I have read a lot of post-apocalyptic books, but never have I read one where the vision of the experience of living on an earth that has been completely decimated was so fully realized. This simple story of a man and his son traveling to the coast along a road through a ravaged, ash-covered America, foraging for food in an entirely lifeless landscape and avoiding other survivors, is chilling in its stark realism. McCarthy conjures his bleak, colorless world with simple, spare sentences that leave vibrant after-images in the imagination: a burned forest, a deserted city, a lone farmhouse, a gray ocean. All are tinged with threat, malice and hopelessness.

Not a lot happens during the course of their journey, but the cumulative effect is terrifying. And yet, at the end, McCarthy manages to inject some small ration of hope for humanity. This is a magnificent work, worthy of the Pulitzer it won, a book that will stay with you for a long time.

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Okay, I’m in the minority here, as about 95% of you liked the book, but I just couldn’t do it. For on thing, there were no quotation marks around dialogue, just like No One Belongs Here More Than You. Isn’t it enough that we try to figure out what characters feel from what they said? I’m not particularly excited about having to first work to figure out which words were said, and then by whom, and then analyze them for meaning. Oh, and the apostrophe thing? Did the big apocalypse destroy half the apostrophes in the world? I’m not sure if this is supposed to reflect that the book takes place in the future, or symbolizes man’s beginning reversion to savagery or what, but it’s weird.
And – cardinal sin – halfway through, I didn’t care if any of them lived or died, so I’m out.

Wow!
Spectacular book. Quick and easy to read. Disturbing and yet hopeful.
This book makes me grateful for all I have – water, food, family, nature, memories, dreams for the future etc. It’s a book that has haunted me since I began reading it and I suspect it will stay with me for quite awhile.

There are a lot of post-apocalyptic books and movies out there right now but this one, in true Cormac McCarthy style, boils it all down to just the essentials. It reads quickly. The dialog has the same brittle, poetic rhythms of the cowboy and desperado banter of McCarthy’s border trilogy. While reading I was reminded of the Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler. Every excess in that story (a book whose direction I admired yet felt was largely unsuccessful), The Road seems to have dispensed with. It is almost entirely devoid of Who, What, When, Where, and Why. No explanations of how the end came to be, none of the particulars of who the good guys and the bad guys are, or why, nothing but the simplest, yet most revealing, details about the main characters, not even their names. Very effective, evocative, and moving. Is my approval of this novel somehow shaped by my utter mystification over why everyone thinks Children of Men is such a great movie?