The Road is a change of style for the Faukerneresque McCarthy, written in such a spare, minimalist, poetic style. I found it compelling and hard to put down, surprising for a book with only 2 characters for the most part--a father and his son. They are travelling a road to the coast after having survived a disaster of the worst sort that has wiped everything off the earth. Trees are charred, houses are empty, food is practically nonexistent. Survivors are understandably deranged; I can't imagine how I'd feel knowing that I was perhaps one of 200 people left on the entire earth.

Why go to the coast. There is water there and maybe things are different because of it. But father & son finally arrive, all the worse for wear, and nothing is really different. The horrors they see along the way, the fear they suffer daily, would persuade any person to sign off. But I guess there is the bare hope that something good might happen again even though there is little evidence to support such a hope.

The book is suspenseful. What will happen to them? What is out there? Once I felt the book got so grim that I'd quit reading it. But I came home from work one night & sat on the couch to finish the remaining 60 pages. There are no answers. I liked it.

sucked ( )

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. ( )

As a post-apocalyptic story this one is about par with a many others in this sub-genre of science fiction. What makes it good is the way McCarthy tells the story. Using a sparse economic writing style that is matter of fact, and has a cadence that draws you into this treck of this dark, bleak hopeless world. You can feel the cold and smell the ashes.
Overall I enjoyed this book, but like many others I could't tell you why. ( )

This was another one of those, 'I read it in a day but when I was done I couldn't tell if I liked it or not' books. It was just so damn depressing, and the author's style isn't my favorite but it did mesmerize me and convince me to want to see the upcoming movie... I just hope the movie is a little more uplifting. ( )

Depressing, yet somehow strangely intriguing. I had to keep reading to find out what the heck was going on. You really root for the main characters in their struggle. ( )

I hate to say it, but I was underwhelmed. The book was engaging and interesting to read, for at least the first 50 pages, but the story never seemed to go anywhere. I was also offended by the [LIGHT SPOILER] scene when the man and son come upon an infant's corpse that has been cooking over a fire to be eaten. [/LIGHT SPOILER] How pointlessly gratuitous can you get? As a reader, I'd already been lead to understand what the other "travelers" were doing for food; this scene seemed pointless but for the gross-out/shock value.

The suddenly-happy ending came out of nowhere, and though I'm sure one could go on about symbolism and McCarthy's intended message, on the most basic level I can't say I enjoyed this book. ( )

The trailer I saw to the upcoming film of this book intrigued me. The film appears to be a special effects vision of post-apocalyptic battles between ragged survivors and cannibalistic refugees from the Deliverance hillbillies.The book, fortunately, is nothing of the sort. Yes, it is a tale of post-apocalypse survival, but McCarthy has crafted an amazing character study where all the characters are faceless (symbolically) and nameless (literally). Don't expect neatly wrapped up plot lines, McCarthy's forte has always been experiencing a moment in time ( )

A GREAT FATHER AND SON STORY ABOUT SURVIVAL, COURAGE AND INNER STRENGTH... ( )

This book was loaned to me by Tim McIlrath of RISE AGAINST while we were on tour this summer... I knocked it out in around two days.The question asked force you to look deep inside your self and spend a little time there.Would you?, Could you?I realize that this was an Oprah Book, and it leans towards the psuedo-intellectual... but anything that forces thought, reflection and conversation is alright by me. ( )

The landscape in this book reminded me of the bleak landscape in a computer game I played once. It has the same feeling of forsaken Godlessness and the same constant menace of unseen hazard. It is a landscape of the mind. Have we not all rehearsed in our imaginations how we might survive in such circumstances? It is hell on earth. The bag lady on the street and the drug addict in the gutter are there already, scavenging for food and preyed on by others. Perhaps McCarthy's world waits for all of us. It is stripped of everything beautiful, and while there are still pockets of goodness and love, there is no hope.
All the same, this is a thrilling read. My copy is encrusted with the highest recommendations from illustrious international reviewers, and I can only add mine to the chorus. ( )

After hearing my friends rave so much about this book, and after hearing it was going to be made into a movie, I figured I would find out what all the fuss was about. Needless to say, it has become one of my favorites. About a father and his son traveling through a post-apocalyptic land trying to survive in spite of cannibals, bleak weather, and starvation, the tone is no doubt bleak, but McCarthy's ability to develop the relationship between the father and son kept me reading until the end, hoping for a miracle. ( )

A great book, but extremely depressing. Although it's a fast read, it took me a while to get through just because I didn't want to read too much at a time without taking a break from the misery. ( )

Bleak, but impressive. McCarthy brings to life a postapocalyptic world devoid of plants, animals, and civilization. An unnamed father and his young boy walk a cold, lonely road to the south in search of others like them. It's a lofty goal: the world is barren and decimated from the trees to the ghostly buildings, the air is thick with ash, and what's left of the human race resorting to barbarism and cannibalism. McCarthy strips this world down to the basics: there are no politics, no causes, only the will to survive. Even the author's short sentences and short scenes packed in brief paragraphs with no chapter headings give the impression of moving forward amid great hardship, pain, and horror.

This is a book that will stay with you and says a lot while revealing only a little. ( )

An excellent book about a father and son who travel in post-apocolyptic world and try to survive. The story is excellent and the fact that the father and son never really talk about what happend to the world is very good. The movie coming out with the same name did kind of get me to want to read the book, but I would suggust the book to anyone looking for a good story. Adult content though does come up in the story though. ( )

Perfectly executed ( )

I have to confess that I almost put this book down and went on to the next book in my To Be Read stack. It reminded me of "The Brief History of the Dead," which I found one of the best reads last year. But then I started to notice little touches in the writing and execution of the story like the way that the sparse prose was laid out on the page, and the overwhelming feeling that everything in this new world is black, white, and grey. Here's a brief rundown of the story line...a father and son are on a journey down a road after the world, as we know it, has been destroyed but for a very small number of people. Details of the who, what, where, and when are few and far between and this fact makes the story even more stark. In the end, I found this a great read but in a different way than Brief History...the two books would make quite an interesting comp lit discussion. ( )

http://straycarrierpigeon.com/2009/11... ( )

Maybe I missed the point... ( )

McCarthy's sparse sentence structure makes for quick and easy read. This is a good thing since the plot itself deals with the dark aspects of surviving in a post apocalyptic world and can seem quite depressing at times. The story of survival is a simple one and the father and son face fairly predictable story lines, but it is the greater theme of paternal caring and the hope that the next generation can redeem humanity that make this a compelling read. ( )

Escrito con una precisión y concisión admirables, el libro captura la atención casi desde la primera línea. Me gustaría ser capaz de escribir así. Esto inaugura lo que espero sea una fructífera relación con McCarthy.Crítica (en catalán) más completa en http://membrillu.blogspot.com/2007/10... ( )