The Road

By: Cormac McCarthy

Narrated by: Tom Stechschulte

Pulitzer Prize, Fiction, 2007

America is a barren landscape of smoldering ashes, devoid of life except for those people still struggling to scratch out some type of existence. Amidst this destruction, a father and his young son walk, always toward the coast, but with no real understanding that circumstances will improve once they arrive. Still, they persevere, and their relationship comes to represent goodness in a world of utter devastation.

Bleak but brilliant, with glimmers of hope and humor, The Road is a stunning allegory and perhaps Cormac McCarthy's finest novel to date. This remarkable departure from his previous works has been hailed by Kirkus Reviews as a "novel of horrific beauty, where death is the only truth".

McCarthy, a New York Times best-selling author, is a past recipient of the National Book Award and National Book Critics Circle Award. He is widely considered one of America's greatest writers.

Check out more selections from Oprah's Book Club.©2006 M-71, Ltd. (P)2006 Recorded Books LLC

Critic reviews

"McCarthy's prose retains its ability to seduce...and there are nods to the gentler aspects of the human spirit." (The New Yorker)
"One of McCarthy's best novels, probably his most moving and perhaps his most personal...Every moment of The Road is rich with dilemmas that are as shattering as they are unspoken...McCarthy is so accomplished that the reader senses the mysterious and intuitive changes between father and son that can't be articulated, let alone dramatized...Both lyric and savage, both desperate and transcendent, although transcendence is singed around the edges...Tag McCarthy one of the four or five great American novelists of his generation." (Los Angeles Times Book Review)

What was I supposed to get from this?

I really don't understand what I was supposed to get from this. It felt like a writing exercise to see if you could create a whole story with nothing but setting. The setting was indeed infinitely believable and viscerally relateable.

BUT.

There was no background. No questions asked about nature or humanity. There were only 2 real characters, neither of which had names. There was no action, no plot, and almost no character development. In fact, the author seemed allergic to anything interesting. About 1/2 dozen times throughout the entire book, something of interest would start to happen. And in absolutely no time flat, the scenario was over and we were back to the trudging setting and starvation. It would all feel quite bleak if I weren't left so bored by the monotony.

The dialog structure was annoying and repetitive. Boy: 'Dad, I have a question unrelated to anything so that you can tell the reader what you want to say.' Dad: 'Here's what I want the reader to know.' Boy: 'That's what you want the reader to know?' Dad: 'That's what I want the reader to know.' Seriously, this was a large percentage of the dialog.

Props to the narrator. This book was all about tone and his was perfect in every way.

Disappointed but Not Surprised

When I saw this book reviewed on Oprah, and her interview with the author, I was intrigued enough to want to read it. Until I got it on Audible, however, I just didn't have time.

Now I've listened to it, and even though the narrator is absolutely fantastic and the story relatively moving, I honestly felt like the author spent more time droning on and on using adjectives and adverbs which just didn't fit the nouns and verbs they were modifying.

To make things worse, McCarthy apparently doesn't feel the need to name his main characters, which is fine, I suppose, though I am more likely to care about a character that I can name, rather than "the man" or "the boy" over and over ad nauseam. Add to that the fact that he NEVER once distinguishes between "the man" = main character, and "the man" = various random encounter whilst on the road, and we have momentary contextual confusion as our brains try to sort out just which "the man" is doing or saying a thing. Even when there is no pointless third person, there are moments when the pronoun "he" is used without clarification of whether "he" is the man or the boy.

This was my first experience with Oprah's book list, and I have to say I'm disappointed, but not surprised. McCarthy has written a novel swallowed up by the "intellectual elite", which is to say he's an emperor in new clothes, and if we can't see them, we must be silly fools, though I'd be surprised if many of the people who laud this book really truly cared about it at all beyond earning the right to say "Why, yes, I read that masterpiece!".

Summary: Great narration. Decent character development. Vivid, though occasionally obscure descriptions. Gruesome, ghastly, and occasionally depressing - which, considering the setting, fit very well. Once you get past the author patting himself on the back for having a huge vocabulary (aka access to a thesaurus) it becomes easy to get lost in this sad world with these two lonesome drifters.

Very slow

The performance on this audiobook was truly great, but the story itself is very slow and meandering. Fortunately, it was a quick listen because it was a struggle to keep my attention.

Nihilistic

Very interesting. This book falls in line with I Am Legend by Richard Matheson and other apocalyptic stories. As a listener or reader you are thrown into the story which is a short timeline of events of the two main characters. For the most part they are the only two characters. I enjoyed the provocative story elements and attention to detail. Yes it's bleak but you know that already. If you want a love story or some milquetoast novel there are plenty to choose from. This is a dark in your face piece of humanity told from a first person perspective and I certainly don't regret having listened to it. I actually wish that it could have gone on for twice the length. Stephen King's apocalyptic drivel goes on and on until you wish you were dead, but Cormac McCarthy paints his story on a canvas that even though its dark and bleak you still admire every thoughtful nuance.

Finally, an author who has the talent, guts and vocabulary to tell this tale with plausibility. It will wake you up rather than put you to sleep.

Compelling

The novel is well known and honored, I won't bother to recap it. It is not exactly uplifting stuff, but it is compelling and brilliantly evoked. The reader is top-notch. So why not five stars? It's just something about the bleakness of it all that makes you keep your distance a bit -- you don't volunteer to take the dog for a walk just so you can listen some more. But it is the last word on apocalyptic fiction and definitley worth your time.