The Road: Pulitzer Prize Winner (Vintage International)

It was right there, in the description of the item in my Amazon cart; it was in parenthesis: (The Oprah Winfrey Book Club)--and, after a few clicks and an innocuous transfer of some money-numbers on a computer screen, the book was mine and it was on its way. Over the next couple of days, as I awaited the book's arrival, I had to wonder what I'd done. Was I actually going to like this book or was I going soft, like a piece of fruit being tossed (and dropped a few times) around the library by a couple of bored high-school kids that don't understand why anyone would read the book when you can just watch the movie? I'd been told to check out Cormac McCarthy several times over the past few years and I'd been putting it off. I like stories of the macabre, I told myself. I'm not mainstream. I don't like the sort of books that populate the shelves of Barnes and Noble. (Although I couldn't quite stifle that voice in the back of my head that kept whispering: What about King, you idiot. How much more mainstream can you get, you hypocritical bastard.) I thought that if Oprah liked it, the woman adored by so many middle-aged woman across America, it probably wasn't for me. When the book arrived, sure enough, there it was: that great big gleaming O sticker, stuck to the front of my new book like a tumor, a mark that, to me, was as glaring and hideous as a scarlet A. I took the book to work with me, shamefully hiding the Oprah Book Club sticker with my fingers, and I read the first 50 pages or so. I read some more at lunch. I was intrigued; I was curious; I was drawn into the world of the book. I hadn't imagined a place so perversely dark and hopeless, so vague and yet so very real--so very human. I forgot about that little sticker on the front cover and I finished the book in a day and I immediately looked up Oprah's Book Club--what other kinds of things were on that list? What was I missing? "The Road" by Cormac McCarthy is a very good book. Its subject matter is most decidedly horror, but its style and restraint are the qualities of good literature. It chronicles the journey of a man (never named) and his young son as they travel through a world after some sort of apocalyptic disaster (never explained). All we know is that it's cold, food is extremely scarce, and everything is in ruins, covered in ash and falling to pieces. McCarthy's sparse writing style works perfectly to convey the desperate numbness of humanity reduced to a state of aimless survivalist. People are kept locked in basements like cattle to be eaten by other people; a woman gives birth to a baby and roasts it on a spit for dinner with her male companions; all the plants and birds and everything is dead. It is a bleak world and a bleak story, but with a lot of heart and much to say about the nature of altruism and the human spirit. Now, I've looked through Oprah's list of books from the past few years and most of what's listed there are not of much interest to someone like me who loves the horror genre and loves subversive fiction (besides a few works of Faulkner), but I have to say it is a solid list of 'literary' pieces of writing that I'm sure are important and powerful in the canon. I must say, my respect for Oprah has jumped considerably after looking over her list of books and knowing that she actually reads and encourages others to read--in a society that is becoming more and more illiterate and loosing its historical memory, anyone totting the value of the written word is a commendable and upstanding member of the human race in my eyes. Read "The Road." It is a wonderful piece of literary horror fiction.

This was my first book in an attempt to get more into reading books as an adult. In order for me to stay committed to reading something the content has to be engaging, readable and keep me turning pages. The Road met that criteria and I finished it within a few days. It’s a great story about a father and son just trying survive in what can best be described as a post apocalyptic world. The ending of the book was very abrupt and not what I had anticipated.

Cormac McCarthy presents bleak as no other writer can. While I was reading The Road, several times I thought that I’ll never again believe a writer who uses the word “hopeless” to describe the plight of their character. In The Road, there is nothing but hopelessness. Almost. Which leads to where I struggled with this novel. I’m giving it 5 stars, though it deserves at least 6 even though I think it has a few flaws. And even with 6 stars, I strongly suspect he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize not so much for this work as much as for his body of work. If you can stomach the astounding violence in Blood Meriden, it is the far better book of the two. On the off chance, you don’t already know the details of the plot, this is your spoiler warning. I have long avoided reading The Road though friends have encouraged me to. I only read it after reading McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. I’ve long avoided the novel because the premise is that they are traveling down a road in a hostile, post-apocalypse setting. One of the first things you learn as a combat soldier is you never take the road. In the military, these are called “natural lines of drift.” It’s a clever way to say “the route people will take”. If you have ever walked across fields that cows frequent, you know what I mean. Cows find the easiest path and tread it over and over. If you want to kill a cow, just wait along one of those paths. Roads for humans are the same. If you want to kill a human, just wait along a road. This world of McCarthy’s is populated with “bad guys” who are almost invariably cannibals. This is because there is simply no food left, no living thing other than the last scraps of humanity preying on each other. They are often also on the road or setting up ambushes along it. Several times during the story, the man, and the boy avoid dying in such encounters. Too many times to my thinking. So, if you take the road literally, the entire premise seems flaky. But the road is needed as a literary device: The two main characters have to start somewhere and end somewhere else. It is both physical and metaphorical. So they travel a road for hundreds and hundreds of miles, miraculously, without getting hurt. I was so taken with McCarthy’s writing after Blood Meridian, I decided to read The Road in spite of my doubts about their travels on this road of theirs. So getting into the book, and starting down the road, the next issue I had was that they were pushing a shopping cart full of their meager belongings. You may see homeless people pushing shopping carts under bridges or down a sidewalk. You don’t see people pushing shopping carts hundreds of miles over roads after a decade of neglect and (apparently) nuclear blasts. To his credit, McCarthy had his character’s wear out one and often had to dig a path through sand or snow to keep the cart going. Doable? Maybe…for a while. But the doable part had another issue. It takes a lot of water and a lot of calories to keep pushing such a cart. The Road‘s landscape — world — is depressingly bleak and gray; even the snow falls gray. Rivers are described as ugly sludge. For much of the book, I wondered where they were getting water clean enough to drink. Though they stumbled across a few forgotten caches of food and water from time to time, not until the last few pages did we actually see them getting water out of a creek, straining it to clean it. It was a weak throw to acknowledging how they were getting their water. But he did not share it until the end of the book because it mitigates the desolate, rotted Earth images of the earlier portion of the book. Maybe the streams are not quite so dirty. Another problem I had with the book was how they were getting enough calories to keep their strenuous trek going (in freezing weather, no less). I’ve lived outside doing hard work for weeks at a time. You burn 3K calories a day…easily. That is a lot of food. When the book starts, there is no explanation of how they came to have a cart full of supplies. No matter. But as they deplete them through the story, they invariably stumbled upon more food as they were about to starve to death. And it was food the rest of humanity had missed while they were starving to death, seemingly over five or ten years. Yet the man and the boy found it, which was all too convenient. I also struggled with what event would kill all life on Earth other than humans? I don’t doubt there could be a nuclear exchange, or a devastating meteorite strike, or some other terrible event. But what puzzled me was that there is no other life. Nothing. There were no rats, flys, crickets or cockroaches… These are forms of life that are amazingly resilient. But somehow there are humans wandering about but none of these little critters. Not a lot of humans, but enough that we run into one or two or a dirty gaggle once every twenty or thirty pages. But not a mouse in sight. Seemed odd. And after hundreds of pages and hundreds of miles on the road, and after most of the people they came across were cannibals that wanted them for dinner, at the end, after the man dies, and the boy sits beside him for three days on the verge of dying, who walks up? A well-armed father with a good (Christian?) wife and their two children who are about the same age as the boy. The man has delivered his son into the hands of someone who will care for him and raise him in a safe environment. Not are these just playmates, but there is potential to propagate and start humanity anew. There is hope. Of course, there is no food and the Earth is incapable of growing anything. There are no animals, no living plants, nothing. Are we left to believe that the boy has been saved? Or will he live in misery and despair until one way or the other, he also falls? This, in turn, leads to the novel’s strengths. Beyond the extraordinary writing and the stunningly bleak vision, beyond the smart way McCarthy never feels the need to explain why or how it all happened, he sets up unrelenting tension. Arguably the core story is that the man — the father — does not have the courage to kill his son and then himself to escape their hell. Where is the wife? The boy’s mother? She killed herself, we discover, before the story opened. And when the story opens, the man has a pistol with — you guessed it — two bullets. So we know from the start he has not yet found the courage to kill them both, and not long after we start our trip down the road, the man has to use one bullet. With only a single bullet left, his dilemma is even more profound: Should he use it to kill the boy in his sleep? Get it over with? If so, how would he kill himself? He could do it, but he no longer would have such a simple and easy means as a self-inflicted shot to the head after killing his son. In short, he can’t bring himself to kill his child, the child he loves so dearly, the child that trusts him so totally, which is shown over and over through the story in deeply emotional, compelling ways. Thus the tension mounts as we see the man, coughing his lungs out, sick and wounded, starving, limping toward his own death. We are left wondering until the end if he has the guts to kill his child and save him from what will befall him when taken by the cannibals. In the end, though McCarthy could horrify us, the man could not kill the child, his child, so he created an ending that (to this reader) was completely out of step with the rest of his dark vision. All said, the book is brilliant and I highly recommend it. The writing is uniquely McCarthy’s and the vision, the tension and the violence are also something few (if any) writer can match. I urge you to read The Road. McCarthy is a literary treasure and his works – gut wrenching though they are – should be experienced because they are so unlike the tediously similar books that frequent the bestseller lists. Just don’t think it is going to be a fun trip down the road.

If you want to fully dive into a book that catches your full attention and makes you forget about the world, this is it. A real page-turner, beautifully written, amazing story, heartbreaking, insightful, entertaining.

In een vernietigende zwarte kou doolt een vader naar het zuiden met als enige motivatie zijn zoon. We volgen dit tweetal in een post-apocalyptische wereld van as en onmenselijkheid door zo helder beschreven vernietiging dat de adem stokt. Er is geen hoop, maar de lezer denkt het te kunnen vinden.

Can't even describe the emotions involved in this book. I could FEEL the love between the father and the son as this man tried to raise his child amongst cannibals and chaos in a post apocalyptic world. This book gets into your heart. So much emotion conveyed in a simple " okay"

Brilliant read, loved it. Fast, free delivery from Amazon

Scritto in ma ieri quasi asettica, in alcune parti ripetitivo, quasi a suggerire il nuovo corso delle vicende umane dopo una misteriosa catastrofe che resta percepibile solo attraverso le tracce che lascia. Ci sono due visioni quasi contrastanti. Un padre che lotta per la sopravvivenza e un figlio che prima accetta qualsiasi nefandezza come qualcosa di indiscusso, e poi, crescendo, inizia a sviluppare una sua personale coscienza. E' un grido forte all'umanità, alla riconquista di valori perduti. Storia che lascia tantissime emozioni e che merita di essere letta tutta di un fiato.