This is not my typical genre of book at all, but with all of the attention it was getting, I thought I would check it out. The setting of the story is so bleak, there's not much left of the world, and danger is everywhere. The relationship between the father and son is very touching, and it's really what the story is all about. This story gets back to the basics of what is really important and makes you appreciate your comfortable life. ( )

A man and his son travel through post-apocalyptic America.

Whenever a Big, Earthshaking, Oprah-Loved-It-And-Everyone-Must-Read-It-Or-Else book comes along, I expect to be the lone voice of dissent. I’m going to hate it. It’s going to flop for me. I’m going to wonder what the hell everyone else is thinking.

Of course, I almost always love it.

This time, I figured I’d skip a step and just expect to love THE ROAD from the get-go. And wouldn’t you know it, but I can’t say as I did.

I did like it. I found it readable and evocative and all that jazz. But I’m almost certain I’ll have forgotten all about it by this time next week.

I feel like some sort of an emotional cripple. Everyone else on the planet thinks THE ROAD was a total sob-fest, filled with poignant contemplations on the nature of love and devotion and meaning and spirituality and seven million other wonderful things. And I mean, I know it was, but I rarely felt it.

I got it. I may be an emotional cripple, but an intellectual dunce I ain’t. I done my time on the literature front, my dears. I done it good. And I’ll tell you, you could get a couple dozen paper topics out of this book wicked easy. You could spend a week or two discussing it in class. There’s a lot to mull over here, a lot to think about and paw through and ramble on about. I can think of about a thousand discussion questions I’d like to take a class through.

I mean, how many people have mentioned McCarthy’s sparse prose in your (glowing) reviews? There’s a paper or two just in the way he’s pared everything down. Why do some contractions deserve apostrophes while others dont? How do the absent quotation marks influence our reaction to the dialogue? How do the many brief scenes drive the narrative forward? What’s going on with that one chunk of first person in the sea of third? Would you that the nameless characters, divorced from pre-apocalypse social norms, allow us to insert ourselves into the text? Etc. etc.

Then there’s the world itself. Why do you think McCarthy never tells us just what happened? Do you think it’s important to know how society reached this state? How does McCarthy show us the tension between the father/son duo and the rest of society? Between the man and the boy themselves? In what ways does hunger drive the story forward? How would the book be different if the man and the boy traveled through a warm wasteland? Is THE ROAD science fiction masquerading as literature or literature masquerading as science fiction? In what ways does it coincide with and diverge from our expectations of both literature and science fiction?

So there’s a lot here. It’s an intellectually stimulating book. There were moments, too, when I came this close to realizing what everyone was on about. (There’s a particularly good scene where the man and the boy cower in the gutter while a cannibalistic convoy rolls along past them. It chilled me). I could tell you all about how the story's many layers appealed to me, and how I found that McCarthy's approach drove the story onwards in some interesting ways. But at day’s end, I feel all right about passing this book along. I'm pretty sure I'll try more of McCarthy's work in the future, but I won’t need to read this one again.

(A slightly different version of this review originally appeared on my blog, Stella Matutina). ( )

Try to imagine an apocalyptic event destroying most of the earth: scorching fire, eerie darkness, total devastation, and death. Several years pass. No electric, no running water, no new crops thus food supplies dwindle. More death. People disappear and corpses accumulate. Gray ash continuously falls from the sky coating the earth. The sun does not shine and it is always damp and cold. “Barren. Silent. Godless.” And then "The Road" begins. "The Road" is bleak and frightening, but beautifully written. Cormac McCarthy draws the reader into the story with graphic images of the surroundings, strong characters, and effortless poetic prose. The writing style is simple. The dialogue has no punctuation; naturally primitive….like the surroundings in the story.

Against all odds, an unnamed father and son take to the road traveling on foot foraging food, fresh water, and shelter. They search for salvation. Small gangs of marauders roam the forsaken countryside. The father and son hide from all strangers. Strangers could be thieves, murderers, or worse…they could be evil. They could practice cannibalism. Strangers are “the bad guys”.

"The Road" is about faith and love. The father’s love for his son is absolute. He would do anything to protect his child…and does. “There were times when he sat watching the boy sleep that he would begin to sob uncontrollably but it wasn’t about death…..He thought it was about beauty or about goodness. Things that he’d no longer any way to think about at all”. And the son knows that he is loved, and it gives him faith and hope. In spite of the evil that surrounds them the son is pure of spirit and innocent of sin. The father is the son’s protector, and the son is the father’s spiritual guide.

And when "The Road" ends and you think you know how it ended, go back to the father’s thoughts and instructions to his son, like the passage on page 160 and reread, and then think again. Cormac McCarthy leaves the reader to wonder….. The movie is being released this coming week and I am looking forward to seeing how Hollywood interpreted the ending. I have already seen ads for the movie and I have a feeling it will be totally different from the book. The son is only a child in the book whereas in the movie he is 13 years old. I guess they re-wrote all the dialogue and quite a bit more to adapt to that change. I suspect the movie will be typical Hollywood style; lots of sensationalized violence and drama and very little spiritual meaning…..mediocre at best. The 2006 Pulitzer Prize winning book was extraordinary. ( )

Sad, disturbing, and exceptionally good. ( )

Quite probably the greatest book I have read. ( )