Goodreads | The Road

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Keely rated it:

05/09/08

bookshelves: fiction, novel

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.

Much of the book is written in apparent simplicity, but the degree to which the author concentrates on pointless tedium without building plot, mood, or character means that the whole text is needlessly co...more

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Scott rated it:

02/19/08

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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John rated it:

05/02/08

Read in March, 2007

Post apocalyptic novels are a dark, bleak and often illuminating genre that are highlighted by titles that include The Day of the Triffids, A Canticle for Leibowitz, Eternity Road, On The Beach and Galapagos. J.G. Ballard carved out a large section of this wasted landscape with The Crystal World, The Drowning World, The Burning World and The Wind From Nowhere. But among all of these fine works and dozens more I’ve read, none compares, holds a candle to or rings such gloomy, bleak chords as doe...more

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Jason rated it:

07/06/07

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 reader’s un...more 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 reader’s understanding of the limited number of resolutions affect their reading? These issues and many more were addressed by Chabon, so I direct you there. As far as Oprah selecting The Road for her book club, my coworker Adam said it best: “I want those people to feel like I did.”

How did I feel? I felt like someone close to me died. Over and over and over again, with every turn of the page.

The following scene follows a description of a ruined landscape in which the father watches gray snowflakes fall on his hand and “expire there like the last host of christendom:”

“From daydreams on the road there was no waking. He plodded on. He could remember everything of her save her scent. Seated in a theater with her beside him leaning forward listening to the music. Gold scrollwork and sconces and the tall columnar drapes at either side of the stage. She held his hand in her lap and he could feel the tops of her stockings through the thin stuff of her summer dress. Freeze this frame. Now call down your cold and your dark and be damned.”

This is some of the most masterful writing I’ve ever read. This is a stand-alone creative writing lesson.

A burned, winter landscape transitions easily and swiftly into a pleasurable memory of music, summer, and love. Then it slams the reader back with one of my favorite lines in any book, “Now call down your cold and your dark and be damned.”

That line is pure English. Monosyllabic pentameter, pure poetry of the English tongue. The alliteration of “down, cold, dark, damned.” The beautiful vowel sounds of “now, down, your, dark, and, damned.” Everything works, and it works together. Immediately following the bliss of memory, it is a crushing, emotionally devastating statement that ties two people in love into the dualities of past and present, have and have not, happiness and sorrow, civilization and wilderness. More, it subtly supports one of the central themes of the novel, that of a father’s love for his son.

These dualities run throughout the scene. Take, for example, “seated/theater,” “tops/stockings,” thin/stuff/summer/dress” – evocative pairings of S and T sounds again mirroring the two lovers, the pleasure of memory with harsh reality.

Or, look how well the syllables of “gold scrollwork and sconces” compare to “tall columnar.” The letters of “tall columnar” almost resemble the physical objects the words describe, with the vertical stems of the L’s and the rounded bowls and stresses of the C, O, and U. Say “gold scrollwork and sconces” and you also find that the sounds resemble the letters.

McCarthy chose every word with the utmost care. It is spare prose to match the subject and it is beautifully crafted. Nothing is wasted, overwrought, or unnecessary. A casual reader will read it with ease, without an awareness of craft, and that is, perhaps, for the best. Too much awareness of the writer’s work spoils the stew – and this is heavy stew.

Yet, despite the weight of its subject matter, The Road is a hopeful novel. The father’s love for his son, his unwavering efforts to protect and provide for his son, and his hope for his son’s future make even the bleakest moments bearable, and sometimes, uncomfortably familiar. Although McCarthy has shown us a world where the living exist with “Borrowed time and borrowed world and borrowed eyes with which to sorrow it,” he also shows that beauty and happiness also exist in b...less

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Jason rated it:

02/17/08

Read in April, 2008

recommended to Jason by: Ian Riggins
recommends it for: Anyone and everyone

This is a book about the moral standing of Earth. I don’t care what you say about it, the harrowing romantic tale of two people lost in the post-apocalyptic wilderness; granted. But it does not stop there. It is about so much more. It is a spectacular novel and it is extremely sad. Not only because of its bleak content and its hollowness, but because of its hinting towards a depravity that could not be written about fully, because it has yet to be understood. This acknowledgement of a fu...more

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David rated it:

12/02/07

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 vi...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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Kristen rated it:

(review of isbn 0307387895)

03/04/08

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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Tom rated it:

05/06/07

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 across a bleak, post...more

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Matt rated it:

03/20/08

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 in “T...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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Chris added it

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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Nick rated it:

(review of isbn 0307387895)

12/12/07

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 should ex...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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3 comments

Greg rated it:

(review of isbn 0307387895)

01/11/08

bookshelves: fiction

Read in January, 2008

This took me an embarrassing amount of time to read, and it's not that I didn't enjoy it, I just gave it the lowest priority out of two other books I'm reading at the same time.
Not to be daunted by the jabs and subsequent emoticon ditto given to me for a review of another Oprah book I'll once again show that I'm not one to overlook the Queen of All Media and creator of literary tastes among the generally not-so-well read and hark once again on Oprah and her choices of books. This book makes...more This took me an embarrassing amount of time to read, and it's not that I didn't enjoy it, I just gave it the lowest priority out of two other books I'm reading at the same time.
Not to be daunted by the jabs and subsequent emoticon ditto given to me for a review of another Oprah book I'll once again show that I'm not one to overlook the Queen of All Media and creator of literary tastes among the generally not-so-well read and hark once again on Oprah and her choices of books. This book makes no sense as an Oprah book, and it's sad in away that it is one, not sad in that boo-hoo I'm going to lose a favorite author to the masses kind of way, but because too many people who read this just because it is an Oprah book just don't deserve to read it. That's right, they don't deserve it and they will not realize that they are reading something truly great and moving, and just think they are reading some kind of staccato nonsense about a man and his boy walking around on a road and not really saying too much to each other.
This book isn't for the uninitiated into the writing of Cormac McCarthy, I'm not sure what I would think of this book if I hadn't read most of his other books before this one. The same could be said of No Country for Old Men too though, both of these books have their strength in being beautiful while being held against the world he has created for his characters in books like Suttree and The Border Trilogy. In McCarthy's stoic world these books are probably about as close to an overflowing of emotion that one is going to find, and he puts that emotion quite subtly into the experiences of the boy and the child. He doesn't hark on it, just like he never seems to feel the need to really give the reader a real sense of what is going on in the world that these two characters are living in. The world is post-apocalyptic, but the reasons are never really given. Some really bad shit happened after whatever it is happened, but again the reader doesn't know exactly what that was. Why are they wearing pieces of cloth over their mouths sometime? Why did the tar on the road melt? Why did some people cut their fingers off? What sent the masses onto the road, something that was bad enough to scare the shit out of everyone, but not bad enough to kill them, and something that left people living on the road for years. The average reader I think will find the lack of answers annoying, but it's in the very slight clues and sparse flashback scenes that little tantalizing bits of information are given, and I think it was McCarthy's idea to leave it to the reader to fill in the blanks. Not because it's the lazy way out, but because the speculation and ultimate unknowing is more satisfying to the imagination while reading the book, then any answer and author could give. We've all read about the end of the world, there are even plenty of 'road' apocalypse books (like The Stand), and to get into the details of why the world ended and why all the crazy shit is going on ignores the central crux of the story, the relationship of two people , a father trying to raise his son in a world that is on it's death bed. There is a sense of futility to the book that's as if it came out of a Beckett novel, but unlike the characters of Beckett who are trapped most of the time in the absurdity of a lack of hope, McCarthy chooses to have his characters continue to slowly trudge on towards something better even if there is nothing better out there.
This book isn't for everybody, and I can't imagine what it would be like coming to this novel after the generally melodramatic family stories that Oprah normally chooses for her readers, maybe it will be a good thing for them. I don't know. I'm running out of characters quickly, but I'll throw in my one pet theory of the novel, and I have no basis for this, but it's sort of how I saw the man when I read the book. The Man is Suttree. ...less

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2 comments

Rachel rated it:

12/26/07

bookshelves: fiction

recommends it for: people who like Oprah books

Okay FINE. I give. I'm reading it.
It was all right. Choppy. Short. Easy to read. I didn't find myself particularly caring about the characters.
I don't think the little boy gets eaten. Is that a spoiler? Sorry. Also, it's been 5 or so years since the "armageddon" thing, so why aren't people planting and growing things again? They were able to farm in Nagasaki, Hiroshima, and Chernobyl after being nuked. Maybe it was chemical warfare. Dunno. Anyway, I'm not buying it.
MEH.
So he...more

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