Art is different from entertainment because art changes you, and this book affected me more deeply than any piece of art I've ever encountered. Not that I think it's perfect -- I see many flaws. But they don't matter. It accomplished its mission. Cormac McCarthy has written the definitive literary depiction of the power of love. Although they were cold, dirty, starving, frightened, I was surprised to find myself at one point envying them, for they were nurtured from within by the power of love. Especially the father, as it's the nature of the parent-child relationship that the parent gives and the child receives. CM is saying, that when all hope is gone, love remains. And he's done it so convincingly that during the days I was reading this book, when I had occasion to throw away some food, I found myself thinking "I wish I could give it to them." In some part of my mind, I felt convinced that these people really existed. That was how completely I entered into their world. Caution: spoilers ahead!! I have never cried so hard at any death in a movie or book. It started with the line: "when he lay down he knew that he could go no further and that this was the place where he would die. The boy sat watching him, his eyes welling. Oh Papa, he said." I'm crying for the loss to the man, who showed so much courage, self-denial, sheer grit, and boundless love. We want to see that kind of all-out effort succeed and be rewarded, but life isn't like that. We know the horror the man must feel in leaving his son alone in that world, with nothing but a half a tin of peaches to sustain him. In his final gesture of love, the man declines the peaches and tells his son to save them for him -- for tomorrow, when he knows he'll be gone. I'm crying for the loss to the skinny, starving boy, who has lost his smart, determined, vigilant and tender father -- the only thing standing between him and a horrific future as a catamite or cannibal's dinner. And I'm crying for the loss to myself of the most inspiring character in the fiction world: a man with the strength to keep going, keep walking, keep searching, when almost all others have given up (like his wife) or given in to their basest instincts (the roadagents). "The Road" left me knowing that love is all that matters, and determined to live my life out of that knowledge. I want to give up living from my mind and start living from my heart. Perhaps I will adopt a child. The story is more powerful than a thousand sermons. Cormac McCarthy strips away all the superfluous stuff that has nothing to do with love. We don't know whether the man preferred to go out for sushi or steak, jazz music or country. Was he a lawyer, salesman or mechanic? None of that is essential to who he is. We don't need him to crack jokes or say profound things. All we know of him is what he does, and that's plenty. We see him putting his son's welfare first, over and over again. When they are hiding from the cannibals, he considers running to draw them away from the boy. That he himself will end up in that basement doesn't even figure in his decision not to do it -- only that he doesn't think it will work. His own pain weighs nothing when compared to his motivation to save the boy. As for those who fault the man for not helping strangers -- I don't agree. Any morsel of food given to strangers is taken from the mouth of his son, or lessens his own chance to stay alive long enough to get his son south. He had to choose and he chose his son. So the story had a deep emotional impact on me. But in addition, it is a story of ideas. How low can man go? What darkness beats in the heart of men, only thinly veiled by our (currently) abundant society? At what point is life no longer worth living? At what point should the strong drive for self-preservation be ignored, if it means committing atrocities on others? And lastly, to what extent am I taking life's current luxuries and comforts for granted? I'm sure many a reader of "The Road" has collapsed into bed after a night of reading and felt immense gratitude for their cozy bedroom, their clean sheets, their fridge and a tasty midnight snack. Things that troubled me about the story: I wanted them to stay longer at the bunker. At least to make full use of those provisions and take the time to fatten up and rest before heading on. They could've hauled a load of groceries off a mile or two and pigged out for a few weeks before coming back for more. The more weight they put on, the less crucial it would be to find fresh provisions when they finally did leave. I wanted to see him make a major effort to find a way to disguise the trap-door to the bunker. It had gone undiscovered for almost ten years, if it was well hidden perhaps it could go undiscovered for at least a few more months. Setting off the flare gun was irresponsible. They wasted a flare and announced their position, perhaps drawing the thief. But those are minor quibbles. After finishing "The Road," I felt profoundly blessed, and cleansed from within from the tears shed. I knew I was in the presence of greatness. Cormac McCarthy has given mankind an immense gift, for which I paid only $7.99. Thank for Cormac McCarthy.

Just finished Cormac McCarthy's "The Road" a haunting tale of survival in a post-apocalyptic world. The story follows a father and his young son as they navigate a landscape ravaged by an unspecified catastrophe with a hope that something better awaits. McCarthy's sparse writing technique is prose is powerful. It captures the bleakness of the world and the starkness of the character's reality. Despite the despair and darkness, the novel is filled with moments oftenderness, goodness, and love, showcasing the resilience of the human spirit and making the novel impactful.  It is a testimony to the author's skill that he can create a grim world with such beauty and grace. I will admit it is not a novel / genre I would typically read, but I enjoyed this selection from my fraternity"s book club because it identified the ability to find goodness in the midst of our trials and storms. Check it out!

Cormac McCarthy presents bleak as no other writer can. While I was reading The Road, several times I thought that I’ll never again believe a writer who uses the word “hopeless” to describe the plight of their character. In The Road, there is nothing but hopelessness. Almost. Which leads to where I struggled with this novel. I’m giving it 5 stars, though it deserves at least 6 even though I think it has a few flaws. And even with 6 stars, I strongly suspect he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize not so much for this work as much as for his body of work. If you can stomach the astounding violence in Blood Meriden, it is the far better book of the two. On the off chance, you don’t already know the details of the plot, this is your spoiler warning. I have long avoided reading The Road though friends have encouraged me to. I only read it after reading McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. I’ve long avoided the novel because the premise is that they are traveling down a road in a hostile, post-apocalypse setting. One of the first things you learn as a combat soldier is you never take the road. In the military, these are called “natural lines of drift.” It’s a clever way to say “the route people will take”. If you have ever walked across fields that cows frequent, you know what I mean. Cows find the easiest path and tread it over and over. If you want to kill a cow, just wait along one of those paths. Roads for humans are the same. If you want to kill a human, just wait along a road. This world of McCarthy’s is populated with “bad guys” who are almost invariably cannibals. This is because there is simply no food left, no living thing other than the last scraps of humanity preying on each other. They are often also on the road or setting up ambushes along it. Several times during the story, the man, and the boy avoid dying in such encounters. Too many times to my thinking. So, if you take the road literally, the entire premise seems flaky. But the road is needed as a literary device: The two main characters have to start somewhere and end somewhere else. It is both physical and metaphorical. So they travel a road for hundreds and hundreds of miles, miraculously, without getting hurt. I was so taken with McCarthy’s writing after Blood Meridian, I decided to read The Road in spite of my doubts about their travels on this road of theirs. So getting into the book, and starting down the road, the next issue I had was that they were pushing a shopping cart full of their meager belongings. You may see homeless people pushing shopping carts under bridges or down a sidewalk. You don’t see people pushing shopping carts hundreds of miles over roads after a decade of neglect and (apparently) nuclear blasts. To his credit, McCarthy had his character’s wear out one and often had to dig a path through sand or snow to keep the cart going. Doable? Maybe…for a while. But the doable part had another issue. It takes a lot of water and a lot of calories to keep pushing such a cart. The Road‘s landscape — world — is depressingly bleak and gray; even the snow falls gray. Rivers are described as ugly sludge. For much of the book, I wondered where they were getting water clean enough to drink. Though they stumbled across a few forgotten caches of food and water from time to time, not until the last few pages did we actually see them getting water out of a creek, straining it to clean it. It was a weak throw to acknowledging how they were getting their water. But he did not share it until the end of the book because it mitigates the desolate, rotted Earth images of the earlier portion of the book. Maybe the streams are not quite so dirty. Another problem I had with the book was how they were getting enough calories to keep their strenuous trek going (in freezing weather, no less). I’ve lived outside doing hard work for weeks at a time. You burn 3K calories a day…easily. That is a lot of food. When the book starts, there is no explanation of how they came to have a cart full of supplies. No matter. But as they deplete them through the story, they invariably stumbled upon more food as they were about to starve to death. And it was food the rest of humanity had missed while they were starving to death, seemingly over five or ten years. Yet the man and the boy found it, which was all too convenient. I also struggled with what event would kill all life on Earth other than humans? I don’t doubt there could be a nuclear exchange, or a devastating meteorite strike, or some other terrible event. But what puzzled me was that there is no other life. Nothing. There were no rats, flys, crickets or cockroaches… These are forms of life that are amazingly resilient. But somehow there are humans wandering about but none of these little critters. Not a lot of humans, but enough that we run into one or two or a dirty gaggle once every twenty or thirty pages. But not a mouse in sight. Seemed odd. And after hundreds of pages and hundreds of miles on the road, and after most of the people they came across were cannibals that wanted them for dinner, at the end, after the man dies, and the boy sits beside him for three days on the verge of dying, who walks up? A well-armed father with a good (Christian?) wife and their two children who are about the same age as the boy. The man has delivered his son into the hands of someone who will care for him and raise him in a safe environment. Not are these just playmates, but there is potential to propagate and start humanity anew. There is hope. Of course, there is no food and the Earth is incapable of growing anything. There are no animals, no living plants, nothing. Are we left to believe that the boy has been saved? Or will he live in misery and despair until one way or the other, he also falls? This, in turn, leads to the novel’s strengths. Beyond the extraordinary writing and the stunningly bleak vision, beyond the smart way McCarthy never feels the need to explain why or how it all happened, he sets up unrelenting tension. Arguably the core story is that the man — the father — does not have the courage to kill his son and then himself to escape their hell. Where is the wife? The boy’s mother? She killed herself, we discover, before the story opened. And when the story opens, the man has a pistol with — you guessed it — two bullets. So we know from the start he has not yet found the courage to kill them both, and not long after we start our trip down the road, the man has to use one bullet. With only a single bullet left, his dilemma is even more profound: Should he use it to kill the boy in his sleep? Get it over with? If so, how would he kill himself? He could do it, but he no longer would have such a simple and easy means as a self-inflicted shot to the head after killing his son. In short, he can’t bring himself to kill his child, the child he loves so dearly, the child that trusts him so totally, which is shown over and over through the story in deeply emotional, compelling ways. Thus the tension mounts as we see the man, coughing his lungs out, sick and wounded, starving, limping toward his own death. We are left wondering until the end if he has the guts to kill his child and save him from what will befall him when taken by the cannibals. In the end, though McCarthy could horrify us, the man could not kill the child, his child, so he created an ending that (to this reader) was completely out of step with the rest of his dark vision. All said, the book is brilliant and I highly recommend it. The writing is uniquely McCarthy’s and the vision, the tension and the violence are also something few (if any) writer can match. I urge you to read The Road. McCarthy is a literary treasure and his works – gut wrenching though they are – should be experienced because they are so unlike the tediously similar books that frequent the bestseller lists. Just don’t think it is going to be a fun trip down the road.