The Road
by Cormac McCarthy
Summary
A man and his young son push a shopping trolley south along a road through an America destroyed by an event the novel never names. Ash covers everything, the sun is not visible, nothing grows, and the remaining humans have divided into those who scavenge and those who have started eating people.
They are heading for the coast without any real belief that the coast will be better. The boy was born after the catastrophe and has no memory of the world before it. The man is dying, and is teaching the boy the only thing that seems worth teaching, which is that they are the ones carrying the fire.
McCarthy strips his prose almost to nothing here: no quotation marks, no chapter breaks, short paragraphs, a vocabulary reduced to what is left. Almost all the dialogue is the boy asking short questions and the man answering them, and the tenderness between them is the only warmth in the book, which is what makes it almost unbearable.
There are moments of relief and they are calibrated exactly. A hidden bunker full of tinned food and clean blankets is, for thirty pages, the most luxurious thing in any novel. Then they have to leave it, because staying anywhere is how you get found.
It is short and can be read in a day, and There is one scene in a cellar that readers commonly cite as the most frightening thing they have encountered in fiction.
Best for readers who want a book about love reduced to its irreducible core, and who can take a great deal of dread on the way.
Historical Context & Significance
The Road won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, describing a father and son, each the other's world entire, sustained by love as they journey through a devastated landscape.
Cormac McCarthy had been publishing for more than forty years, admired chiefly for Blood Meridian and the Border Trilogy and read by a relatively small audience, when this and the film of No Country for Old Men arrived within about a year of each other and made him famous. Oprah Winfrey selected The Road for her book club, which produced his first television interview at seventy three.
He dedicated the novel to his young son John, and has said the initial image came to him in a hotel room in El Paso while travelling with him. McCarthy died in 2023.