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.
Book Reviews
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As a prophetic vision of the end times, McCarthy's interpretation would leave the fire and brimstone prophets of old quaking in their sandals. As a parable or allegory, The Road offers rich veins of interpretation, precisely because it lacks a clear message, leaving it up to the reader to interpret it as they see fit. Full Review (members only, 930 words).
Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. McCarthy establishes himself here as the closest thing in American literature to an Old Testament prophet, trolling the blackest registers of human emotion to create a haunting and grim novel about civilization's slow death after the power goes out.
The Houston Chronicle - Earl Dachslager
Presumably the reason for all this secretiveness is to lend the story an air of mystery, to turn it into a parable of the moral and physical degeneration of our time. But for a parable to succeed, it needs to have some clear point or message. The Road has neither, other than to say that after an earth-destroying event, things will go hard for the survivors. In the end The Road reminds me most of the 1981 movie The Road Warrior (aka Mad Max); that is, if you can imagine The Road Warrior as co-scripted by Faulkner, Hemingway, Conrad and Samuel Beckett.
Chicago Tribune
Why read this? . . . Because in its lapidary transcription of the deepest despair short of total annihilation we may ever know, this book announces the triumph of language over nothingness.
The Washington Post - Ron Charles
With this apocalyptic tale, McCarthy has moved into the allegorical realm of Samuel Beckett and José Saramago -- and, weirdly, George Romero.
The New York Times - Janet Maslin
Mr. McCarthy brings an almost biblical fury as he bears witness to sights man was never meant to see.
The San Francisco Chronicle
His tale of survival and the miracle of goodness only adds to McCarthy's stature as a living master. It's gripping, frightning, and, ultimately, beautiful. It might very well be the best book of the year, period.
The New York Times Book Review - William Kennedy
[T]he most readable of his works, and consistently brilliant in its imagining of the posthumous condition of nature and civilization—"the frailty of everything revealed at last. Old and troubling issues resolved into nothingness and night."
The Observer - Adam Mars-Jones The Road isn't a fable, or a prophesy, or even a tract in the manner of Shute's On the Beach. It's a thought and feeling experiment, bleak, exhilarating (in fact, endurable) only because of its integrity, its wholeness of seeing. The man pushing his shopping cart towards nothing hopeful, boxing the compass of despair, makes Brecht's Mother Courage seem downright fortunate in the choices she must make.
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The Road
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