This is a disturbing book about a man's journey with his young son in a world that has lost civilization. You feel like you are on a roller coaster ride moving from anxiety to relief than going back to anxiety not knowing where the ride will end up. The characters are not just any two companions on a journey. In this journey the father is helping the child understand a strange world that the father himself is not familiar with. The readers will be haunted by the dialogs between the father and the son. The author uses simple sentences so effectively that it feels like poetry. He does not give the readers too many details about the characters, but the readers still feel like they understand the characters well.

I read this book after learning it won the Pulitzer and it came highly recommended. I enjoy this type of book, The Stand by Stephen King being one of my all time favorite books and Swan Song by Robert McCammon being another.

The Road however is absolutely terrible. The story goes nowhere, the characters are completely one dimensional and every page seems to have the same concersation;

"I'm scared, Papa"
"Don't be"
"Let's just go"
"We can't"
"You won't leave me?"
"No, I won't leave you"

Seriously, the same conversation for 280+ pages. The entire book is the father and son walking while being cold and hungry. I was convinced something else would happen but I was wrong. The ending makes even less sense, I think the author was on a deadline since it just abruptly ends.

This book is a total waste of time.

Unto Adam God said, "Because thou hast eaten of the tree, in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life; By the sweat of thy brow shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return."

The Road is the path a man takes from birth to dusty death. The road is populated by the dust of the past, in the form of the ashes of men, their achievements, their coroporeal remains, and our memories of them. The end of the road is our own dusty death.

The Road is a daily struggle for existence, avoiding the Evil that can engulf us, searching wistfully for the Good, which is the fire that we carry with us in our bellies, and experiencing the incredible depths of starvation and murder, as well as the delerious highs of a full stomach and a secure place to sleep out the night.

The fire in our bellies, for McCarthy, is compassion and love. The man experiences this fire for his son, but his will to survive does not permit him to extend this love beyond this lone individual to others in need. The fire in the boy's belly is pure love, for his father, for a desolate dog who will surely be eaten if left to its own devices, and for the poor souls whose Road to dusty death appears to be a bit shorter than his own. Only the wisdom of the man prevents the boy from sacrificing his life on the alter of compassion.

The Evil in this books are the people who lack this fire, and treat others as pure instruments towards meeting their own pitfully selfish needs. The Evil in this book are cannibals, but the literary allusion is much less concrete.

The final scene of this fine novel sees Good triumphing over Evil, as the boy is taken in by others, strangers, who have the means of behaving compassionately, as his father could not. This is a deep message of hope for us all.

The unrelenting intensity with which the above message is worked into the words, sentences, paragraphs, and pages of this book is reinforced by spareness and repetition of themes. Spareness: there are no colors in this book, there is no emotion except love and fear, there is no satisfaction except full stomach and security from external threat, there is no joy except in the mutual love of the man and the boy, there is no nature except ash and dust, there is no wisdom except the value of the love and the danger of Evil. Repetition: the theme is set up in the first ten pages and repeated with little variation until the final paragraphs of the book. This reminds me of Robbe-Grillet, with his mesmerizing repetition of themes, or perhaps Ravel's Bolero without the increasing volume and tempo. Perhaps it is trite to recall Shakespeare, but it is nevertheless apt, because it doubtless informed McCarthy's vision of The Road: "Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, Creeps in this petty pace from day to day, To the last syllable of recorded time; And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death."

My advice to Cormack McCarthy is: hey, fella, cheer up a bit. There's lots more to life than your philosophy ever dreamed of, including music, and flowers, and philosophy. And even Nintendo.

What an overrated book! I 've heard it was on Oprah's book club so one can only assume she' s getting old and desperate (she should stick to politics she does better!)
This is not the consummate book on the after effects of nuclear winter and if the father -son relationship is the apogee of realting we're all in trouble!
Real time waster from the literary as well as story line aspect.

Among the great "journey stories" I have read. Beautiful in the ugliness of this end world, and in the hopeful allegory of man's inner struggle to remain humane though the struggle that is life. I have read other works by Cormac McCarthy and am frankly stunned by the depth and imagination of the book even if Oprah likes it.

It took me a while to get into The Road, but once I did I was hooked. The unnamed father and son have an incredibly close bond that becomes more and more evident the further you get into the book.
It's bleak and at times a tad depressing but its never less than engrossing. Well worth a read and I can't wait to see the film.

I've read post-apocalyptic tales before. I've read tales of fathers and sons.

There are key elements missing in this story. Specifically: plot line. Man and boy walk down the road, while wonderful descriptions of a bleak landscape are recited. But other than that, almost nothing happens. Oh, there are a couple of encounters, but none fleshed out to the point where there is a significant action sequence or tension, beyond the steady grinding of death by starvation.

This is nothing that hasn't been done better by any number of authors. Perhaps the rabid fans of this novel have not read any of these types of stories before, but there's nothing that makes this better, or even as good, as many of the others out there.

A man and a boy are traveling in a bleak and desolate world. Ashes decorate the scarred and burnt landscape. The man and the boy struggle to survive in an almost empty land while avoiding the straggling groups of marauding invaders bent on evil. The man and the boy travel down THE ROAD in a powerful and unforgettable tale.

Atmosphere is absolutely critical to the success of THE ROAD. Cormac McCarthy envisions a post-apocalyptic world that is both harsh and believable. One can easily visualize the remnants of our current civilization as described in THE ROAD. Everyday items we take for granted become prizes worth killing for while the items we currently consider luxuries are ignored as they are useless when survival is all that matters. The joy over a can of peaches is beautiful and poignant in the hands of this storyteller.

The sometimes terse and simplistic prose only serves to heighten the horror of the world in which the man and the boy travel. Even the lack of names for all the characters, except for one, adds a starkness to this powerful and often depressing tale. However, all is not lost as there is a kernel of hope buried within the tale, the hope of the power of love that knows no boundaries or limits.

On audio, THE ROAD is a frightening and eerie story. Tom Stechschulte's narration is absolutely superb. He provides just the right pleading, sometimes whiny tone for the boy to contrast with the gruff voice of the man.

THE ROAD is not an easy tale to listen to or read. Cormac McCarthy doesn't pull any punches with this one as he demonstrates just what lengths man will go to when survival and love are all that matter. Not everyone will enjoy this tale, but it is destined to be a classic for the strong emotions it evokes.

COURTESY OF CK2S KWIPS AND KRITIQUES

An unnamed man and his son travel south in a desolate charred landscape, the aftermath of some unnamed apocalyptic disaster, hoping to find some escape from the horrors that have become their daily struggle for survival. We know nothing about them other than what little we learn as they travel; we deduce for example that the boy must be very young; we come to realise that they consider themselves the "good guys", and that out there somewhere there are also the "bad guys".

It is a harrowing tale, and while not a vast novel it does seem after a while that there is going to be little relief from their constant search for food and the struggle against starvation. Yet one is compelled to stick with them as they cling to some distant hope. For despite all the apparent despair the boy (for that is what he is called), shines as a model of morality and compassion; while his father tries hard to live up to his son's expectations of him.

It is a story told with great economy, matched by the succinctness of the dialogue between father and son. But what makes the story so compelling is that we are quickly drawn to man and boy, the obvious love and trust the two share, that we have to keep with them ever sharing their forlorn hope.

I'm not really big on reading novels. Outside Hemingway, Vonnegut, and a handful of others, I find most of today's fiction full of clever prose, but ultimately spoon-feeding and ponderous. However, I found this book not ponderous, but ponderable. And the pondering comes from me. With every page I found myself filling in the all the blanks. Agonizing over what would I do at this point? What if my child saw that? Would I be that courageous? Or would I cave? This story puts you front and center into a meditation of hopelessness. Unenviable, but cathartic. The Man in the story is the ideal of the best we could ever hope to be. That we would be strong enough to save that which we love so much. Messianic in the most human sense. Trudging imperfectly into a full on hell, armed with nothing but a single bullet and his hope against hope for nothing else but the sake of his child. I know some didn't think much of this story, and I respect their opinion. I only hope the upcoming film does the story justice, so maybe those who couldn't take something true from the pages will find what's meaningful to them in a more visceral environment. I actually had to stop about six pages from the end to gather myself, which I have never done. I was caught completely off guard, that a book could ever bring me to such a place. But when all you have done for nearly 300 pages is carry your own child through the nightmare of nightmares, then getting to that place comes pretty easy.

...or does McCarthy totally overuse the word "okay" in almost every exchange of dialog between the man and the boy? It actually gets annoying after a while. Nobody says okay that much!!! Aside from that, it is a very good and disturbing novel that portrays exactly the world that humanity will deserve after a nuclear war.

I just finished this book after two days of frenzied reading. I knew it was going to be good, as it was very highly recommended, but I didn't realize how good a short book without a single quotation mark could be. I know that there is a movie coming out, I saw the stills as I started the book. While I think that the casting is perfect, I cannot see the dreamlike narrative of the book translating to the screen as well as it deserves.

I was eagerly anticipating the ending of the book, and while I think that it was a bit awkward (it should have been a BIT shorter or a BIT longer), I was very happy the author didn't see fit to go into a metaphorical allusion involving the boy and his father (trying hard to avoid spoilers). A good example of a classic work going to metaphorical and not enough physical is Albert Camus'es The Plague. I enjoyed The Road much more for this reason, while there is little doubt that the simple plot and characters can fit a large number of stand-ins, the book is much more readable and easy to follow.

I don't normally review products or books on Amazon but there are a few here and there that seem to force my hand. I am not sure where 'real' critics or Cormac McCarthy himself would rank this book but to me its right there at the top. In most of McCarthy's books the protaganist has a singular thing that seems to drive them, "the fire inside". And for those that understand "it" it is an amazing thing to behold. For the father of this story "the good guys carry the fire", this thing that he finds and nourishes within his own son, at every step afraid of its extinction, and even at the end succeeds at keeping it alive in a landscape where it shouldn't even exist.

A book that somehow captures what every parent feels for their children and no where is it more poignant than in a situation where the stark realities have driven it to be abandoned by almost everyone else.

Truthfully, an astonishing read.

Published in 2006, Cormac McCarthy's THE ROAD has been among the most widely praised novels of the era, receiving numerous awards including the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. It has also been extremely popular with the reading public--something of a surprise, for it would be difficult to imagine a novel that is more relentlessly bleak than this one.

THE ROAD presents us with a nameless father and son, the latter about ten years old, who have survived an unspecified environmental disaster and who are now traveling south in an effort to escape the ever-intensifying cold that seems to grip the landscape. The journey is horrendous: they push a grocery cart through a seemingly endless sea of gray ash beneath a gray sky, cold, wet, hungry, and very fearful of other people--and with good reason, for in the absence of other food many survivors have turned to cannabalism. Cities are empty with the occasional corpse; rivers and streams are dead; the forrests and fields are dead; they have no certainty of what they will find when and if they reach the sea.

McCarthy writes in a style that is sparse to the point of painfulness, and the narrative is repetitive in the same sense of a reoccurring nightmare. At the same time, however, the darkness of serves to set off the one golden glow: the father's love for his son. "We carry the fire," the father tells his son. "We're the good guys." And so they struggle on together in the hopeless hope of finding a means to live.

As THE ROAD progesses it acquires a certain mythic quality: the concept of a heroic journey into the unknown to win a great prize; the idea of a light in darkness; the imagery of carrying the fire to the sea. At the same time, however, heroism is in short supply and the great prize is simple survival in a barren world. McCarthy does ultimately offer a grain of hope, but only of the most tenative kind imaginable.

I would be remiss if I did not state that this is easily one of the most profoundly depressing works I have read. Recommended--but you might want to keep a couple of Zoloft handy.

GFT, Amazon Reviewer

You know who they are. Those people that get upset when stories are told that aren't a sugar coated version of the world, stories that seem like they were written by authors who truly believe that ignoring cold, hard reality is the best medicine.

Cormac McCarthy is not one of those authors. At the very, very least not with this book he is. And this is not a book for those who can't face what true horror can be. By true horror, I don't mean the boogie man in your closet or having to work for some really nasty boss with a penchant for administering torture in the form of some really nasty humiliation tactics. This is a story about facing absolute oblivion in its truest form and continuing to move forward under its weighted stare.

McCarthy's writing is poetry. The book is written in some of the most sparse prose I've ever seen read with my own eyes. You can finish this one in about a day, its such a quick read. Yet somehow the book manages to paint a detailed landscape for this poor father and son to trek across in fewer words than I'd have thought possible. They make their way across a bleak and horrific world wiped out after a nuclear holocaust, a blasted world where people do anything they can to survive, even if it means consuming one another. I can't explain how this book grabs you almost immediately and how soon you begin to empathize with these two unnamed characters as they encounter horrors that would probably break most people had they been placed in this same situation.

The two make their way towards the shore miles away, simply on the faith that its the right decision. And you'll be right there along with them for every treacherous step of the way. McCarthy creates a world that really is not too far out of reach, the apocalyptic world that we've heard about and been warned of for some time now but have managed to avoid, at least for the time being. The relationship between the father and son is a thing of beauty. In this world where men feed on each other and life as we know it has come to a sad death, it seems to be the only thing in existence that has any value to hold on to. I mentioned before that this book was a quick read. I purposely read it only a little at a time, just so I could hold on to these characters a little longer.

This book managed to move me as few other books have. The book isn't an action packed bonanza but really a meditation on survival and perseverance in all forms. It does have some really tense moments and moments where just when its gotten as horrifying as it can be, the rug is pulled out from under you and something even more horrible is there for you to stumble across. I will say that any book that makes me tear up when someone finds a packet of grape flavored drink mix gets my vote.

I cannot recommend this enough.

Reading is, for me, instructive, uplifting, entertaining, or enlightening. To be dark without any of the other attributes feels like a waste of time. This book wasted my time. I already know how cruel humans can be, and how badly we treat the planet. I kept waiting for the moral to rise out of the ashes, but none did.

I just finished reading this book. I feel as though I have wasted 4 hours of my life. I refused to put it down until I finished because I thought there must be a pay-off at the end. I suffered through page after page of the same story. Ash, shopping carts, wrapping up in blankets, rain storm, look for food, hide on the side of the road, go through an abandoned house. Turn and page and repeat. The dialouge between the boy and the man was annoying. "Papa I'm cold". "I know". "Okay". "Okay". "Papa, I'm scared". "I know". "Okay". Luckily, I bought the paperback and only wasted $14 instead of $27!

Another outstanding book from Cormac. And out of his normal genre. I really enjoyed the book but it is gonna leave you feeling like you need some sunshine afterwards. Dark book, dark story telling done very well.

This is the last time I listen to Oprah regarding any book. This book is dark but meaningless. I had to force myself to finish this pointless tragic story.
How this became a best seller is beyond me.

This month's book club leader chose it. Something I probably never would have read. That is what makes being in a book club and others choosing each month fun. It was an "interesting" book. I found it very slow at the beginning. As I got into it I could not put it down. I needed to know what was going to happen to the characters. The love between father and son was very strong. I feel the father would have done anything for the son and in a way did. He may have just given up if he did not have his son to protect.

Pulitzer winner, great reviews, and I was bored by the tenth page.

I have no problem with McCarthy's prose style, the run-on sentences and sparse prose aptly illustrate the landscape of a devastated, post-apocalyptic planet and the minds of those who inhabit it. Jose Saramago's Blindness uses similiar literary style to much better effect. It also worked in McCarthy's brilliant, morally ambiguous No Country For Old Men. McCarthy's prose has never been a problem.

My problem was that- for the entire book- nothing happened. The man and the boy travel south. The boy rarely speaks. When he does, he usually says "Papa, I'm scared, I'm scared Papa." The Man shows no humanity to anyone besides the boy, but they're the "good guys". Man and boy journey to the sea. At the sea, things suck as much as they do everywhere else.

There is no enemy to overcome, no joy, no hope, no anger at the misery the world has been brought to, nothing but apathy expressed throughout the entire book. The rest of humanity has apparently become depraved and degenerate, but the contrast doesn't make father & son any more heroic by comparison. I found nothing compelling about either the boy or his father. Their story was flat, repetitive and boring. For a truly brilliant tale of disaster and redemption look to Jose Saramago's Blindness... or Max Brooks' World War Z... or Stephen King's the Stand. All of which are more profound than The Road.

In a world somehow burned to a crisp, a few people survive. A father and young son travel south along a partially-melted highway to escape the winter. They have no names; nothing has a name any longer. On the way, they encounter others trying to survive, often by preying on the helpless, even enslaving and eating some. The child wants to help some of the more unfortunate, but the father's focus is entirely on saving the boy and himself. He trusts no one, and hides from all human contact. Eventually, the father dies of TB, and the boy, left alone, shows himself to a band of travelers, expecting to be eaten. But instead they adopt him, and it is obvious that the group of good people will form the basis for a renewal of civilization.
The theme appears to be that good will always triumph over evil eventually.

Four Little Old Men: A (Mostly) True Tale from a Small Cajun Town

I didn't know exactly what to make of this book but I couldn't put it down. It was depressing and simple but somehow profound at the same time. I never would have picked it up based on its description but Oprah came through again.

Cormac McCarthy amazingly makes the relationship between father and son remarkably warm in the cold environs of post-apocalyptic United States - after the bomb or something similar has incinerated all of nature. The two main characters, each nameless and referred only as man and boy, allow us to watch their journey on the "Road" in the world we pray never to know.

The book is merely a chronological story of the daily long walks by the pair to the coast and then south - all the time seeking food and other needs for sustenance. All in a world of no sun. Eternal clouds. No stars. "The nights dead still and deader black. So cold." You might think: Why live? The father, understanding the inevitable end to this daily torture ". . . would raise his weeping eyes and see him [his son] standing there in the road looking back at him from some unimaginable future, glowing in the waste like a tabernacle." Unlike most other adults, the man has reason to live - to love and be loved. This ugly world has a beautiful story.

Fighting against all odds, in the moonscape left from the nuclear assault on man and nature, this book mixes two great movies' themes: "Two Women" and "Mad Max." Without sun, no food can be grown. Without light, temperatures plunge and winds sweep the lands. With the strange sunless weather patterns, the already burned trees fall like dominoes, expose the entire forestless continent to all winds, and leave all men prey to the same who walk without masks or eye protection. It is not a jungle out there - all the flora is dead. It is hell. But, against these odds, the main characters fight on.

People become desperate in such desperate times. Children, the weakest, are freely eaten by the adults. Every day, following the inevitably black as ebony night, requires energy to walk on. Day or night, animal-like senses are needed to assure self preservation. In one conversation, the two discuss this never ending stress in obtaining preservation.

-If you're on the lookout all the time, does that mean that you're scared all the time?
-Well, I suppose you have to be scared enough to be on the lookout in the first place. To be cautious. Watchful.
-But the rest of the time you're not scared?
-Yeah. I don't know. Maybe you should always be on the lookout. If trouble comes when you least expect it then maybe the thing to do is to always expect it.
-Do you always expect it? Papa?
-I do. But sometimes I might forget to be one the lookout.

After having read the heavier and less personal "Blood Meridian" and seen the movie adaptation to "No Country For Old Men", I feared this book of the post apocalyptic world would be strewn with endless pages of blood, guts, exposed viscera and nauseatingly horrific accounts of violence. Surprisingly, it is not. Not that this book is void of shockingly violent behavior, or occasional scenes of putrid details. But, such accounts are not nearly as great as included in the other two works. And, on a personal note, that is appreciated.

This book moves incredibly quickly. The writing is clean, but skillfully done with strong words and Hemingwayesque minimalist style. McCarthy's success is not any surprise to any of his readers.

When I realized that Cormack McCarthy also wrote No Country For Old Men, I knew I was in trouble since that was one of the worst movies I have ever seen. Now I can add that The Road is one of the worst books I have ever read and that I obviously conclued that I need to avoid any title or movie associated with the author.
I don't care how the critics rave about him, he is vastly overrated.
The book was boring, unpleasant, had a weird ending, and was just kind of sickening.
Grim, dark, depressing, nauseating. Nuff for me from him.
Anne
NYC

This one was a bit disappointing. I found myself more interested in learning of the cause of the apocalyptic event than the plight of the characters. Yes, I get that the disaster is supposed to be secondary to this story. Was the lack of punctuation supposed to be `edgy'? There were conversations between the `man and the boy' that spanned an entire page that consisted of two word sentences. The flashback component was a bit too vague to help with the character development. If you are considering this book because you like the author's style, then you will probably not be unhappy. If, however, you are looking for an actual complete post-apocalyptic novel, then check out `Free Flight', `Down to a Sunless Sea' and of course `Alas, Babylon'.

Mr McCarthy is a brilliant writer, but this is far from his best work. Of course, if you enjoyed "Child of God", then this is probably right up your alley.

Some plot spoilers ahead, but none too specific.

This is a bleak depressing book, but you keep on reading it to find out more about the close relationship of a boy and his father trying to survive in a harsh post apocalyptic dawn. A bond reforged by the graphic suicide of the mother, the family remnant leaves the memory of home for the harsh reality of 'the road.' Their quest is two fold: keeping the fire, and to make it south to the coast and warmer climes. As the book progresses, we learn about how 'keeping the fire' means holding on to humanity's virtues, by helping others, and not resorting to cannibalism, which is widespread after the loss of photosynthesis and the resultant loss of animal life.

The central conflict surrounds this pact, which the father realizes mainly the objective of reaching the coast, without keeping the fire, and the boy mainly wants to keep the fire, regardless of reaching the coast. The father's decline is gradual, being more benevolent in the beginning, and more and more unheroic in the many questionable situations which follow. The father is quick to justify his actions, and the boys budding understanding of the reality of the situation gradually brings about a schism between the two characters. Their love always binds them, but the rift grows as the child's innocence is replaced gradually by understanding.

The boy serves as conscience for the family for the majority of the book, and even though he become a boy who is much more aware, he always remains a boy. He is genuine, innocent, and youthful, seemingly undamaged by the harsh environment. It is heartwarming.

In the end this is a book about two people who made a pact to live up to some high ideals. During the course of their journey together, only one of them ended up living up to these ideals, and it damaged their relationship. You learn that when you live in a world where hopes are always on the verge of shattering, your morals may shatter with them, but yet, in the end, sometimes innocence can still triumph.

Do you want to experience a bleak post-apocalyptic world? Listen to Rupert Degas's reading of Cormac McCarthy's The Road. McCarthy won a Pulitzer Prize with this novel describing the passage of father and son down an endless road in a wiped-out environment, scavenging for food to survive where they can. I read the novel first so I knew the story, but couldn't tear myself away from this audio. Degas (in totally different voice to his readings of another contemporary `great', the novels of Haruki Murakami) doesn't get emotionally embroiled...just reads it like it is. As listeners, we can only observe, frightened, hopeful, concerned, occasionally tearful, as father/son stagger on to an ending you know is coming in one way or another. McCarthy's language, spare and powerful, hits home like poetry. Required listening for politicians playing nuclear power games.

I do not know what makes somebody to write such a novel. Like a bad dream, grim, dark and doom-laden. There is no beginning and no concrete end. Man, his boy and the shopping card. They appear from nowhere and in the end disappear. World has ended and without any explanation. I would envision such scenario after collision with a large asteroid. Only small number of "good" and "bad" people roam around. And God Almighty, who equipped us with free will, so we can behave like evil or like true humans. Suffering, cold, hunger, fear, death and boundless devotion - that is all. Essentially there is no true action here, but text is sort of mesmerizing. However it is hard for me to imagine movie based on this book. Movie will be rather boring.

When gimmicks get in the way of a book's readability, as they do in triplicate in Cormac McCarthy's novel "The Road", 256 pages feels like a long row to hoe.

Most notably, McCarthy declines to name his main characters. The idea, presumably, is that in a post-apocalyptic and post-societal world, the time for names has passed. It's about animal survival. Cute, but not very practical, as borne out in McCarthy's execution. As both of his main characters are male, the number of masculine pronouns quickly becomes overwhelming, and the prose gets awkward in its lurches and stretches to make the idea work. He seems likewise to have an aversion to using specific descriptions of the rubble of his lost world, so the opportunity for poignancy - the reader's connection with this scenario as a possible future for his or her own world - is lost. (Fortunately, it's an oversight neither Richard Matheson nor Stephen King make in their respective apocalyptic masterpieces.)

Next on my list of grievances is a rather silly refusal on McCarthy's part to use quotation marks, and to use apostrophes in his contractions. It makes me wonder if the celebrated author is one of those people who can't be bothered to use punctuation and capitalization in emails. What's somehow more infuriating is that he isn't consistent about it. He condescends (presumably) to use apostrophes in a small minority of contractions, to make sure we get, for instance, that he's saying "we'll" and not "well". Maybe we're not National Book Award winners, but I'd like to think the average reader is capable of puzzling through a missing apostrophe.

A good author leans on his or her word choice to get ideas across, not on typography or the shape of the letters on the page. Otherwise, why not go whole hog and make the margins into curvy parallel lines, to give us a visual reminder that we're talking about a road here?

Oh yeah - I promised you a third gimmick. The sentences. Chopped. The onslaught. Unrelenting. Verbs in absentia. Merciless. Again and again. Throughout. We need this approach, apparently, to fully feel the desolation.

Most of the time, the dialog is simplistic and spare. This, too, is an attempt to highlight the harshness of the new reality the characters are navigating. But the dialog's style changes completely during one expository remembered scene between the main character and his dead wife. It becomes suddenly florid, stilted, and melodramatic - showcasing both McCarthy's difficulty writing realistic dialog and his inability to get into the heads of female characters. Ron Charles (The Washington Post) says of the scene: "Most middle-school boys have a more nuanced understanding of the opposite sex than McCarthy demonstrates in his fiction, and he does nothing to alter that impression here."

Gimmicks aside, is this a good read - a memorable story, at least? Well, yes and no. If "The Road" had been a short story, tight and mean, it might have had a chance to sing, to give a 21st-century Naturalistic spin to the dystopian future myth. But McCarthy doesn't show us one powerful day in a long brutal struggle against all odds. We get months of it (and feel those months). Every mile is like the previous mile, and the mile to come.

If you read "The Road", keep a close eye on your bookmark. Those times I lost my place, I had a heck of a time finding it, as there aren't even chapter or section breaks to guide the way, and the style and content of this book are remarkably, excruciatingly homogenous.

"The Road" was my introduction to Cormac McCarthy. I bought the book at an airport before a cross country flight. I sat down during the minutes before I boarded my first flight and began to read. By my lay over in Dallas, I was halfway through, and my heart was pounding. By my arrival in Raliegh, I had finished it, and I was speechless. The novel had effected me so much, that I couldn't think of anything but this father and son's journey. Since then I have almost read everything Cormac McCarthy has ever written (all of which has been amazing!), and he has become my favorite author. This story, written in Mccarthy signiture stark prose, brings this post apocalypyic world to breathing life, and makes us hanger's on in this journey. We feel true fear when they are stalked by ravaging cannibals, and feel true elation when they find even the smallest sustenance. I would highly recommend this book to anyone with a brain. It will effect you in such a way you will thirst for more. I just hope John Hilcoat's film (due early 2009) does this masterpiece justice!

I have never read anything that matches the intimacy and immediacy of The Road. This book is so engrossing that I recommend reading this only when you are headed on vacation or have a free weekend, because putting it down is truly painful.

While some of McCarthy's other work tends towards the masculine, rest assured that this book is for everyone. The nameless characters in a future we no nothing about give The Road universality where it matters - in characters, emotions, relationships and the basic building blocks of the human spirit.

As the father of two young children I found this book timeless, heart wrenching and tragically beautiful. McCarthy's prose is stripped down of all pretense. He manages to convey the horror of a post-apocalyptic world in a way that is singularly powerful. The bond between the father and son, the son's innocence and the primal urges that keep them both alive are riveting. I could not put this book down.

There were good descriptions here of dogged survival in a gray, ash-choked world, and certain passages rose above the wooden dialogue to achieve eloquence, but unlike others I don't consider this book a classic that somehow engraves its name in the literary landscape. What I found it to be was an attention-grabbing tale of survival and fatherly love that would probably have made a better graphic novel than a prose one. As far as The Road's failings, and it did have plenty, I for one wanted to know more about what brought on the global catastrophe the father and son were left dealing with, and very little was ever explained. What went wrong on planet earth? What were the parameters of the apparently human-authored disaster? What had the father "been" in happier times? There was a great bare bones setup in the plot that whetted my curiosity, but far too much was left to be guessed at instead of explained. So in the end, as I so often have to say: a good book, but not great.

This is a really bad book but I can understand why some people are enthralled with it.

Simply, it is a bleak, Christian-nihilistic, end-of-days allegory written for Christians who get off on that sort of thing. If however, you demand a modicum of realism, depth, and consistency - forget it, this is the tin allegory of a third-rate sermon.

As a book it fails on several levels. The dialogue is a monotonously hollow staccato:
Are we going to die?
Sometime. Not now.
And we're still going South. [Note the lack of question mark here, but not above.]
Yes.
So we'll be warm. [Again.]
Yes.
Okay.
Okay what? [Finally it reappears!]
Nothing. Just Okay.
Go to sleep.
Okay.

How profound... It's page after page of this tone-deaf "talk" - and I have NEVER seen the word "okay" overused to this extent, it shows up in every dialogue - it's everywhere, I guess because everything ultimately will be okay. The characters (referred to as "good guys" and "bad guys" apparently for the benefit of the really stupid readers who might miss the relentless black-and-white symbolism) are generally Christian archetypes that appear and disappear gratuitously simply to lay-on more heavy-handed symbolism.

The relationship between the father and son is also symbolic not real. What's the boy's name? After hundreds of pages we don't know because the father never calls the boy by name. How realistic is that? Then there's the matter of save-the-day Divine Intervention (or is it Providence?) - several times, just when all is lost and the end is here - wait! - out of nowhere a bounty or savior appears. You can't trust this author, he is too transparently manipulative and doesn't respect the reader or the story, he's too blinded by his goal of delivering the Important Message.

The style is dreadful, not poetic. As seen from the example above it is inconsistent and comes off as more sloppy, lazy, and self-indulgent than the minimalist or broken remains of a broken world. The sentences are pointlessly fragmented and ill-punctuated; it's the style beloved by semi-literate text-messaging teenagers.

As far as their post-apocalyptic world goes, we don't know if the disaster was nuclear, natural, or the wrath of god. It's bleak but clichéd, it's all been done before and much better. There's nothing original or insightful here, it's the usual cast of Halloween characters: cannibals and road warriors and it's all for affect - but then, that's what this whole book is about - invoking the known Hollywood and imagined biblical horrors in a Christian end-of-days context.

It's an artless and tedious bedtime story for the infantile at heart.

I have no idea why Oprah and her readers liked this book so much! The plot hinges on coincidence and doesn't stand up to too much thinking. Things happen at the right time (for the author), but not likely if this were actually happening.

Bad waste of time.

No color. No beauty. Music is meaningless. Art is pointless. Sounds mask danger and no one is to be trusted. Not even family.

The characters have two bullets and few choices for their use: Survive for the next day or end the horror of living with no hope no food no government no safety.

This novel is classic McCarthy. Antihero characters. Ambiguous endings. Harsh settings. And cannabalism.

I remember having to take those advanced English courses back in High School. I was drafted because I did pretty well in a Creative Writing course, and the English department had an authoritarian system that forced the unwilling to take more English. All whining aside, I actually came to enjoy analyzing stories and earning the nickname "misanthrope".

The only reason to inflict my sufferings on the rest of the world is that "The Road" is the first book in my life that would have inspired me to write a paper of my own volition. I want to write about the lessons in the book, the underlying meanings, and even search for symbolism that I am not sure the writer actually meant to put in there, but are sufficiently plausible to satisfy an English teacher looking for symbolism and archetypes and whatnot.

I have read the 1-star reviews to see why the writers felt this excellent book deserved just one. The poor grammar and punctuation were so much a part of the book that I did not notice them. And I'm the sort of person who notices all of the errors in the emails of others, and cannot catch 100% of my own until I re-read my messages after sending. I noticed some idiosyncratic words and grammar, but they belonged to the characters, not to the author. I almost want to shout to the negative reviewers that they must have missed the obvious lessons in the story. They must have missed the fact that there are scenes of great horror, but this is not a horror story.

More than anything, I want to cast a 5-star vote for this gook. Technically, it may not be great, but it is awesomely good. I am inclined to create an entirely new class of "good" for this book.

'Nuff said

This book is hands down the worst book I've ever read in my entire life. Boring, poor writing style, choppy sentences, poor descriptions of time and place. Do not buy the hype on the book. There is no point to any of it. It is a page turner mostly because you keep turning the page hoping something actually happens. I can sum it up like this: Man and boy walk on road avoiding a handful of "bad guys" (any confrontations in this book are lame) while running out of food and water and then just when you think all hope is lost they find some food and water. Then, they start walking again to some unknown destination while running out of food and water. There isn't even a logical ending to this. Waste of time and money.

Ive never written a bookreview before.
Never?
Never.
Okay?
Okay.

I had to force myself to finish this book, and I can't say I'm glad I did. Like the Seinfeld epidsode where Elaine was forced to watch "The English Patient" a second time, I kept thinking, "Oh, just die, die already!"

Maybe I'm a prude because I hated the way the author took liberties with the English language, and not, to me, in a positive way. I kept wondering why he chose to write his book in English when he so seemed to hate its rules.

Besides that, I couldn't identify with the characters, or their plight. If, as the book claims, the bleak landscape had been this way for years, why are they just now seeking some other venue? Whatever.

I really hated this book. For others who feel the same, I recommend "The Secret History" by Donna Tartt. Now THAT's a novel worth reading.

This is a great book that is also an absorbing and easy read. The brutal and brilliant simplicity of the book is remarkable. McCarthy imagines the world after the nuclear apocalypse in which everything is stripped away and then asks, "what's left?"

In part, the answer is the kind of evil that is resurgent in McCarthy's other books and that is best captured by Golding in "Lord of the Flies" when he imagines children on a Pacific Island stripped of civilization. McCarthy paints a picture of scavengers and cannibals, treating chained slaves like meat on a hoof. But the rest of the answer comes from the father's love for his 10 year old son born right after the apocalypse. This child is far more angelic than the children imagined by Golding, mostly because he is raised by the father and invested by the father with everything that seems good and noble in human nature. The symbiotic and redeeming love between father and son, and the portrayal of this relationship as the bedrock for all of human civilization, is the theme of the book.

Much of the book concerns the day to day job of survival, and the father's remarkable cleverness in getting through each day. But ultimately, the book also concerns the father's limitations. The fixation on survival strips him of all ability to trust or to act like one of the "good guys" that he and his son talk about. Also, the new man is going to have to leave the road entirely and find a way to survive on the land. The father seems unable to cut his connection with this dangerous artifact of the pre-apocalyptic world, whereas the son and those he ultimately must ally with are more willing to live entirely away from the road.

The writing style brilliantly fits the themes of the book. It is maniacally spare -- like Hemingway on steroids. He never even uses quotation marks. Yet it is always clear who is speaking. And while spare, the language is at times extraordinary poetic, particularly the concluding paragraph.

It will be interesting to see how this book is received in literary circles. I think it confirms McCarthy's reputation as a great American writer.

Spare and grim and word-perfect. This clear classic is made transcendent by the last two paragraphs. Bravo.

Just finished the book, and was wanting just a litle more from it than what it delivered. Maybe a little more action, maybe a little danger from "The Road". The author never clearly portrayed a danger to the character, events that could have terrified the reader was closed simply in the space of a paragraph and quickly dismissed.

The father/son relationship never established itself. Why were they "the good guys" when just about everyone else was "bad"? Unanswered. I never really got a the feeling that dad even liked son, but instead was just commited to carry him along for a ride that was certain to end in doom.

Wish I could say the book was about an epic struggle for survival, but it really wasn't. Wish I could say it was about the great love between father and son, but it wasn't. It missed the mark and I think this story could have been much better than it was. It was a great idea, just not pulled off well.

One thing I will grant McCarthy: The writing style was highly unusual and something I've not found in other novels. I hope to never encounter it again.

I read this book for a forms of literature class and I was very disappointed...It has just about 300 pages of the same old thing...OVER, and OVER, AND OVER!

I did not like the ending either...

There's something about Cormac McCarthy books that just doesn't resonate for me. I read all three books of the Border trilogy and wasn't as dazzled as everyone else was, and I never planned to read another. When 'The Road' came out, it was recommended to me by several people who know of my love for apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic stories. I decided to give McCarthy another shot...and once again, I find I am not as impressed as so many others are.

'The Road' is a simple story of a father and son trying to survive in a world devastated by some sort of disaster. The disaster itself is never really described in detail, but we see the aftermath and that is enough. There isn't much of a plot in the traditional sense, just a description of the day-to-day struggle to avoid violent confrontation, stay healthy, and find enough food to survive. The descriptions of settings and characters are spare and stark, very black-and-white in nature. Dialogue is minimal. Like the Border trilogy, very little of the characters' motivations or state of mind is described or even implied with any depth, leaving much up to the reader's interpretation...perhaps too much for my taste.

As post-apocalyptic stories go, 'The Road' is successful in some ways and fails in others. Because of the stark nature of the prose, it's a very distant and cold sort of story, but in this sort of story I prefer a more personal perspective. In this sense, Stephen King's 'The Stand' is a much more successful book, placing rich and full-bodied characters in a post-apocalyptic situation. To a lesser extent, King's 'Cell' works better too. Perhaps the best example, though, is Jose Saramago's 'Blindness', in which the characters are never named, but we still get to know them on a very intimate level. The situation in 'Blindness' is original, and the stories of the characters drive it forward in a compelling way to a moving conclusion.

I never felt compelled by 'The Road,' though. Much like the characters, I slogged my way through to the end and then moved on, detached and disaffected. The idea is good and I can respect the unique take on it, but for me, there are just better books than this. 'The Road' is distant, cold, unrelenting...ultimately too much so.

I highly recommend these two extraordinary books. They are very helpful for deep seekers of life and psychology. 1) RUMI & SELF PSYCHOLOGY (PSYCHOLOGY OF TRANQUILTIY) 2) SARA'S THERAPY: THE WAY TO PURITY

I guess I'm in one of those post-apocalyptic moods. Venturing to the library these two weeks ago, I picked up two titles with similar subjects - "The Pesthouse" by Jim Crace (which I am readying to read) and "The Road" by Cormac McCarthy. Having never read any of McCarthy's novels before this, I was a bit concerned that his literary method wouldn't hold my attention. Instead, it grabbed me by my shirt collar and hauled me into a willful surrender.

"The Road" depicts time and again an anemic wasteland, full of ash and smoke, blackened vegetation and little sight of sun or sky, the heavens veiled in ominous cloud cover. Surviving in this land of pervasive soot are a father and his son; we never know their names, yet we are deeply ensconced in the terror and uncertainty that is their reality, the world utterly and completely destroyed by an unnamed disaster. With scant natural resources (food, water) and no modern conveniences available (electricity, plumbing, gasoline for cars), father and son are living a primitive and base lifestyle. Complicating their struggle is the evolution of this scorched planet into a veritable battleground - it is kill or be killed for those left roaming the emptiness and anything that may aid in their hollow cling to life is fought over tooth and nail. Every new day may yet be a wasted attempt, the bleak condition of the world leaving little point to life; it is an inevasible pondering which has the son asking his father time and again, "Are we going to die?"

McCarthy's distinctive style of writing is his disjointed, incomplete sentences that remain easy to understand and at times are sage-like in their contemplation:

"People were always getting ready for tomorrow. I didn't believe in that. Tomorrow wasn't getting ready for them. It didn't even know they were there." (pg. 168)

His description is majestic and mesmerizing, conjuring the worst imaginable environs and the most demoralized of people:

"By then all the stores of food had given out and murder was everywhere upon the land. The world soon to be largely populated by men who would eat your children in front of your eyes and the cities themselves held by cores of blackened looters who tunneled among the ruins and crawled from the rubble white of tooth and eye carrying charred and anonymous tins of food in nylon nets like shoppers in the commissaries of hell. The soft black talc blew through the streets like squid ink uncoiling along a sea floor and the cold crept down and the dark came early and the scavengers passing down the steep canyons with their torches trod silky holes in the drifted ash that closed behind them silently as eyes. Out on the roads the pilgrims sank down and fell over and died and the bleak and shrouded earth went trundling past the sun and returned again as trackless and as unremarked as the path of any nameless sisterworld in the ancient dark beyond." (pgs. 180-181)

Once started, "The Road" can barely be put down, a riveting read that is regrettably short at only 287 pages. The book contains no chapters but there are several convenient stopping points marked by an ellipsis or short, widely spaced paragraphs. Strangely enough, it's lacking in punctuation here and there, such as in compound words like "didn't" and "wasn't" (they appear instead as "didnt" and "wasnt"). There are also no quotations when characters are conversing and if one is not paying attention, one can forget easily just who is speaking.

Bottom line: No more can be said about "The Road"; the appeal to read it would be lost on one too many reveals and/or conjecturing on the plot, the dark adventure on which a reader embarks indelibly spoiled. Pick it up today at your local bookstore or library - it will be one of the best novels you read this year.

I was in the first screening audience for the movie made from this book last night in NYC.
Let me say the movie was riveting, the whole audience was at the edge of their seats the whole movie. There is an intense palpable desperate hopelessness running through the whole movie. The actors were all excellent. It was a horrifying, picture of a dying earth and the last people who are still barely clinging on. This movie will win the Oscar, the screenplay writers, cinematographer and the actors in it should win it too. Even the men in the audience were sniffling at some points during the movie.
I went to buy the book the next day.
I heard that the movie was very faithful to the book.

Fascinating exploration of the upswings and downswings of life in intimate and memorable words ... nice addition to any book club.