In The Road, Cormac McCarthy pares down language into short paragraphs sequenced on the page as singular, independent blocks of text, the spaces between each paragraph designating gaps of time that may be seconds or hours or days or weeks.  This is a significant change from his earlier writing. McCarthy’s prose in the first half of his career, up through Blood Meridian, was labyrinthine, Faulknerian in the extreme, reminiscent at points of Melville, Milton, Joyce. 

The language in this new novel is spare, cautious, stripped of subordination and of excess. Fragment sentences often serve in place of complete sentences.  Especially in comparison to the McCarthy of Suttree and Blood Meridian, the change is shocking and dramatic. Yet No Country for Old Men, published last year, and of a piece with The Road, prepared us for it.

McCarthy’s novels have always concerned estrangement.  From the sewers and liminal cesspools of Suttree to the necrophilia of Child of God to the existential depredations of American expansionism in Blood Meridian to the tamer and deceptively romantic travails of John Grady Cole in All the Pretty Horses and Billy Parham in The Crossing, McCarthy’s characters have wandered outside the margins of the modern world - dispossessed, abused, lost, alone. In last year’s No Country for Old Men, McCarthy explored the blasted wastelands of Southeast Texas, blasted not by droughts or sandstorm but by drug wars and murderous human dysfunction.  

McCarthy’s vision has always been bleak, sometimes bitter, sometimes verging on the nihilistic. No novelist has a bleaker vision.  Even so, this latest novel is a disturbing surprise. It is dark and despairing even for McCarthy. Its darkness and despair come not out of the experiences of his imagined characters, but out of what he fears and envisions as the ultimate future of our human world. 

The Road occurs in a post-apocalyptic world, six or seven or so years after a horrific disaster, probably a nuclear war, incinerates most of the human race. The Road is an environmental parable, an ecological novel where ecology no longer exists. 

The main character in The Road is referred to simply as “the man.”  His son is “the boy.”  In the old life, we know they had names, but now since they are practically the only people left, or at least the only “good people,” there is no need to call them by anything personal. No one in the novel is called by any name, with the exception of one wandering old man, Ely, whom the boy and the man briefly befriend. 

The title refers to the path the man and the boy follow as they make their way down from the mountains towards the southern coast.  The novel is set in the Appalachians, where McCarthy grew up.  Like the people, the mountains are not named, but there are enough geographical clues that we can identify them.