false 62182027 25380 3297457 0307455297 9780307455291 169 <![CDATA[The Road]]> http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1255631875m/3297457.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3297457.The_Road 3.83 418 Border Trilogy, hailed in the San Francisco Chronicle as "an American classic to stand with the finest literary achievements of the century," Cormac McCarthy has written ten rich and often brutal novels, including last year's bestselling No Country for Old Men, and this year's The Road. Profoundly dark, told in spare, searing prose, The Road is a post-apocalyptic masterpiece, one of the best books we've read this year, but in case you need a second (and expert) opinion, we asked Dennis Lehane, author of equally rich, occasionally bleak and brutal novels, to read it and give us his take. Read his glowing review below. --Daphne Durham

<hr size="1"><span class="h1">Guest Reviewer: Dennis Lehane

<span class="small">Dennis Lehane, master of the hard-boiled thriller, generated a cult following with his series about private investigators Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro, wowed readers with the intense and gut-wrenching Mystic River, blew fans away with the mind-bending Shutter Island, and switches gears with Coronado, his new collection of gritty short stories (and one play).

Cormac McCarthy sets his new novel, The Road, in a post-apocalyptic blight of gray skies that drizzle ash, a world in which all matter of wildlife is extinct, starvation is not only prevalent but nearly all-encompassing, and marauding bands of cannibals roam the environment with pieces of human flesh stuck between their teeth. If this sounds oppressive and dispiriting, it is. McCarthy may have just set to paper the definitive vision of the world after nuclear war, and in this recent age of relentless saber-rattling by the global powers, it's not much of a leap to feel his vision could be not far off the mark nor, sadly, right around the corner. Stealing across this horrific (and that's the only word for it) landscape are an unnamed man and his emaciated son, a boy probably around the age of ten. It is the love the father feels for his son, a love as deep and acute as his grief, that could surprise readers of McCarthy's previous work. McCarthy's Gnostic impressions of mankind have left very little place for love. In fact that greatest love affair in any of his novels, I would argue, occurs between the Billy Parham and the wolf in The Crossing. But here the love of a desperate father for his sickly son transcends all else. McCarthy has always written about the battle between light and darkness; the darkness usually comprises 99.9% of the world, while any illumination is the weak shaft thrown by a penlight running low on batteries. In The Road, those batteries are almost out--the entire world is, quite literally, dying--so the final affirmation of hope in the novel's closing pages is all the more shocking and maybe all the more enduring as the boy takes all of his father's (and McCarthy's) rage at the hopeless folly of man and lays it down, lifting up, in its place, the oddest of all things: faith. --Dennis Lehane <hr noshade="noshade" size="1" class="bucketDivider" /><div class="bucket">

]]> 4178 4.00 104280 20868 4 0 false Wed Jul 08 00:00:00 -0700 2009 Sat Jul 04 23:26:51 -0700 2009 Wed Jul 08 19:26:56 -0700 2009
I liked this book because of the imagery within in, and the way the father looks out for his son and how they travel together on the road. There's still some bleak sense of hope in him for the boy's sake and the things they encounter while traveling was well portrayed.

Some of it was a little off to me, like the deliberate punctuation mistakes which I wasn't absolutely sure why they were in there. Did the narrator forget how to use apostrophe's? Is it symbolism of the downgrading of civilization? ]]>