The Road by Cormac McCarthy

This searing, post-apocalyptic novel reads like slow, sad song. From the staccato sentences and philosophical ruminations to the bleak and unflinching descriptions, everything has a quietening effect on the soul. In reading it, I felt like I was responding to the command, 'Be still and know that this is The Road.'

The Road is the story of a man and his son on a journey of hope that really holds no hope. They are among a handful of destitute survivors in a literally ashen and barren world. Majority of the survivors have become cannibals, capturing and maintaining human livestock in the full glare of the lack that has engulfed them all. Furnished with a revolver that has only two bullets and a shopping cart containing all their belongings, the man and his son (my guess is less than 10 years old, probably eight) must make their way south, to the ocean. The sun hides behind a Along the way, they make some exciting discoveries that are sure to make any cynic fall on his knees and praise the Good Lord.

McCarthy writes with grace and wisdom. His prose is replete with nuggety quips of insights, and reading it feels like watching a man pick up a sheet of steel, and with his bare hands, bend and beat it to shape. It's hard to think that language can be that malleable. But it certainly is.

What stood out more than anything for me is the deep love and intimacy between the characters. Without describing expressions and emotions, McCarthy is still able to render the human complexity that could exist both within a man and between him and his son. Only a genius could pull something off like this, something so...ingenious. Strictly from dialogue and action, no adjectives, no embellishments, we see this moving portrait of a family of two and the profound love and dedication a man has for his little son, even in a world like the one they live in. At one point, the man says to his son in extremely plain terms that he will kill anyone that touches him because that is the task God has given him.

On the final page, we find McCarthy's answer to everything, his solution to the previous 300+ pages of gloom and despair. A three-lettered word.

I've looked up some of McCarthy's other works, and the man is in an entire class all his own. His work is incredibly sophisticated, and now I can see why Harold Bloom would include him among one of the four greatest living American writers today. For those who don't know, the movie No Country For Old Men is based on his novel of the same name.