Book Review: The Road

Here’s the story in a nutshell: a father and son are wandering through a burned-out America some years after an unspecified global cataclysm.  The sun is eternally shrouded in clouds and ash, nothing is growing anymore, and they’re just trying to reach the Atlantic coast before heading south to hopefully find... something better, maybe warmer.


OK, OK, I get it, I get the story, its message, its style.  It’s a deliberately sparse canvas on which McCarthy has painted his masterpiece.  Here’s the message: Parents care for their children and keep them safe.  Children, through their innocence and trust, keep their parents true to their principles.  “Were the good guys.  We dont eat people.  Were carrying the fire.” [sic, note the lack of punctuation; will be discussed momentarily]  Parents sometimes have to fake it when they really don’t have a clue.  In the end, the most a dying parent can hope for is to have a child step into the world and make the right choices, to recognize and team up with “the good guys,” and to keep moving in some generally right direction.  There, that’s the message of The Road, and you didn’t have to suffer through 287 pages of bleak to read it.  Worth a short story?  Sure, if done well.  It is a good message after all, and it is cleverly woven into the story.  A full-length novel this dull?  No way.

Some other things bothering me about The Road: 

• What’s with the lack of punctuation?  Did the apostrophe key on McCarthy’s keyboard rot off in his future wasteland?  Did Reavers steal his double-quote key and carry it away back to Joss Whedon’s computer?
• They’re hauling all their stuff in a shopping cart.  Ever try to push a loaded one over anything but smooth grocery store floors?  You put a keg in one and try to get it across a brick dorm walkway while being pursued by campus cops sometime, and now tell me that you’d use one of these rattletraps to haul your beany-weenies while being pursued by cannibals.  Nuh-huh.  Hasn’t McCarthy (or an editor at Random House) ever heard about the Mormon handcart settlers?  BIG wheels, they roll over rough ground better.  While running from Indians, which is a lot more scary than running from the gimpy half-starved cannibals on The Road.
• So just exactly how did the man realize the magic bunker full of goodies was under his feet?  I’ve read and re-read that passage, and it doesn’t work.  And, having camouflaged the hatch, why didn’t they stay there for a couple of weeks fattening up before continuing on?  “No, let’s leave these dry bunks in a secure hidden shelter full of food and cool stuff to go hang out in the rain in some woods next tree over from a bunch of hungry-ass cannibals.”  Um, yeah.
• These two are on the run from some genuine violent nutballs.  So at every opportunity they seem to light a fire, saunter down the middle of the street, shoot off flares, and generally be conspicuous.  Just sort of blows the whole “suspension of disbelief” on which fiction depends.  Well, good fiction anyway.

Finally, look at the glowing newspaper review snippets plastered over the flypages: New York Times, Boston Globe, L.A. Times, Rocky Mountain News (R.I.P.).  Gushing love from dying legacy media, for a book about an all-but-dead world.  Like the ghosts in J.K. Rowling’s world, maybe the literary critics at these print zombies relish the flavor of rot, because it’s all they can still almost taste, it’s the only thing left to them. 

Bottom line: this is crap.  Put it down and walk away.