The Road (Oprah's Book Club)

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Editorial reviews

Product Description
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.

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Amazon.com
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

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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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Customer reviews

review by: Angry Warrior date: 2008-08-21 rating:
Simple, heartfelt and brilliant
This was simply an amazing book! From the moment I picked it up, I couldn't put it down and even when I did, the bleak landscape that Mccarthy paints for us so eloquently would not leave my mind. All things considered, this book has more heart than any I've read in a long time.
I can't wait to see the movie. Viggo usually doesn't miss his mark if the script is well written.
An absolutely superb story that you wont be able to put down for a second. READ IT NOW!

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review by: jazz woman date: 2008-08-20 rating:
The Road
This beautifully written work is quite intelligent and evocative. It provokes deep emotion and thoughts in this reader. Both poignant and horrifying all at once, this tale of post apocalyptical earth and the father and son trying to survive is breathtakhing. I could not put it down.

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review by: of The Divide by Zero Foundation date: 2008-08-17 rating:
audiobook review
So, here's my first review of anything on Amazon, hopefully I can make some sense.

First off, if you are looking at reading this because it has been tagged as post apocalyptic fiction, and you like that type of story, you might want to think twice about this one. I have read numerous books in that genre, and like that type of fiction, but this one is probably not what you are looking for. With that said, it is somewhat in that genre, but the post apocalyptic world really isn't the point of the book.

Like many others, I ended up trying this book out because of all the good reviews it has garnered. I also got a new GPS that included 2 downloads for audio books, so this was one I chose.

I have read a good bit of the pros/cons of the writing style used here, but since this was an audiobook, many of the issues people had with the style weren't as obvious. Personally, if you have any concerns about the odd writing style, try out the audio version. I'll bet many local libraries would have it available, so you wouldn't need to worry about the expense of an audiobook. Besides, if you think this is a tough one to read, go try Russell Hoban's "Riddley Walker".

As for why I gave the book only 2 stars; basically because to me, it was boring beyond belief. This is the gist of the book as I saw it (although sometimes they happened in a different order):

We are starving
We are in danger, but miraculously get out of it
We find food, again miraculously
Boy convinces father to help someone
We are starving
Rinse, repeat... until the end, which really, is not uplifting in the least, but at least its different than the rest of the book.

I'm sure I will get some people trying to tell me I just didn't get it, that there are all sorts of hidden meanings; in the way it was written; in the way the conversations went; in how the imagery meant this or that; and God knows what else. To me, a good book needs to have at least some of those meanings explored. Otherwise, everything is guesswork, and you really have no idea what those hidden meanings actually do mean. How can you enjoy a book if the entire time you are reading it, you are guessing if the author is trying to hide a meaning in something? Be honest, those that have given the book a good review and said that there are all these hidden meanings - do you really know that, do you really think you got all those meanings? Or are you just trying to justify why this book should be praised so highly by pretending to "get" it?
Also, I might have been able to see some of the meanings and imagery, but the boring, repetitive nature of the whole book overshadowed everything else so much, that I ended up just wanting it to be over.
For example, to me, the complete bleakness of the world can be looked at 2 ways (and yes, I can understand either point). It was either a really easy out for the author - hell, why try to paint a worthwhile background? Let's just make it always the same, easier to write it that way. Or; it was done that way to deftly portray just how bleak and desolate the world had become without that overshadowing the more important story of the father and son.
If the story of the father and son was really fleshed out more, with much more to that story that led to at least a partial understanding of what happened to the world to make it as bleak as it is, then I could accept the second idea. However, since that story was just as desolate in what was said and done (other than a few places here and there), it just made the lack of the other imagery stand out that much more (which, in this case, is not a good thing).

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review by: Bathyscaph date: 2008-08-16 rating:
Beautiful
Possibly the most depressing book I've ever read and yet the writing and description is so beautiful that I couldn't stop reading it. McCarthy does an amazing job making you know and feel the world he creates. I don't think I've read a more perfect novel and I think people will still be reading this book 50 or a 100 years from now.


review by: date: 2008-08-16 rating:
"Where men cant live gods fare no better."
This was my second Cormac McCarthy novel, after "No Country for Old Men".
While that book was a breathless, rollercoaster ride, "The Road" entertains in a completely different way.

The survival of a father and his son on a desolate, dying earth is the focus of this novel. After an unspecified catastrophe (man-made or natural we do not know and actually it does not matter) small groups of humans try to scavenge for food and shelter as best as they can. There is no escaping these absolutely wretched conditions. McCarthy does a wonderful job of injecting an eerie atmosphere and endless dread, a world where many would rather face death by their own hand than to keep going on. There are a couple of horrific scenes that might unsettle some readers but make perfect sense in the context of this story.

The most memorable, electric scene for me, though was the few pages where the father talks to his wife, talking about their future. Their brief discussion is raw and merciless.

The son seems to be the man's shadow and perhaps acts as his conscience. Situations arise when the two of them have to make tough decisions. Their discussions had me thinking of what I would have done in their positions. If nothing else this book should make you appreciate a lot of things we take for granted, the simple pleasure of seeing the sun in the sky, or flipping a switch on a wall to receive light, for example.

The ending, for me, was surprisingly satisfying, even though it felt a little rushed. But for a work of art and Pulitzer Prize winning novel, "The Road" is certainly is a page-turner.

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