The Road
Book | Cormac McCarthy
A mesmerizing post-apocalyptic novel that compels you to keep reading even as it saps your will to live.
A man and his son stumble through a scorched landscape, their only goal to find the sea. This is the premise—or, perhaps more accurately, the condition—of Cormac McCarthy's The Road, a mesmerizing post-apocalyptic novel that compels you to keep reading even as it saps your will to live. McCarthy's relentlessly spare prose brings to mind nothing so much as Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea, but the overall effect is far more pitiless. The world has ended. There is no future. Nothing remains but barren forests, abandoned cities, despair, famine, and betrayal; the father, driven by love in a world that no longer recognizes such a thing, tries to educate his son on the nature of good, evil, and what it means to be human. Fans of McCarthy might recognize these tropes from his earlier works, but nowhere are they as starkly and elegantly presented as in this small, pithy masterpiece. As a cautionary tale, this book is brutally pessimistic; as an affirmation of the human spirit, it is desperately beautiful. Read it and weep.
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