Cormac McCarthy’s Pulitzer Prize-winning latest novel, The Road, is a post-apocalyptic novel of uncommon skill and eloquence. It is the story of a father and son on a journey south to the coast in search of warmer weather. Along the way, they must avoid roving bands of cannibals, weather bitter cold and languish in a constant state of almost-starvation
Cormac McCarthy is the author of 10 novels and the winner of the 2007 Pulitzer Prize. He lives with his wife and child in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
The Road is a masterpiece of sharp, vivid, minimalist prose. Not a single word is wasted, and the sparse, almost journalistic style McCarthy employs certainly complements the subject matter.
The two main characters are anonymous but not without identity. Their interactions with each other are sometimes funny, sometimes heartbreaking and always real. These characters have no society but each other, no concerns but survival, and no dreams but nightmares. The unique situation in which they find themselves, combined with McCarthy’s keen emotional insight, lends a degree of depth to these characters that is rarely matched in contemporary literature.
The world they have been placed in is perpetually gray and pockmarked with skeletons of cities; it is reminiscent of The Stand or A Canticle for Leibowitz. Unlike those novels, however, the agent of man’s destruction is never explicitly identified though the whole world is covered in a fine gray ash.
As if to add to the mystery, McCarthy chooses to disregard standard punctuation rules. He seems to use commas only when so inclined and eschews quotation marks entirely. He also tends to form nonstandard compound words. These choices can make this novel somewhat difficult to read in spite of McCarthy’s excellent pacing.
The Road is a brilliantly crafted, intensely emotional gem of a novel that will chill the bones and warm the hearts of even the most discriminating readers.
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