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The Road (Oprah's Book Club)
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| Editorial Reviews: | | |  | NATIONAL BESTSELLER
PULITZER PRIZE WINNER
National Book Critic's Circle Award Finalist
A New York Times Notable Book
One of the Best Books of the Year
The Boston Globe, The Christian Science Monitor, The Denver Post, The Kansas City Star, Los Angeles Times, New York, People, Rocky Mountain News, Time, The Village Voice, The Washington Post
The searing, postapocalyptic novel destined to become Cormac McCarthy's masterpiece.
A father and his son walk alone through burned America. Nothing moves in the ravaged landscape save the ash on the wind. It is cold enough to crack stones, and when the snow falls it is gray. The sky is dark. Their destination is the coast, although they don't know what, if anything, awaits them there. They have nothing; just a pistol to defend themselves against the lawless bands that stalk the road, the clothes they are wearing, a cart of scavenged food-?and each other.
The Road is the profoundly moving story of a journey. It boldly imagines a future in which no hope remains, but in which the father and his son, "each the other's world entire," are sustained by love. Awesome in the totality of its vision, it is an unflinching meditation on the worst and the best that we are capable of: ultimate destructiveness, desperate tenacity, and the tenderness that keeps two people alive in the face of total devastation. | | | Best known for his 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 the bestselling No Country for Old Men, and 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
Guest Reviewer: Dennis Lehane
 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 all 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
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| Custom Reviews: | |
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| ---> A Bitter Disappointment | |
| | I did not have sky high hopes for this book. I've been through that and knew better. My hopes were moderate. Even so, they were dashed. I realize that the minimalist approach the author took was meant to create a haunting atmosphere and it did work, but there was SO MUCH MORE he could have done with the 'story'. I kept waiting for something interesting to happen. Heck, I kept waiting for ANYTHING to happen. Unfortunately, the entire book can be summed up as follows;
We have to keep walking.
Okay Papa.
We should eat.
Okay Papa.
Okay.
And that's what passes for a 'great book' now in our TV, WalMart, McDonald's culture.
| | | Here's what "The Road" is not. It's not science fiction. The story is set in a post-apocalyptic America but it doesn't bother to go into any detail about what happened. It's not an adventure story. Our protagonists don't fall into the hands of an evil army and forge a daring escape. It's not a traditional story. If you're looking for a three act arc with beginning, middle and end it's not here. You get a beginning and maybe an end, that's it. So what is it? To me it's about us; as a race, as individuals. Ask you're self what would happen if the world changed tomorrow? Changed in such a way that everything we know, our cars, our food, our friends, our sky were all gone. How would you adapt? How would you survive?
In McCarthy's "The Road" we follow a man and his son down a road as they move east towards the sea, their world reduced to themselves and a shopping cart which they push slowly forward. Through their eyes we see the planet as it has become, a forever gray sky, humans reduced to cattle, giant fires that sweep across the land. The writing, the dialogue, even the punctuation is minimum. Often it felt repetitious and too simplistic, but I was still drawn to their struggle. After some time reading, I knew I wasn't going to get a predictable "Hollywood" story. Rather, I was just going to get their story; a story that anyone of us might face some day, utterly lacking in adventure, predictability, and even dialogue but a story that reeks of paranoia, fear, and uncertainty.
Is "The Road" a classic? I don't know if that's for us to decide, but it's a perfect read for those in high school and on up. So maybe some 12th grade Lit. Class will debate the "classic" question, because people seem to be debating it now. And the fact that they're debating now tells me that McCarthy doing something right.
| | TItle of the book about as imaginative as the plot. | |
| | I've been trying to read this book for about six months, and I can never get more than 1/3 of the way through. It's frusterating because I have yet to read a negative review, so I assume it must just be because I am stupid that I don't like the book.
It's the end of the world and a father and son are traveling down a road. That's it? Yes, that's it. Maybe if the father's narrative used proper grammar and actually said things that made sense, it might have had more meaning, but as it is it is just meaningless garbage.
Every other page is a description of them building a fire and burning a tin can of food, and almost every paragraph ends like this: What is it, Papa? I don't know.
Eventually, I decided not to waste another minute of my life reading it and built a fire with it, keeping myself and my child (each the other worlds entire) warm as we ate from a tin can. What is it, he asked? I didn't know.
| | | No technology, no living animals except man (and much of mankind is little more than animals), no living plants, the world in the midst of a prolonged winter. It's depressing to think the world could come to this. The book still sends chills down my spine weeks later.
| | Scary, Supensful, Truly Unique Book | |
| | The Road is an excellent book. Through a unique writting style the author allows you to live the simply raw terrifying experience of a father care for his on a post apocalytpic america. It stirs and meddles in our most basic instincts of protection of our young vs. a scenario of complete dispair.
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