The Road (Oprah's Book Club)

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 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.