, a father willing to sacrifice himself for his son. What makes this human, i.e. complex, are those times when the father chooses between what is necessary to survive and what is necessary to be a good father. The question of the utility of morality is posed often, appropriate for a world blind to it. The ending justifies the need for such morality — decency and humanity can exist between two people, even if they're the last two decent humans on earth. McCarthy's optimistic protagonists (those of All the Pretty Horses, The Crossing, and The Road) are all symbols of this individualism: if civilization is in decline or already gone, that's fine. What made the world "the world" is not its societies, but what people did with their actions on an individual scale. Rather: for McCarthy, the phrase "alone, together" was the origin, not the endpoint. Doing something right, despite its wisdom or foolishness, is what counts.

Structurally, the book sheds the proselytizing eulogies found in the extraneous last chapters of No Country for Old Men and Cities of the Plain. We are left with a surprising ending and no recourse but to reread the whole book to scrutinize its ramifications. I still consider Blood Meridian and The Crossing his boldest achievements, but I doubt you'll find a better new novel this year than The Road....less

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Kathy rated it:

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09/03/08

Read in August, 2008

This book was really powerful. It had me hooked from the first couple of pages and I had a hard time putting in down until I was done. It is basically about a man and his son living in a post-apocalyptic world. It is a barren world where nothing can grow any longer, so when the world runs out of whatever food is already there, everyone will die. There is horrible evil all around. There was a particular scene that reminded me of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. Maybe that was on pu...more This book was really powerful. It had me hooked from the first couple of pages and I had a hard time putting in down until I was done. It is basically about a man and his son living in a post-apocalyptic world. It is a barren world where nothing can grow any longer, so when the world runs out of whatever food is already there, everyone will die. There is horrible evil all around. There was a particular scene that reminded me of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. Maybe that was on purpose by the author, I don't know, but it did make me realize that there were similar themes going on about the darkness that men can descend to when civilization is stripped away. I think at the heart of the book, though, was love and goodness and that's what made it bearable.

I thought about this book a lot after finishing it. I think for me the point is how we live our lives. All of our time is limited. Here it was a fight for survival, but what's the point of living, say, two more days than someone else because you wouldn't share your food? You still die. At least if you can live with kindness and love, your life itself meant something and brought some joy to yourself and others. I don't think the point is the destination so much as "the road," or the way you get there.

The writing was really compelling and different. There was limited punctuation. The lack of quotation marks threw me off a little at first, but I actually ended up being able to follow who was saying what without difficulty. I think it was just down to essentials, just like the characters were, and even their dialogue. Nothing wasted. Here's an excerpt from the beginning to give a feel for the setting and writing:

On the far side of the river valley the road passed through a stark black burn. Charred and limbless trunks of trees stretching away on every side. Ash moving over the road and the sagging hands of blind wire strung from the blackened lightpoles whining thinly in the wind. A burned house in a clearing and beyond that a reach of meadowlands stark and gray and a raw red mudbank where a roadworks lay abandoned. Farther along were billboards advertising motels. Everything as it once had been save faded and weathered. At the top of the hill they stood in the cold and the wind, getting their breath. He looked at the boy. I'm all right, the boy said. The man put his hand on his shoulder and nodded toward the open country below them. He got the binoculars out of the cart and stood in the road and glassed the plain down there where the shape of a city stood in the grayness like a charcoal drawing sketched across the waste. Nothing to see. No smoke. Can I see? the boy said. Yes. Of course you can. The boy leaned on the cart and adjusted the wheel. What do you see? the man said. Nothing. He lowered the glasses. It's raining. Yes, the man said. I know.

There were disturbing scenes and it was difficult in a way, but I found that I felt kind of detached, sort of like the characters had to be. I didn't cry at all despite very sad situations, but I did think a lot and I am pretty sure this is a book that will stick with me....less

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Tung rated it:

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07/11/08

bookshelves: classics

Read in July, 2008

McCarthy’s first breakaway hit was “All the Pretty Horses” (which I haven’t read), so I chalked him up as a writer of Westerns. Opening this book up, I prepared myself for a slow-moving ranch drama filled with descriptions of the dusty Midwest. This’ll teach me to stereotype writers; instead of a slow Western, I found myself engrossed in a modern masterpiece of despair, love, hope, good & evil, beauty – all of the great things one hopes to find in a piece of literature. The Road ...more

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