The Road (original 2006; edition 2006)

Wonderfully written depressing story about a dad and son walking and surviving after the apocalypse empties the earth of other people. ( )

You can read this and many other book reviews at Quieted Waters.

The Road is set in post-apocalyptic America, but one of the book’s strengths is that McCarthy never wastes effort describing the apocalypse itself. Instead, this book focuses on a man and his son, and their attempt to stay alive.

My favorite part of this book was the father-son relationship, in all its gritty beauty. The father attempts to shield his son from the worst horrors of a devastated landscape. The son clings to youthful optimism but trembles in fear as he watches his father’s health fail. Their interactions and their love drive this story.

McCarthy’s vocabulary astounds me in its breadth and its beauty. The Road is squarely in the prose camp, but its lyrical style blurs the lines between fiction and poetry. Dozens of sentences stopped me in my tracks, forcing me to reread multiple times just to enjoy how well McCarthy writes. Like this one:

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 and 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. (15)

This story is far darker even than that excerpt. The father’s despair sucks hope from the reader, and the hopelessness weighs heavy on the entire narrative. That darkness is simultaneously McCarthy’s genius and one reason I can’t give this book a five-star rating.

Forgive me for a review that’s more about me than the book, but I don’t enjoy books as much when they lack a strong story arc, when they lack resolution of some sort. I loved the emotion and the relationship in this book, and McCarthy’s writing is unique but powerful. But I wanted more resolution. I don’t mean that I wanted a happy ending; I just wanted an ending that tied things up better. For a book with so much overwhelming emotion, I expected more at the end.

I greatly enjoyed The Road, and I will likely find more of McCarthy’s work in the future. While his writing style took twenty or thirty pages to get used to, after that it flowed quickly and pulled me along. This was a powerful story with many images that will stick with me. ( )

i never thought i would read a a post apocalyptic novel, though i watch such movies with my son. I read it as it was recommended in a literary forum on amazon as one of the best ten novels of all times and i loved it.. the unique way its written and the beautiful relationship between a father and son trying to survive in a hostile environment makes it worth reading. By the way, i guess i like sensational and shocking scenes because the scarier it got (with cannibals and fingerless hands ) i more i loved it.the end couldnt have been better. ( )

Given its Oprah and Pulitzer status, this is supposed to be a very profound book, but I just wasn't feeling it. Above all else, I think it's because my mind kept wandering to the movie Children of Men, which was also a post-apocalyptic hopeless-situation-with-a-tiny-glimmer-of-hope sort of story that was simply beautiful and left me in awe. Compared to it, The Road is just dismal and repetitious. I was glad it was under 300 pages, since at the halfway point I was already just DONE with the walking-along-the-road-and-hiding-from-people-and-finding-a-house-and-looting-it-for-food-rinse-and-repeat. I get what the repetition was doing, but that doesn't mean that I enjoyed it.

If I hadn't seen Children of Men, might I have enjoyed this more? It's possible, but difficult to determine. There's certainly something to be said for using simplicity to convey a story, but I kept feeling like so much more could have been done with the themes. ( )

Listen to springsteen's devils and dust while you're reading this book. You will not wake up the next morning. ( )