The Road (Audio CD) by Cormac McCarthy - Reviews, Discussion, Bookclubs, Lists

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Jul 06, 2007

Jason Weeks rated it:

(review of isbn 0307265439)

bookshelves: reviewed

Read in December, 2006

recommends it for: Everyone

I added The Road to my top ten list. I read it at home and nearly cried in front of my roommate. I read harrowing and tender passages of such craftsmanship, beauty, and sorrow that I choked up. This is a dark and terrifying book. It is a work of art.

I dare not attempt to address larger compositional issues, not after reading Michael Chabon’s superb NYT review. Is The Road science-fiction or literature? What possible outcomes are there in an apocalyptic novel, and how does the reade...more

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Feb 19, 2008

Scott rated it:

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I really feel compelled to write up a review of McCarthy's The Road as this book really worked for me (for those of you who haven't read it, there are no real spoilers below, only random quotes and thematic commentary). I read it last night in one sitting. Hours of almost nonstop reading. I found it to be an excellent book on so many levels that I am at a loss as to where to begin. It was at once gripping, terrifying, utterly heart-wrenching, and completely beautiful. I have read most of McCarth...more I really feel compelled to write up a review of McCarthy's The Road as this book really worked for me (for those of you who haven't read it, there are no real spoilers below, only random quotes and thematic commentary). I read it last night in one sitting. Hours of almost nonstop reading. I found it to be an excellent book on so many levels that I am at a loss as to where to begin. It was at once gripping, terrifying, utterly heart-wrenching, and completely beautiful. I have read most of McCarthy's other books and am already a big fan, but this one is different, perhaps his best in terms of lean, masterful prose, plot presentation, and flat-out brilliant storytelling.

Take this passage for example: "The blackness he woke to on those nights was sightless and impenetrable. A blackness to hurt your ears with listening. Often he had to get up. No sound but the wind in the bare blackened trees. He rose and stood tottering in that cold autistic dark with his arms outheld for balance while the vestibular calculations in his skull cranked out their reckonings. An old chronicle." Happy times! The word choice and imagery is classic McCarthy yet is leaner and more honed, tighter and in turn more intense. The whole book follows this pattern. No word, not a single one, is extraneous. This is perhaps my favorite single sentence in the book: "By day the banished sun circles the earth like a grieving mother with a lamp." I just love that.

Clearly this book struck a chord with me due to the two protagonists and their predicament, a father and his young son struggling in a post-apocalyptic world. To say I could identify with their interactions would be a huge understatement. McCarthy absolutely nails their dialog, making me marvel at how well he has mastered presenting on a page the way we communicate (it isn't exactly how we talk, of course, it just seems that way. Through some sort of magic, he writes dialog that comes across more realistically than actual dialog. Witchcraft for sure.). The young son was especially well done and was most certainly the most complicated character in the book. McCarthy presents him as a sort of supernatural being (Christ figure?), of only the best sort, full of goodness, a thing not of the world in which he finds himself. He is effortlessly drawn down the path of the righteous throughout the book, as if he is God's right hand man. The reward appears, at least superficially, to be key moments of luck.

It almost wouldn't work from a literary standpoint if it didn't serve so well as a vehicle to reinforce the central theme of the book: the undeniable power of love over all else. The theme of love, mostly presented through the bond of the father and son, is so well done as to evoke strong emotions, even now, as I consider how to present its keen development throughout the novel. To be so desperate, in every way and at all times, and yet to survive and at times thrive, to persevere through terrible events of unbelievable horror (think Steven King's The Stand on steroids) would strike feelings of great, sad compassion in even the most tempered soul. But it is much more than that of course. Consider this passage, a speaking passage from father to son, spoken during one of the most tense and horrifying scenes in the book: "You wanted to know what the bad guys looked like. Now you know. It may happen again. My job is to take care of you. I was appointed to do that by God. I will kill anyone who touches you. Do you understand?" In this one passage, McCarthy shows the great contradiction in this theme of love, the idea that violence and beauty can spring fourth from the same well, can come from the same fountainhead. Interestingly, the father often resorts to violence in his role as a servant of love (he sees it as his duty, in a religious sense, as stated in the quote). Yet the boy never does and appears better for it, in so many ways, even in that terrible place. He is the embodiment of pure goodness, and sets up the other, better side of love, the side that is unsullied by the world, that never resorts to baseness and violence, that finds beauty in even to most unlikely of places. Like seeing a picture better when you hold it up to the light, the contrasts between these two sides is masterfully provided, page after page, in only the most well written and considered prose.

The often repeated promethean phrase "carrying the fire," agreed upon by the two protagonists as pretty much the whole point of their continuing, embodies this central theme. The boy is carrying the fire for us all, and is perhaps the most important survivor in that shattered world, bearing the torch of love for humanity to share when it is again ready. Not to belabor the point, but the way McCarthy handles this, all the way until the end, is nothing short of genius. Can you tell I liked the book yet? I am amazed that I missed this book for so long, me being a huge McCarthy fan and placing him squarely at the top of the "big four" (with DeLillo, Roth, and Pynchon). The book is so "it's own" that as soon as I felt myself feeling an influence (for example, I swore I smelled Hemmingway's Old Man and the Sea in terms of prose/theme, and the more terrifyingly cruel parts at times rang so much like Kosinski's The Painted Bird ), McCarthy would insert the perfect McCarthyism, solidly planting the flag (so to speak) of a phrase or sentence into the passage to claim it forever for himself, like a prosaic explorer figuratively pushing out into the unknown through deft assemblages of words and phases impossible to all but him (ok, that metaphor was way too much….time to wrap it up). Of course I have more to say but am beginning to risk (actually have already thoroughly risked) repeating myself and sounding like some deranged, McCarthy stalker-type. Check this one out. It is superior literature. (less)

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Apr 01, 2008

Keely rated it:

(review of isbn 0307265439)

bookshelves: fiction, novel, post-apocalyptic, reviewed

Read in May, 2008

recommended to Keely by: Mother

The text of the book is jumbled and without any lingering style. Many have pointed out where parts resemble one author or another, but the whole of the book is not a seamless blend as much as it is a reanimated corpse: sewn together from half dead parts to make a wobbling, incongruous whole and jolted to half-life by McCarthy's hollywood popularity.

Much of the book is written in apparent simplicity, but since the author concentrates on pointless tedium without building plot, mood, or...more

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Nov 28, 2007

David rated it:

(review of isbn 0307265439)

The Road is a literary mash up composed of equal parts William Faulkner, Raymond Carver, Samuel Beckett, and pulp sci-fi. This sounds great on paper but works only about 50% of the time.

For the first 25-30 pages of The Road my BS detector rang like a fire alarm. It soon quieted down, but ultimately the things I disliked about the book—it’s egregiously overwritten in places and some of McCarthy’s more “experimental” techniques seem arbitrary --kept me from fully appreciatin...more The Road is a literary mash up composed of equal parts William Faulkner, Raymond Carver, Samuel Beckett, and pulp sci-fi. This sounds great on paper but works only about 50% of the time.

For the first 25-30 pages of The Road my BS detector rang like a fire alarm. It soon quieted down, but ultimately the things I disliked about the book—it’s egregiously overwritten in places and some of McCarthy’s more “experimental” techniques seem arbitrary --kept me from fully appreciating its virtues. It took James Woods’ definitive review in The New Republic to help me see what there is to like about it. Wood praises The Road for: the way the McCarthy taps into a post 9/11 fear of apocalypse; his combination of an ornate lyricism a’la William Faulkner with the deadpan minimalism of Raymond Carver; and for McCarthy's rigorous attempt to imagine what a post-apocalyptic world would look and feel like. The Road doesn't extrapolate a dystopian future from some present fear or potential calamity. Rather it plops its characters down in a world engulfed by some kind of nuclear winter (the cause of the catastrophe is never specified) and obsessively imagines what that world would look and feel like.

Despite these virtues, there’s just something about the way The Road is executed that puts me off. Critics praise McCarthy for his linguistic inventiveness, and there are some beautiful passages in The Road, but the writing often struck me as showy rather than inventive. I mean, what’s so “inventive” about the arbitrary splicing together of two words? How much linguistic creativity does it take to call a cash register a cashregister, or a pump organ a pumporgan. Such devices occur frequently enough to annoy but not often enough to add much to the musicality of the prose. Then there’s the frequent use of antiquated words: gryke, discalced, scribing, laved, etc. There’s nothing wrong with this in principle—writers should make maximum use of the linguistic resources available to them. A generous interpretation of this tic would be that it adds to the sense of inhabiting a time that’s spiritually detached from the present, or makes the point that the future involves regression rather than progress. But it struck me as showy and gratuitous--a kind of screw you to 21st century sub-literates.

The other thing that bugged me was the frequent dropping of profundity bombs—brief portentous statements tacked onto the end of a paragraph that hint at philosophical or religious themes. Two problems with these: First, they are almost always duds; they are never developed and rarely explode into meaning. Second, they often come wrapped in convoluted syntax that I suspect obscures their banality. So, in this case, is McCarthy tweaking the language to make the banal sound profound?

Despite these misgivings I liked the book and found it hard to put down. When McCarthy stays in his minimalist register the writing is quite good. He definitely creates a mood, and many of the word-pictures he paints, especially when describing landscapes or the objects necessary to the two main characters’ survival, are quite beautiful. And I do have to give him props, as Wood notes, for advancing the post-apocalypse sub-genre by creating a remorselessly unedifying world in which our present concerns have almost completely faded from memory. Most of the dialogue in The Road is banal in the extreme, and the characters are almost completely without inner lives. But give McCarthy credit for credibly representing the psychological reality of a world in which the things that support inner lives—history, culture, community, an unacknowledged but ever present sense that humanity will extend into the indefinite future—have all but disappeared. McCarthy doesn’t tell us how to avoid the apocalypse, but he gives us a pretty good sense of how we’ll be spending our days when it comes.

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Dec 14, 2009

MyFleshSingsOut rated it:

(review of isbn 0307265439)

bookshelves: fiction, survivally, within-the-dark-there-is-a-spark

Read in December, 2009

recommended to MyFleshSingsOut by: Hupp

"It’s something ineffable and frail!"

This is the lyrical line that echoes out from the larynx of my best friend, which leads into the intensely beautiful and magnificent coda of a song he recently wrote and recorded under his (and sometimes our) musical pseudonym, Death Rattle Orchestra. The song will function as the official review soundtrack, and the line is an appropriate focal point for this review.

"Oblique, Centripetal and Vagrant"

T...more

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Jun 18, 2008

Maren rated it:

(review of isbn 0307265439)

Read in June, 2008

I'm a terrible person because I didn't really like "The Road" and I'm not sure how I feel about Cormac McCarthy. Honestly, I think there's something wrong with me.

I just finished reading "The Road" today - it only took a couple of hours to get through, because it's not that long a book, and I think it was a good way to read it because I felt really immersed in the story, which is told like one long run-on nightmare of poetic import. The characters don't get quota...more I'm a terrible person because I didn't really like "The Road" and I'm not sure how I feel about Cormac McCarthy. Honestly, I think there's something wrong with me.

I just finished reading "The Road" today - it only took a couple of hours to get through, because it's not that long a book, and I think it was a good way to read it because I felt really immersed in the story, which is told like one long run-on nightmare of poetic import. The characters don't get quotation marks when they speak, and for some reason McCarthy also does away with the apostrophes in words like "couldn't" and "shouldn't" - I'm still not really sure why that was necessary, it seemed a little unjustified.

The story is set in a post-apocalyptic world but the apocalypse itself is never really described or explained. I still don't really know why the world is the way it is as the story begins, other than that everything suddenly started burning and there are few survivors. What survivors remain are generally split into "good guys" and "bad guys" - the good guys are just trying to get by and the bad guys usually kill and eat people and steal their things. A man and his boy are walking south, yet we never really know why - to get to what? Even the man, whose plan this is, never explains the rationale more than once when he thinks that it will be warmer there. We're meant to think that they're in America, I think, only there's little indicators of an American world or otherwise. At one point, near the end of the book, most of the artifacts they find are written in Spanish, which led me to think they had made it to Mexico possibly, but it still snows there, I think, which would be unusual.

In other words, there are few concrete details, and a lot of small conversations between the man and the boy - the man usually says "we have to keep going" or "we have to stay" and the boy says "i'm scared" or "don't leave me" and the man says "Don't be scared" or "Okay". That was probably my biggest frustration with the book - the mundane repetitiveness of the dialogue. While many will argue that that criticism is *exactly what the author intended* (along with the amorphous location and lack of details) in order to bring about the black ethos of the novel's post-apocalypse, I just felt like it made for an uninteresting read.

The language is definitely poetic and it's peppered with abstract observations about the world or life or death, but I wasn't very moved by them or the story. I didn't feel like I got to know the characters any better as the story went along - they remained distant to me emotionally, endless travelers that I could empathize with (as you would empathize with any soul wandering a post-apocalyptic desert) but I didn't really feel close to anything that happened because the narrative's disjointed and abstract tone just pushed me away as much as it made me reflect on apocalypse.

I read José Saramago's novel, "Blindness" a year or two ago and, to be honest, felt that it dealt with mass epidemic of an apocalyptic nature in a much more convincing, original and powerful way. It contains language of stunning beauty, dialogue that lacks distinction and punctuation, and dire situations but the characters are infinitely more real, more compelling and the situations far more disturbing. What McCarthy only hints at, Saramago dares to depict throughout "Blindness".

So, like I said, I'm sure I'm a terrible person and there's just something that I'm not getting, but I was really disappointed by "The Road" and generally find McCarthy and unenjoyable read. (less)

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Dec 12, 2007

Nick rated it:

(review of isbn 0307387895)

bookshelves: apocolyptic, i-want-my-time-back

I wrestled with a final rating for this. "The Road" definitely has merit. The style is purposefully minimalist. As others have noted there are very few apostrophe's, no commas, no quotation marks. The font is dull. The paragraphs carry extra spacing. The words are clipped. This all works very well for setting the atmosphere.

As others have offered it is also not the job of the author to explain away all questions. Leaving a sense of mystery can be very good for a story. We s...more I wrestled with a final rating for this. "The Road" definitely has merit. The style is purposefully minimalist. As others have noted there are very few apostrophe's, no commas, no quotation marks. The font is dull. The paragraphs carry extra spacing. The words are clipped. This all works very well for setting the atmosphere.

As others have offered it is also not the job of the author to explain away all questions. Leaving a sense of mystery can be very good for a story. We should expect that in the end there should be some questions left unanswered. We should expect this all the more when the story is written in a third person form that has a nearly claustrophobic attachment to the characters perspective.

However, we should always expect the story to make sense based on what we know of how the world works. The setting is not just furniture. This is true in all settings, even fantasy and science fiction. In Tolkien's world dragons may breath fire but apples still fall down. As the setting becomes grittier we should expect the rules to be tighter and more menacing.

Unfortunately, rules don't apply in "The Road". We are presented with an apocalyptic world where every meal counts and where people have turned to cannibalism to survive. And here we are presented with our first problem. Cannibalism as a survival technique isn't very efficient. Eating people that are emaciated by hunger doesn't result in a good transfer of calories. Yet the book strongly implies that the cannibalistic cults have been active for years.

Also odd is that they have avoided the bodies. The father and son are constantly coming across corpses. Some of them still smell. More than a few are mummified. Why not boil those down, since they seem to be plentiful, before having to chase and hunt humans "on the hoof"? It isn't that this makes the cults suicidal and stupid, the problem is that there is no reason for them still existing.

There are other logical inconstancies. The father and son eat dried apples from a field in a world were clouds, rain, and snow seem to be constant. How exactly are they dry? The sun can't dry them out and neither can the heat. All of that is gone.

Nothing grows except one instance of fungus. If everything is dead, except the humans, where did the fungus come from? If fungus survived, why not moss? After all of this time why isn't life coming back? Even Chernobyl is virtual a parkland now. There appears to be no radiation in this world yet nothing lives, why? There are fires being set by the cults yet houses, and the author spends some time describing what is wooden frame construction sitting next to the burnt out houses, still stand. Fires are also being set to what, charcoal? The author doesn't have to explain all of these things, but he does have to be consistent.

Since humans, lumbering giants at the tip of the food pyramid, survived he has to show what happened to the mice. And no, canned food doesn't count. Even a survivalist will only pack enough for his family for six months to a few years. The book implies that the son was born at the time of the disaster and he's old enough now to hold a conversation and be useful which implies that he's at least four years old. Why isn't the food all gone? Given that nothing lives, why not avoid the calorie expenditure and sit on any store of food you find rather than tromping through freezing weather to find the shore. Most critical of all, if there is a reason, why not impart this reason to your son?

Since the book never answers these questions it has to rely on style, which is done well, and a questionable emotional appeal. It is, in many ways, the worst of modern decadence. It expects us to not ask any important questions about the setting and instead feel for the horrors that the characters face. It is a very subtle and powerful form of emotional blackmail. It teaches us to be less than human, to fear and not to think about what we fear.(less)

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Mar 03, 2009

Mike rated it:

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Read in March, 2009

This wasn't nearly as funny as everybody says it is.

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Mar 16, 2008

Sdsouza rated it:

(review of isbn 0307265439)

Read in August, 2007

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

Immersed in the world of The Road, I wrote a review for my blog, and rambling though it is, thought i'll include it here :

What can you say about a seventy four year old author who has been interviewed by the media just thrice? That his work is dark and luminous? That he brings to life the contemplation of death? That he loves Dostoevsky, Faulkner and Melville, in alphabetical order?

I knew very little about Cormac McCarthy until I heard that he had won the Pulitzer Prize

...more

Immersed in the world of The Road, I wrote a review for my blog, and rambling though it is, thought i'll include it here :

What can you say about a seventy four year old author who has been interviewed by the media just thrice? That his work is dark and luminous? That he brings to life the contemplation of death? That he loves Dostoevsky, Faulkner and Melville, in alphabetical order?

I knew very little about Cormac McCarthy until I heard that he had won the Pulitzer Prize for The Road. Last Monday, a two hour wait for a delayed flight at the Chennai airport sent me into a bookstore. Going in to check for Vikram Chandra's Sacred Games, I ended up purchasing The Road, Peter Carey's Theft and John Updike's Terrorist. Cormac came first, since I hadn't read any of his work. I finished The Road in a couple of flights, and cab rides in Delhi and Bangalore.

Warning : Plot details follow -

The back of the book says "A father and his young son walk alone through burned America, heading slowly for the coast. Nothing moves in the ravaged landscape save the ash on the wind. They have nothing but a pistol to defend themselves against the men who stalk the road, the clothes they are wearing, a cart of scavenged food - and each other." That is one more hyphen than I found anywhere in the novel itself. The pistol is to ensure that the two can kill themselves before being taken by others who will ensure a slow, horrible death. The world is disintegrating, even "the names of things slowly following those things into oblivion". What is left of humanity reverts to barbaric practices.

The first thing that strikes you about the book is the form rather than the content - Spare prose that somehow is denser than the richest writing possible. An eschewal of punctuation that doesn't seem contrived. Words like rimstone, slutlamp, gryke, riprap, gambreled, and these in just the first 16 pages of the paperback, unfamiliar but evocative.

The atmosphere of much of The Road is laden with futility. Deep stone flues where the water dripped and sang. Tolling in the silence the minutes of the earth and the hours and the days of it and the years without cease. Yet the father and son carry within them a fire that smoulders on against the nothingness that surrounds. A blushing Cormac admits in an interview that the novel can be seen as a love story for his son. He describes an incident in his relatively recent fatherhood as the spark that created the story. The love blazes through the novel and culminates in a climax that appropriately has been described as redemptive.

Apocalpyse and its aftermath have been imagined for centuries. Yeats' The Second Coming has always been a favourite verse of mine. I can't help noticing some connections between his poem and Cormac's prose -

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Like the great pendulum in its rotunda scribing through the long day movements of the universe of which you may say it knows nothing and yet know it must.

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, ...
... twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

... a creature that raised its dripping mouth from the rimstone pool and stared into the light with eyes dead white and sightless as the eggs of spiders. Crouching there pale and naked and translucent, its alabaster bones cast up in shadow .. It .. gave out a low moan and turned and lurched away and loped soundlessly into the dark.

Yet the connection could be more due to the lyricism of The Road, rather than any allegory the two have in common.

The book has been received with acclaim, and Cormac talks of it in a rare interview. He says it is just about the boy and the man on the road, but obviously you can draw conclusions about all sorts of things. License having been given, I speculate about the Biblical themes in the novel. The Man and the Son of Man. In this case, it is not the Son who (though he loves the world entire) gives his life up, but the Father. In so doing, he provides the only light in a dark story - salvation for his only beloved Son who is then enfolded by the rest of good humanity.

A cataclysm that sounds like the casting out of Man from Eden. The Woman who succumbs to temptation - this time taking Death for a lover as she cannot face continued existence. A house that the Man enters after they have run out of food - there is seemingly nothing in it, but the Man stops on the grass half-faint. He looks back to see the Son watching him. Suddenly he seems to find the ground beneath him special. It is - a bunker with a huge cache of food lies beneath. Food that is like the multiplying of loaves and fish. A prophetic voice in the wilderness that does not see any sense in prophesying - People were always getting ready for tomorrow. I didn't believe in that. Tomorrow wasn't getting ready for them. It didn't even know they were there.

The pivot in the book seems to be the discovery of a stranded sailboat by the man and the boy. Named Pajaro de Esperanza, or the Bird of Hope, it evokes the Trinity completed by the Holy Ghost, who is usually depicted as a dove. It also brings to mind an Emily Dickinson poem, Hope is the Thing with Feathers

Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune without the words,
And never stops at all,

And sweetest in the gale is heard;
And sore must be the storm
That could abash the little bird
That kept so many warm.

I've heard it in the chilliest land
And on the strangest sea;
Yet, never, in extremity,
It asked a crumb of me.

Dickinson of course lived a hermetic life, much as Cormac McCarthy seems to. To return to the novel, it gathers pace after the man and the boy retrieve as much as they can from the boat (leaving behind a sextant - a beautiful object but of no use in a world in which precise navigation is pointless). The boy sickens with fever and recovers, only for them to find that all their belongings are stolen. When they catch up with the thief and repossess their cart, something changes. The boy has always had compassion for the stray humans and animals they come across in their wanderings. The man ignores them as much as he can in his desire to keep the boy safe. After the latest encounter, the father says to the boy, You are not the one who has to worry about everything. Yes I am the boy replies, I am the one.

After this pronouncement, there seems to be very little left to do, except for them to reach the south and the Father to hand over the flame to humans. Yet those undertones seem to come to nothing. The religious symbolism does not resolve into anything explicit, which is just as well. Like a reviewer says, if we do destroy the planet it will be [perfectly plausible that it is:] because of religious faith and not in spite of it.

In a 1992 interview, Cormac comments "There's no such thing as life without bloodshed. I think the notion that the species can be improved in some way, that everyone could live in harmony, is a really dangerous idea. Those who are afflicted with this notion are the first ones to give up their souls, their freedom. Your desire that it be that way will enslave you and make your life vacuous." The realization that I can be eaten by my neighbour when the planet immolates and the local grocery store stops delivering food is one that will clarify the priorities in my life, I think. I do not jest. The casual cannibalism in the book is shocking. The immediacy of portents on our planet that can result in the world of The Road lets me know how powerless I am, and a vast majority of humanity is, in shaping our future. A few men and women often deluded by the trappings of their office will dictate our legacy to our children.

There are very few words strung together of late with the power to bring tears to our eyes. Ten thousand years of history seem to render every generation a little more immune to the power of the written word. <I>The Road reminds me how it was for a writer to take ahold of my mind and make it imagine. In the <a href="http://www.oprah.com/obc_classic/featbook/road/obc_featbook_road_main.jhtml">Oprah interview, Cormac talks of his life and how just when things were truly truly bleak, something totally unforeseen always happened. His novel is full of unforeseen events that allow the man and the boy to carry on, and the end must be the most unforeseen of them all, for a Cormac novel.

<P>Oprah also asks him if he is passionate about writing and as he hesitates, describes how she goes around telling students to follow their passion. Cormac sets her down gently, calling passion a fancy word but says he likes what he does. I hope he continues to like writing and writes more than ever.

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Oct 14, 2008

Robin rated it:

(review of isbn 0307265439)

bookshelves: bad-books, not-worth-it

Read in January, 2009

recommended to Robin by: Book Club
recommends it for: No one

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

So I generally don't hate books - Recently when joining a face2face club they asked which book I disliked the most - and had no answer. Well I want to thank Cormac McCarthy for giving me something to be able to put there.

Having heard the buzz about this book and having seen the plethora of positive reviews, I felt compelled to write my own if only to be that voice of reason in a wilderness of pretentious insanity.

Cormac’s McCarthy’s The Road, I can honestly say, is ...more

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Sep 10, 2007

Lori rated it:

(review of isbn 0307265439)

bookshelves: apocalyptic-fiction, fricken-awesome

recommends it for: everyone

Ok. I know that nothing I can say can do this book justice.

I will say that it is beautifully written. The characters have no names. The land has no name. Everything is covered in ash from something that happened but that we the reader are not meant to know of.

The author uses simple, straight foward words to pull you into the landscape, to yank you off your couch, or out of your bed, and put you out there in the cold, walking side by side with the father and the son, walk...more

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Mar 24, 2009

Choupette rated it:

(review of isbn 0330447548)

bookshelves: 2010, dystopias-utopias-apocalyptic

Read in January, 2010

recommended to Choupette by: Ben Morgan

When I was about fifteen, I watched American History X. And it was, I guess, really good. It was shocking, and it was brutal, and I think it made me cry. It probably crushed some of my illusions at just the right time.

But was it that great? Quite apart from the fact that the ending was a cop-out, I'm not convinced. I have this niggling worm of a feeling somewhere deep inside my inner ear that it's somehow... easier to write (or make films about) deep heavy shit like that. You know, ...more When I was about fifteen, I watched American History X. And it was, I guess, really good. It was shocking, and it was brutal, and I think it made me cry. It probably crushed some of my illusions at just the right time.

But was it that great? Quite apart from the fact that the ending was a cop-out, I'm not convinced. I have this niggling worm of a feeling somewhere deep inside my inner ear that it's somehow... easier to write (or make films about) deep heavy shit like that. You know, all happy families are the same, all unhappy families are different in their own way kind of thing. For all that I love extreme racial tension and post-apocalyptic journeys, I'm much more impressed by a book about a woman going to buy some flowers. I'd rather read about some ordinary girl trying to decide who to marry than about death and destruction. Provided it's beautifully written and perfectly realised, of course (which it has been. Extra points if you can guess which books I'm referring to). This is Tolstoy to Chekhov stuff, and I choose Chekhov.

But really, what the fuck am I talking about? This book was very nearly great. The pacing was brilliant, I liked the weird new vocabulary and the lack of punctuation, the dialogue between the man and the boy was brilliant. And I've always thought that despite almost everything, life was still worth living because of the art and the music and the sheer inexplicable worthiness of learning stuff. But here you have a book where all of those things are gone. Every single book was swollen with damp! I could deal with everything else, but a post-apocalyptic world without books, I couldn't deal with. But then at the end it turned out there was something to live for, and I won't spoil it, it's clichéd enough to guess, but well done enough that it doesn't matter. Tears are cheap, but I didn't shed any.

So I liked it a lot, and I'm going to go see the movie when it comes out ($6 tickets at Nova on a Monday, bargain), and what's more I'm going to hope the movie doesn't slaughter the book, and I'm going to avoid Justin Clemens' discussion of same, because he's an idiot.

I also think there may well be something in what Bram said in his review:

"I bet more than a few writers and would-be writers read this and thought, “Damn, if only I had written this first,” rather than the actually true statement of “Damn, I wish I could write something like this.” "

But I didn't love this book. I still prefer Chekhov.(less)

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Oct 26, 2008

Chris rated it:

(review of isbn 0307455297)

Read in October, 2008

recommended to Chris by: Clack....what did I ever do to you!

I’m trying to find solace in the fact that I’m probably not the only one to be humiliatingly hoodwinked into taking the time to read Cormac McCarthy’s much-celebrated yawn-fest “The Road”, although this hardly makes this bamboozling something to boast about. In spite of the fact approximately three-fourths of the world seemed to readily embrace this as worthy fare, I managed to keep my distance for some time, mainly through ignorance of the general plot of the book and my usual stubbo...more I’m trying to find solace in the fact that I’m probably not the only one to be humiliatingly hoodwinked into taking the time to read Cormac McCarthy’s much-celebrated yawn-fest “The Road”, although this hardly makes this bamboozling something to boast about. In spite of the fact approximately three-fourths of the world seemed to readily embrace this as worthy fare, I managed to keep my distance for some time, mainly through ignorance of the general plot of the book and my usual stubborn reluctance to blindly jump off a bridge with the masses. I should have obeyed my gut instinct and remained one of the few spared the tedium of “The Road”, but then I had to go and actually examine a copy from a carefully-arranged pile resembling some kaleidoscopic, symmetrical form that some unfortunate, underpaid bookslut had to labor over for hours to create, and noticed that not only did this win the Pulitzer Prize, but happened to be a post-apocalyptic tale, and nothing stirs my loins nearly as vigorously. I’d even had it suggested by one of my fellow goodreaders, and after brief contemplation as to whether to waste my money on this alleged masterpiece or another box of nitrous cartridges, I decided that it was time to see what all the fuss was about (regarding “The Road”, I think I can understand the allure of the EZ Whip cream chargers, especially when you’ve got one of those bigass punch-ball balloons).

I sat in a numbed stupor while I read this, completely baffled as to how the hell this managed not only to win awards of great prestige, but, more importantly, just how it managed to be a commercial success with the ordinary reader. I’m almost interested to hear why someone might have actually enjoyed “The Road”, in which McCarthy somehow managed to make boring the concept of post-apocalyptic America. While I usually happen to be a fan of the genre, I found this to be everything which I don’t desire within that intriguing realm. At this point, I’m obviously begging for someone to come along and tell me that I ‘didn’t get it’, and probably point out that I’m a moron for good measure. I’m not denying that these are certainly valid arguments, but convincing me that I didn’t like this book is going to be impossible, my cheeky little friend.

So, what did I get from “The Road”, which stupefies me with its status as a #1 bestseller and Pulitzer-winning tour de force? Several things, all of them sucky; a whole lot of repetitive and boring conversation and redundant let’s-trek-towards-the-coast plodding, a lot of stupidass and harebrained compoundwords, and an insipid amalgam of fiftyword paragraphs that seldom accomplished anything as far as entertaining me as a reader.

Here’s the story in a nutshell, for anyone who might be inexplicably reading this without having read the book; probably because they were wise enough to invest in the EZ Whip instead, and are now dicking around with their iTunes trying to find the song that best complements that flanging sound in their head. Some sort of catastrophe has befallen planet Earth, and I have to admit I was pretty interested to find out the nature of this calamity, but McCarthy decides to keep that a secret for some reason beyond my grasp, maybe as the highlight of “The Road 2: Thoroughfare”. Ok, I can dig it, whatever it was, I know that it had no trouble fucking up Earth’s weak and fragile little blue ass. Score; Unexplained Devastating Event 1, Earth 0. Does it really matter what might have happened, seeing as all it resulted in was the end of almost all life as we know it? Actually, yeah, the lack of any sort of input regarding the origin of this chain of events does suck, and badly. Score: Utter Buffoonishness 1, Cormac McCarthy 0.

In the wake of, well, whatever cataclysmic shit happened, we’ve got a father and son struggling to survive in the resulting aftermath, and things aren’t very promising for this enterprising duo, as whatever wiped out the inhabitants of planet earth also eradicated not only all plant and animal life, but in a shocking display of sheer spite also managed to do away with quotation marks, colons, semicolons, and most hyphens. Survivors of this worldwide holocaust are few and far between: scattered bands of humans that have largely resorted to thuggishness and cannibalism for lack of other hobbies or nutrition, a few mushrooms, and question marks, periods, and a wily subset of apostrophes have managed to escape extermination. The father and son have managed to eke out a regrettable existence for an unknown number of years, and the approaching winter promises to be outrageously cold, so they make way for an unnamed southern coastline, where I can only presume they're expecting to encounter something more accommodating.

Their journey is perhaps the most ridiculously boring shit I’ve ever read. They push a shopping cart along with their scant supplies while alternately stomping through ash and sleeping in ditches. Once in a while they encounter another survivor, each meeting completely preposterous and without substance. They ransack homes and forage for food, they abandon the weak and feeble, they ramble incessantly, engaging in snippets of pointless conversation, usually about how they cannot give up, as they are ‘carrying the fire’. I’m assuming that ‘the fire’ is the inextinguishable hope for mankind, a barely flickering light personified in the child, or maybe the fact that any chance of repopulating may depend on their ash-coated and unwashed swinging schlongs, who the hell knows, the ‘fire’ could be their undiminished belief in god which they’ll impart on the cannibal savages running unchecked when not feasting on fetus.

That’s it. Seriously, that’s the story, and I’ve long since abandoned any attempt to discover what all the hype surrounding this supposed ‘story’ is.

Despite my generally low opinion of our collective taste as a species, I found myself shocked that “The Road” was deemed favorable by so many. But what I really can’t wrap my head around is the critical acclaim, which applauds this for reasons I’ll never understand, and sincerely hope the critics don’t either. I found the storytelling utterly regrettable and lacking in all possible aspects, once in a while McCarthy bizarrely waxed poetic, and he also made the completely unforgivable mistake of mentioning how the ‘sun went around the earth’, which, if intended to be literal, at least offers an explanation as to why the planet is becoming so inhospitable. Otherwise, all Cormac has to offer is a bunch of really short, uninteresting sentences, banal murmurings between father and son, and a whole lot of tedium. I might almost be impressed that on several occasions McCarthy busted out some word which I’ve previously never seen before in my life (woad and siwash come to mind, both forever burnt in my brain as examples of meaningless gibberish), but when the use of these words is considered next to the rest of the prose, composed of rudimentary language, all it called to mind was the disheartening suspicion that McCarthy stumbled across these relics from some Word-Of-The-Day vocabulary-enhancing calendar, making them seem improbably forced into the story:

June 14th: WOAD: n, some absurd, obscure shit.

“Hmmmm,” Cormac ponders this treasure, “I may have to have the protagonists come across a load of woad.” He chuckles idiotically. “A load. Heh. Of woad. Heh heh.”

While the Woad Incident was bad enough, McCarthy also uses ‘wonky’. Christ, the last time I heard wonky used was in Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, coming from Master Blaster. This made for a pretty fitting connection between the two, both being pieces of post-apocalyptic poodle piddle. After getting an unsavory sampling of the author’s propensity for rarely-seen words, I was half expecting to see rampike, which would have actually worked in the context of the story on countless occasions, but apparently that one was included in Roget’s Word-Of-The-Day and our man McCarthy was given the Merriam-Webster last Christmas.

Now I’m just nit-picking, for lack of anything else to comment on, since this was so devoid of action, intrigue, or anything remotely thought-provoking.
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May 06, 2007

Tom rated it:

(review of isbn 0307265439)

bookshelves: general-fiction

Review for Chimes (May 11, 2007)

“The blackness he woke to on those nights was sightless and impenetrable. A blackness to hurt your ears with listening. Often he had to get up. No sound but the wind in the trees. He rose and stood tottering in that cold autistic dark with his arms outheld for balance while the vestibular calculations in his skull cranked out their reckonings.”

In his new novel “The Road,” Cormac McCarthy portrays the journey of a father and son acro...more

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Mar 06, 2009

Amang Suramang rated it:

(review of isbn 9789792243)

bookshelves: indonesian, world-literature

Read in March, 2009

recommends it for: Erie SF, Nenang

Seberapa banyakkah dunia ini memiliki cinta dan kebaikan? Siapakah yang memilikinya? Akankah cinta dan kebaikan kalah ketika harapan hampir-hampir sirna dari muka bumi? Filsuf Jerman Friedrich Nietzsche pernah menuliskan jawaban demikian atas pertanyaan tadi: "Tak ada cukup banyak cinta dan kebaikan di dunia ini yang mengizinkan sedikitpun darinya pergi dari setiap insan." Itu berarti, jumlah cinta dan kebaikan hanya ada sejumput di dalam hati manusia, sisanya mungkin yang disebut deng...more

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Feb 29, 2008

Kristen rated it:

(review of isbn 0307387895)

Read in November, 2007

recommended to Kristen by: George Farrell

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

In his latest novel, The Road, Pulitzer-prize winning author Cormac McCarthy chronicles the journey of a father and son in a post-apocalyptic world, where everything that made the world a beautiful place has been destroyed. Lacking civilization, the only ones that remain are victims of the unknown catastrophe desperately searching for salvation (the good guys), and those who have converted into cannibalism, victimizing passersby, to stay alive (the bad guys). The Road is a remarkably written n...more In his latest novel, The Road, Pulitzer-prize winning author Cormac McCarthy chronicles the journey of a father and son in a post-apocalyptic world, where everything that made the world a beautiful place has been destroyed. Lacking civilization, the only ones that remain are victims of the unknown catastrophe desperately searching for salvation (the good guys), and those who have converted into cannibalism, victimizing passersby, to stay alive (the bad guys). The Road is a remarkably written novel, engaging the reader in a world of despair and hopelessness with a language arranged so elegantly, it leaves images in your mind you never would have dreamed of.

The father and son both remain unnamed and without age, and are suffering from starvation, the suicide of a wife and mother, and winter’s frigid weather. They embark on a journey to reach the southeastern United States in order to have a chance at life in a warm climate, with the knowledge that they may not be able to survive the winter. The father is devoted to keeping his son safe from attack and somewhat adequately nourished, while trying to avoid thoughts of his wife’s death that seem to haunt both him and the son throughout the story. They find abandoned carts and houses full of food; but some of the time they do not find these things without consequence. Human remains are scattered all over the landscape, and the child has seen so much more than any adult in our world has ever witnessed. Despite having a childhood tainted with such gruesomeness, the son seems to be certain there exists some kind of ethical humanity beyond the melancholic road they are traveling.

As a student with grammatical and mechanical rules embedded into my brain, I couldn’t help but cringe at the run-on, punctuation-less sentences; but as a lover of words and the power that they hold, I put my years of English class knowledge behind me and embraced the fantastic imagery. The world McCarthy creates is so dreary that when he refers to “dead limbs” in the woods, one cannot be sure whether he means broken tree branches or human extremities. He paints such a dull, gloomy life that even the snowflakes, one of nature’s most beautiful and intricate creations, are gray from the ash covering the earth.

McCarthy makes us wonder what our own lives would be like post-apocalypse. He forces us to question ourselves: Would I be able to survive? Would I have the strength to bear all the things they have endured? There are no laws, no rules to live by, no sense of order in that world. There only true form of currency is the heartache those who are still alive feel for their past, present, and future.

At first, I thought the only shortcoming of this novel lay in the conversation between father and son. The age of the son is unknown; however, it is a common conception that he is six to eight years old. Repetitive and monotonous, I initially considered the dialogue hard to accept as realistic between a father and a child of that age. The more I thought about it, the more I came to believe that the exchanges of words were a mere representation of the world they lived in, which is exactly that: repetitive and monotonous. I suppose in a life after the apocalypse, there is nothing left to say. All the stories have been told, all questions have been asked, all memories have been recalled.

McCarthy’s writing in The Road only has one downside, his choice of words create graphic and disturbing images and thoughts in your mind. He describes a house filled with human bodies, both dead and barely alive, kept hostage by cannibalistic maniacs. He goes into great detail about the bodies strewn about, burned alive in their final resting place. Though his imagery bordered terrifying at times, the thing that upset me the most was the colossal fear and desperation that lead the father to hand his son a pistol and tell him to commit suicide if the bad guys found him. “If they find you you are going to have to do it. Do you understand? Shh. No crying. Do you hear me? You know how to do it. You put it in your mouth and point up. Do it quick and hard. Stop crying. Do you understand?” The idea of that tore through me; I couldn’t wrap my mind around such a horrific experience, for a child!

For a novel in which nothing major occurs or gets accomplished, The Road has a stunning way of keeping the reader engaged. It is simply a story of a journey for a father and son who are just trying to stay alive. Cormac McCarthy truly has a gift of language, and creates a world for the reader he or she never would have imagined previously. The fluidity of words makes for a graceful storytelling of the unconscionable. While The Road offers a dark, gloomy post-apocalyptic tale that is nothing short of depressing, the beautiful vocabulary and imagery are what makes it so difficult to put down. I recommend this novel to those who are intrigued by language, and take time to think about life in ways they have never before.

~ wrote this for class
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Nov 15, 2007

Charissa rated it:

(review of isbn 0307387895)

bookshelves: apocalypse, dystopia, literature

Read in July, 2008

recommended to Charissa by: Donald, that bastard
recommends it for: those who wish to stare into the eternal abyss of despair

This is the bleakest book I have ever crawled inside. When I wake up in the morning after having gone to sleep reading it, it's as if the grit of ashes is still caught in my eyelashes. The desperation of the man clutches around my heart. I have known that horror and loss of hope, if only for fleeting moments. I know the chasm this character teeters at the edge of. Oh this is the abyss we all frantically, busily keep ourselves distracted from knowing. Cormac McCarthy drags us through it, un...more

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Jul 26, 2008

tadpole rated it:

(review of isbn 0307265439)

bookshelves: 2008, cpl, uncle-cormac

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 ...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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Aug 15, 2007

Kristen rated it:

(review of isbn 0307265439)

Read in July, 2007

recommends it for: everyone

I bought The Road on a whim from some tiny airport bookstore on Long Island, NY. I was dismayed by the Oprah sticker but I lugged it to the counter, where I was informed by the woman that if I kept the receipt that I could return the book for at least half the price. I decided then that if I didn't like it, I could at least get 8 dollars toward another book.

I left the bookstore, removed the horrible "Oprah" sticker, started reading the book in the terminal and didn't put ...more I bought The Road on a whim from some tiny airport bookstore on Long Island, NY. I was dismayed by the Oprah sticker but I lugged it to the counter, where I was informed by the woman that if I kept the receipt that I could return the book for at least half the price. I decided then that if I didn't like it, I could at least get 8 dollars toward another book.

I left the bookstore, removed the horrible "Oprah" sticker, started reading the book in the terminal and didn't put it down for 8 hours, literally. I was even stopped at baggage claim in Chicago, where I was still reading the book and glancing up every minute to see if my bag had passed me by, by a man who gushed with me about how amazing it was.

The story that Cormac McCarthy creates is dark, heavy and at times terrifying of a man and a boy. On the flip side he also creates a story that is full of hope, burnt hope that under all the black soot still burns red.

You never find out much about the man or the boy, including their names. You never find out what the man might have done before the world fell apart, though at times it is kind of alluded to. You never find out where they are coming from or exactly the spot they are searching for. In fact, sometimes I think that I never knew much about the characters except WHO they were.

The fact is: This story is not about the post-apocalypse. It is not about why all the trees have been burned or why people were burned straight into the road.

It is the story about two people and their quest to keep their hope alive, no matter what the cost. it is a story that perhaps more parents can relate to, that small hope that our child will have a future and he will carry on our flame in their hearts to keep hoping.

I believe that this book is one of the more amazing books I have read this year.

Sadly for the lady with her tight curled gray hair and weak chipped-toothed smile at the airport bookstore, I won't be returning The Road in order to obtain more word porn. It's staying right where it is on my bookshelf so that I might, just maybe, be able to share it with someone else very soon.(less)

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Mar 10, 2008

Matt rated it:

(review of isbn 0307265439)

bookshelves: contemporary-literature

Read in March, 2008

To be printed in the March 27 edition of Coastal View News:

With a dearth of adornment and minimal superfluous dialogue in “The Road,” Cormac McCarthy pulls readers and co-travelers into the depths of the darkest hell with only a pinprick of light as reprieve. This narrow beam of light, of hope, appears so dim that it threatens to be extinguished at any instant, but with beauty and clarity, McCarthy rests the fate of mankind on that pinprick, and in doing so produces a work of art...more To be printed in the March 27 edition of Coastal View News:

With a dearth of adornment and minimal superfluous dialogue in “The Road,” Cormac McCarthy pulls readers and co-travelers into the depths of the darkest hell with only a pinprick of light as reprieve. This narrow beam of light, of hope, appears so dim that it threatens to be extinguished at any instant, but with beauty and clarity, McCarthy rests the fate of mankind on that pinprick, and in doing so produces a work of art in “The Road.”

A nameless father and his son wheel an old shopping cart over a vacant road, through a smoldering volcano of a world—a world that has been utterly destroyed by something that is not explicitly revealed, but which was surely caused by humankind. Not more than two sentences into the story, McCarthy lays the setting: “Nights dark beyond darkness and the days more gray each one than what had gone before.” This father and his boy have been traveling for an unknown period of time toward the American coast, the object of their journey, without having any clue what hope this destination might hold for them.

There are few people left in this post-apocalyptic world, and most that are still alive are vicious cannibals—the bad guys. In contrast, the boy and his father are “the good guys,” or so they hope, somehow attempting to strike a delicate balance between survival and goodness. The father is primarily concerned with their survival and the son is primarily concerned with their goodness. In a dying world that is being destroyed by thieves, murders and eaters of mankind, goodness is the only reason to survive for this nearly defenseless pair. As the ashy filth blankets them more fully each and every step, the boy and his father struggle to stay pure. “You are not the one who has to worry about everything,” said the father to his son, referring to the means of survival. “Yes I am … I am the one,” responded the boy, referring to the means of goodness.

The matured and life-worn father knows there is little or nothing to hope for. “He saw for a brief moment the absolute truth of the world. The cold relentless circling of the intestate earth. Darkness implacable.” But the boy, naïve and perhaps unrealistically idealistic, “was all that stood between him and death.” The relationship between father and son and the power of hope between them takes on a new, ontologically real form. Hope and goodness become more than just ideas, they become real entities. To the father, his son is the literal embodiment of hope, goodness and faith. “He knew that the child was his warrant. He said: If he is not the word of God God never spoke.”

Despite an awareness of the feeble light glowing in his son, the father is continually tempted to succumb to the darkness—to give in to hopeless immorality, to play the game of survival common to the rest of the world, to call it quits, to commit suicide. Yet, the boy, who repeatedly asks “Are we still the good guys?” is a thread with just enough fiber to cling to.

On this journey through a destitute America, McCarthy not only speaks to the future, but also to the present condition of mankind. What is a person to hope for, to look to, amidst so much evil? In “The Road,” McCarthy rarely steps out from behind his characters, but when he does it is a clue to what he is attempting to communicate in this story. The first striking example of this communication comes in the beginning: “All things of grace and beauty such that one holds them to one’s heart have a common provenance in pain. Their birth in grief and ashes.” The son, who was technically born after the apocalyptic cataclysm, becomes the father’s symbol of beauty born from the devastation, like a phoenix rising from its own ashes. The second and perhaps only other example of direct thematic communication comes at the very denouement of the story, and carries a message so powerful that it should stick with a reader for a very long time.

“The Road” is a stroke of darkest genius from a Nietzchean soul. But whereas Nietzsche sees only darkness, McCarthy sees that pinprick of light in humanity that may be just enough to live by. “Goodness will find the little boy. It always has. It will again.”(less)

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