The Road

By: Cormac McCarthy

Narrated by: Tom Stechschulte

Length: 6 hrs and 39 mins

Publisher's summary

Pulitzer Prize, Fiction, 2007

America is a barren landscape of smoldering ashes, devoid of life except for those people still struggling to scratch out some type of existence. Amidst this destruction, a father and his young son walk, always toward the coast, but with no real understanding that circumstances will improve once they arrive. Still, they persevere, and their relationship comes to represent goodness in a world of utter devastation.

Bleak but brilliant, with glimmers of hope and humor, The Road is a stunning allegory and perhaps Cormac McCarthy's finest novel to date. This remarkable departure from his previous works has been hailed by Kirkus Reviews as a "novel of horrific beauty, where death is the only truth".

McCarthy, a New York Times best-selling author, is a past recipient of the National Book Award and National Book Critics Circle Award. He is widely considered one of America's greatest writers.

Check out more selections from Oprah's Book Club.

©2006 M-71, Ltd. (P)2006 Recorded Books LLC

Critic reviews

"McCarthy's prose retains its ability to seduce...and there are nods to the gentler aspects of the human spirit." (The New Yorker)
"One of McCarthy's best novels, probably his most moving and perhaps his most personal...Every moment of The Road is rich with dilemmas that are as shattering as they are unspoken...McCarthy is so accomplished that the reader senses the mysterious and intuitive changes between father and son that can't be articulated, let alone dramatized...Both lyric and savage, both desperate and transcendent, although transcendence is singed around the edges...Tag McCarthy one of the four or five great American novelists of his generation." (Los Angeles Times Book Review)

What was I supposed to get from this?

I really don't understand what I was supposed to get from this. It felt like a writing exercise to see if you could create a whole story with nothing but setting. The setting was indeed infinitely believable and viscerally relateable.

BUT.

There was no background. No questions asked about nature or humanity. There were only 2 real characters, neither of which had names. There was no action, no plot, and almost no character development. In fact, the author seemed allergic to anything interesting. About 1/2 dozen times throughout the entire book, something of interest would start to happen. And in absolutely no time flat, the scenario was over and we were back to the trudging setting and starvation. It would all feel quite bleak if I weren't left so bored by the monotony.

The dialog structure was annoying and repetitive. Boy: 'Dad, I have a question unrelated to anything so that you can tell the reader what you want to say.' Dad: 'Here's what I want the reader to know.' Boy: 'That's what you want the reader to know?' Dad: 'That's what I want the reader to know.' Seriously, this was a large percentage of the dialog.

Props to the narrator. This book was all about tone and his was perfect in every way.

Disappointed but Not Surprised

When I saw this book reviewed on Oprah, and her interview with the author, I was intrigued enough to want to read it. Until I got it on Audible, however, I just didn't have time.

Now I've listened to it, and even though the narrator is absolutely fantastic and the story relatively moving, I honestly felt like the author spent more time droning on and on using adjectives and adverbs which just didn't fit the nouns and verbs they were modifying.

To make things worse, McCarthy apparently doesn't feel the need to name his main characters, which is fine, I suppose, though I am more likely to care about a character that I can name, rather than "the man" or "the boy" over and over ad nauseam. Add to that the fact that he NEVER once distinguishes between "the man" = main character, and "the man" = various random encounter whilst on the road, and we have momentary contextual confusion as our brains try to sort out just which "the man" is doing or saying a thing. Even when there is no pointless third person, there are moments when the pronoun "he" is used without clarification of whether "he" is the man or the boy.

This was my first experience with Oprah's book list, and I have to say I'm disappointed, but not surprised. McCarthy has written a novel swallowed up by the "intellectual elite", which is to say he's an emperor in new clothes, and if we can't see them, we must be silly fools, though I'd be surprised if many of the people who laud this book really truly cared about it at all beyond earning the right to say "Why, yes, I read that masterpiece!".

Summary: Great narration. Decent character development. Vivid, though occasionally obscure descriptions. Gruesome, ghastly, and occasionally depressing - which, considering the setting, fit very well. Once you get past the author patting himself on the back for having a huge vocabulary (aka access to a thesaurus) it becomes easy to get lost in this sad world with these two lonesome drifters.

Very slow

The performance on this audiobook was truly great, but the story itself is very slow and meandering. Fortunately, it was a quick listen because it was a struggle to keep my attention.

Incredible and heartbreaking

The Road is more than an amazing account of the horrors and hardships that a father and son have to work through to survive in a post-apocalyptic wasteland. It speaks about fatherhood and a love so strong that it makes you wonder if you would have the fortitude to do what the man does for his son. It speaks about a naive purity and an experienced cynicism and how, to survive, you need both. Tom Stechschulte's narration should be the gold standard that all others are measured against. Simply superb. True, the story is intense, but you have to realize it is Cormac McCarthy's take on a desolate hellscape with humankind pushed close to extinction. The result is an engrossing yet disturbingly bleak tale that somehow manages to allow the faintest glimmer of hope.

Nihilistic

Very interesting. This book falls in line with I Am Legend by Richard Matheson and other apocalyptic stories. As a listener or reader you are thrown into the story which is a short timeline of events of the two main characters. For the most part they are the only two characters. I enjoyed the provocative story elements and attention to detail. Yes it's bleak but you know that already. If you want a love story or some milquetoast novel there are plenty to choose from. This is a dark in your face piece of humanity told from a first person perspective and I certainly don't regret having listened to it. I actually wish that it could have gone on for twice the length. Stephen King's apocalyptic drivel goes on and on until you wish you were dead, but Cormac McCarthy paints his story on a canvas that even though its dark and bleak you still admire every thoughtful nuance.

Finally, an author who has the talent, guts and vocabulary to tell this tale with plausibility. It will wake you up rather than put you to sleep.

Compelling

The novel is well known and honored, I won't bother to recap it. It is not exactly uplifting stuff, but it is compelling and brilliantly evoked. The reader is top-notch. So why not five stars? It's just something about the bleakness of it all that makes you keep your distance a bit -- you don't volunteer to take the dog for a walk just so you can listen some more. But it is the last word on apocalyptic fiction and definitley worth your time.

So dark

I have not been able to stop thinking about this book since I finished it. So dark. If you love post-apocalyptic drama, this is a very solid, haunting take on nuclear winter. Other reviews seem to expect it to be the kind of book that entertains and take you on a structured experience. It's not. It's the kind of literature that forces you to find yourself in the bleak landscape and hopeless characters. I just enjoyed it immensely... and by enjoyed I mean it is painful to read in a good way.

Haunting

As a Southerner the locations of this book were spooky as I was listening to it I was driving through some of the areas being talked about. A really great and haunting book. You long to know what happened but also know that it is not the point and any of a thousand things could have happened to bring the characters to this point. It also makes clear how thin the line is between our civilization and barbarism.

I enjoyed this reading very much.

The story is at first sad without any hope that made me curious to the direction the book would take. In the end was a loving book of hope and longing outlining the relationship and dedication between a father and his son in even the most deparate of situations. It was a very plausible description I could easily visualize and feel deeply for. I recommend this book to anyone interested in a sad heartfelt insight into what family means or what it is to be human.

If only my heart was stone

What a bleak, awful, hopeful, and beautiful book is Cormac McCarthy's The Road (2006). It takes the post-apocalypse genre and pares it to the core, burning away almost all flora and fauna from the world, obscuring with ash earth and sky, sun and moon, making each day darker and colder than the last, and setting in that "dead to the root" wasteland a father and his young son to travel "the road" for days "uncounted and uncalendared" through mountain passes and ghost cities and past derelict houses and charred forests south to the coast. A handful of people yet exist in this world: bands of cannibal savages and, possibly, some "good guys" who manage to survive without eating people.

The descriptions of the landscape are spare, apocalyptic, and vivid, like when the father and son walk past cars once caught in a conflagration, "The incinerate corpses shrunk to the size of a child and propped on the bare springs of the seats. Ten thousand dreams ensepulchred within their crozzled hearts." The ubiquitous ash. The fallen husks of dead trees and the weeds falling to dust. The bones of animals, birds, and people. The colorful memories that are dangerous to recall and the awful nightmares that cannot be recounted aloud.

The journey of the unnamed father and son through the "shoals of ash" is mesmerizing. The father believes the son to be a kind of angel or son of God, though that may be the wishful and hallucinatory effect of starvation and illness. "He knew only that the child was his warrant." The relationship between the father and his son is almost unbearably poignant. The father fears and hopes so much for his precious son in such an extinct world. The son is dependent upon his father for life and companionship and learns vital things from him and in turn guides his father with his pure moral heart. They interact with honesty and love, "each the other's world entire." From the start of the book the father is wracked by a blood-spraying cough, and he wastes and weakens as the journey proceeds, and yet he always finds the strength to lead his son down the road. As he thinks at one point: "No lists of things to be done. The day providential to itself. The hour. There is no later. This is later. All things of grace and beauty such that one holds them to one's heart have a common provenance in pain. Their birth in grief and ashes. So, he whispered to the sleeping boy, I have you."

The moments when the son forces his father to partake in some miraculous treat like a can of coke are moving. The scenes when the father tries to prevent his son from seeing some horrible sight, like a headless baby roasted on a spit, because "the things you put into your head are there forever," are harrowing. The moments when the son is upset and the father tries to reassure him and make him talk are powerful. The scenes where the father meticulously searches a house or boat for salvage are suspenseful: he could unveil a hell (a cellar full of naked people waiting to be eaten) or a "tiny paradise" (a storeroom full of stacks cans of food waiting to be eaten).

The novel is dark, yet it expresses desperate love and hope: the bond between parent and child, the need to do what is necessary without complaint, the wonder of doing good without context or reward, and the strange beauty amid horror: "Human bodies. Sprawled in every attitude. Dried and shrunken in their rotted clothes. The small wad of burning paper drew down to a wisp of flame and then died out leaving a faint pattern for just a moment in the incandescence like the shape of a flower, a molten rose. Then all was dark again.”

McCarthy's book stands apart from other post-apocalypse novels in its severity, its beauty, its darkness, its isolated father-son relationship (most other genre works depict a community maintaining and or rebuilding some form of civilization), its lack of explanation (most other genre works explain their holocausts as nuclear and or viral) and its idiosyncratic style. McCarthy writes elliptical, biblical, poetic prose marked by short sentences without verbs and grounded with simple words and afire with unusual ones (like "gryke," "illucid," "entabled," and "discalced") and illuminated by unexpected similes, such that any "like" may be a lamppost for epiphany, whether ironic ("They wandered through the rooms like skeptical house buyers") or sacred ("All of this like some ancient anointing. So be it. Evoke the forms. Where you've nothing else construct ceremonies out of the air and breathe upon them"). And the dialogue is laconic, repetitive, and precise, because accurate communication is a matter of life or death and because anything the father and son say may be their last words.

We're going to be okay, aren't we Papa?
Yes. We are.
And nothing bad is going to happen to us.
That's right.
Because we're carrying the fire.
Yes. Because we're carrying the fire.

If there is a flaw in the novel, it may be that McCarthy doesn't seem to think much of women. The father and son have been abandoned by their wife/mother, who despaired and committed suicide: “I will not. I cannot.” And the man's memories of her are somehow unconvincing. This is a masculine book. But the man acts both father and mother for his son with great courage, resourcefulness, and tenderness.

Tom Stechschulte's reading of the novel is masterful: reading The Road as a book moved me, but listening to the audiobook made me cry.

I recommend The Road to parents or to people who want to imagine being parents, to people who like the post-apocalypse genre and condensed epic novels, to people who like style as much as story, and, of course, to fans of McCarthy.