Cormac McCarthy's The Road: Book Review

From the Cover: 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.

My Review: I have had this book on my shelf for three years now and each and every month for those three years I took this book off of the shelf and said "This month, I'm going to read The Road" and each time I put it back on the shelf and said "Not yet. I'm not ready to read this." Let me explain: this book came out shortly before my son was born, and I got it after he was born, and as a new father, I just couldn't bring myself to read a book in which, as the back of the book says: "A father and his son walk alone through burned America." It cut just a little too close to the bone, so to speak.

That all changed when, within the course of twenty-four hours both my brother (a recent father himself) and my father told me I needed to read it. I expressed my reservations about the subject matter of the book, and they both said that I needed to read it in spite of those concerns. So, when I finished The Ayatollah Begs to Differ I finally picked up The Road and dug right in. Forty-eight hours later I was done with the book.

I will say this ... it was a very raw and emotional forty-eight hours. It was a forty-eight hours in which I hugged my son more, and in which I was depleted emotionally and physically. Cormac McCarthy's book is, as I have said, a very raw read, and one which was both very hard to get through and which I simply could not put it down. McCarthy's prose is extremely sparse-reminiscent of that of Ernest Hemingway in fact-and holds back no punches. His decision to eschew quotation marks and apostrophes (turning can't and won't, for example, into cant and wont) are decisions that I usually detest, however, in McCarthy's hands, it only added to the overall atmosphere of total breakdown and the loss of control that the book exudes.

That feeling, of what one father does in the face of the collapse of not only society but of the natural world took so much out of me in the reading of it. No names are ever given in the book, the characters are only ever "The Man" and "The Boy," or "Son" and "Papa" or any such permutations of those pronouns, and this invites, demands even, that the Reader, especially a father such as myself places himself and his son into the book, my and my son's faces on McCarthy's characters, our voices in their mouths. The emotional connection that this creates with the characters in the book is a connection that is very very visceral.

When the man says to his son "My job is to take care of you. I was appointed to do that by God. I will kill anyone who touches you. Do you understand?" (77), I found myself making the same mental promise to my son. Every success and failure that the man and the boy experienced is a success and a failure that I experienced vicariously. By the time I had, in the moment, reached the end of the book, I was so emotionally drained by the 287-page trek that I had taken through McCarthy's post-apocalyptic landscape, I didn't really care that the ending seemed contrived or "too easy an out," a deus ex machina as it were.

Even looking back on the book, I can forgive McCarthy (a father himself, who was inspired to write The Road while travelling with his son) the story's end because of the rest of the book. The devastatingly real characters, the truly hellacious situation into which the man and the boy are thrown, the completely accurate and heartbreaking depiction of a desperate father, all of these aspects of The Road not only allow me to forgive McCarthy's ending but also embrace the ending as in a book about hope that has very little hope, the ending makes me, as a father, feel much better about myself in the role of "the man" and my son in the role of "the boy."

I know I have used the words "raw" and "emotional" a lot in this review, but those are the best words to describe The Road which is, without a doubt, one of the best-and most difficult-books I have read to date.

For another review, check out reading by pub light.

There will be a film adaptation of McCarthy's book released this coming October (October 16^th, to be exact), directed by Joe Hillcoat, and starring Viggo Mortensen, Charlize Theron, Guy Pearce, and Robert Duvall.

This review can also be found at Bryan's Book Blog.

by Cormac McCarthy
(New York: Vintage Books, 2006)
Trade Paperback, 287 Pages, Fiction
ISBN: 9780307387899, US$14.95