Is The Road McCarthy’s best novel yet?
A father and son push a shopping cart along a broken concrete highway. The sky and landscape are gray and desolate. Nuclear holocaust? Armageddon? We can assume but are never told. Father remembers what it was like before. The son has known only this world of ash and danger and survival. What happened to the father’s wife and son’s mother? We think we know but even that is left to the imagination.
As father and son head for the coast – we don’t know why – they carry scavenged food, anything they can find for warmth, and a handgun. The rule is there must always be two bullets left. We find out why when they almost fall into a trap at what seems to be a deserted farmhouse.
Bleak. Despairing. Sparse. And yet The Road is a story of love and faith. The bond between father and son is inspiring and offers glimmers of hope in the midst of the gray tones.
This is a road and journey I highly recommend you take.
I read The Road before Oprah (along with the people who made the movie No Country for Old Men) took Cormac McCarthy mainstream. But not by much. I must confess in my years of reading and spending time in the book publishing industry, I somehow missed McCarthy as a brutal, unrelenting force in American fiction. Some would argue that he is the greatest living American novelist and this is his greatest novel.
One warning on McCarthy’s style. As mentioned, his writing is sparse. It took me a little while to get used to the fact that he doesn’t use quotation marks in his dialog, and he doesn’t care much for commas either. I think there is a little something Ernest Hemingway in his tone and style.
After The Road, I did go back and read a number of his other works, including Blood Meridian, which I thought was the best of his novels I read. It is a true classic. The portrait he draws of the Devil in human flesh in the last scene is as terrifying as anything you read from Dante – but that’s a different road to cover at a later time.
