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The Road
by Cormac McCarthy


8.4

based on 31 reviews
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based on 178 votes
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No Country For Old Men

The author's follow-up to "No Country for Old Men" is set in a bleak, post-apocalyptic world.

Knopf, 256 pages
09/26/2006
$24.00

ISBN: 0307265439

Fiction
General Literature & Fiction

NOTES:
Winner of the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

All reviews are classified as one of five grades: Outstanding (4 points), Favorable (3), Mixed (2), Unfavorable (1) and Terrible (0). To calculate the Metascore, we divide total points achieved by the total points possible (i.e., 4 x the number of reviews), with the resulting percentage (multiplied by 100) being the Metascore. Learn more...

Chicago Tribune Alan Cheuse

A postatomic apocalypse novel as we've never seen one before, a black book of wondrous paragraphs that reads as though Samuel Beckett had dared himself to outdo Harlan Ellison.

Los Angeles Times Steve Erickson

The book wrenches our nightmares into a gray light where they don't vanish but become more vivid.

The Globe And Mail [Toronto] Michael Helm

It's the darkest novel you are likely ever to read...The redeeming note here is in the writing. As in all the best fiction, in McCarthy's work, language is not a tool; it's an element. The novel can't escape a saving irony: that the end of this unsigned world has the maker's mark on every page.

Entertainment Weekly Jennifer Reese

The extraordinarily lovely and sad final pages of this masterpiece embrace both terrible possibilities.

Booklist Keir Graff

Hypnotic and haunting, relentlessly dark, this is a novel to read in late-night solitude.

Publishers Weekly

A haunting and grim novel about civilization's slow death after the power goes out. [24 July 2006, p.32]

Library Journal Stephen Morrow

He uses metaphors the way some writers use punctuation, sprinkling them about with an artist's eye, showing us that literature from the heart still exists. [1 Sept 2006, p.137]

Slate Jennifer Egan

With only the corpse of a natural world to grapple with, McCarthy's father and son exist in a realm rarely seen in the ur-masculine literary tradition: the domestic. And from this unlikely vantage McCarthy makes a big, shockingly successful grab at the universal.

Chicago Sun-Times Jon Barron

Primal, violent, achingly poetic and flush with a sense of landscape...The setup may be simple, but the writing throughout is magnificent.

PopMatters Chris Barsanti

The book is not only an instant classic of its type, it’s pretty close to being the novel of the year.

The New York Times Janet Maslin

The Road would be pure misery if not for its stunning, savage beauty....[It] offers nothing in the way of escape or comfort. But its fearless wisdom is more indelible than reassurance could ever be.

San Francisco Chronicle David Hellman

Stunning and heart-wrenching...A remarkable and unforgettable novel.

The Independent Ed Caesar

For all its grim imaginings, The Road's divine language carries its two entwined souls above the darkness. McCarthy continues to carry the fire.

The Guardian Alan Warner

It makes the novels of the contemporary Savants seem infantile and horribly over-rated. Beauty and goodness are here aplenty and we should think about them.

The Guardian Alan Warner

It makes the novels of the contemporary Savants seem infantile and horribly over-rated. Beauty and goodness are here aplenty and we should think about them.

Daily Telegraph Niall Griffiths

One of the saddest, most desolate, most horrifying books I've read in years...It's so good that it will devour you, in parts. It is incandescent.

The Independent Clive Sinclair

Some connective tissue, some deep sympathy, makes them human and knowable to us, causes us to care almost beyond bearing about their fates, and so makes us read on compulsively for fear of what might happen to them. And us.

USA Today Dierdre Donahue

Many authors have imagined a post-nuclear world. McCarthy is particularly well-suited to the task because he writes so beautifully and convincingly about violence, despair and men in desperate situations.

Village Voice Mark Holcomb

Sci-fi divination is new for him, though, and the freshness he brings to this end-of-the-world narrative is quite stunning: It may be the saddest, most haunting book he's ever written, or that you'll ever read.

Washington Post Ron Charles

But even with its flaws, there's just no getting around it: The Road is a frightening, profound tale that drags us into places we don't want to go, forces us to think about questions we don't want to ask...Ultimately, my cynicism was overwhelmed by the visceral power of McCarthy's prose and the simple beauty of this hero's love for his son.

Sydney Morning Herald Mark Mordue

McCarthy maintains the pace by keeping each scene barely more than a paragraph long. This accentuates The Road's impressionistic power, adding to its rhythm, as if the book were not composed of sections but stanzas in a poem, the metaphysical footsteps of his characters, beat by beat in a terrible dream.

The Economist

The opening's pretentious intonations give way to passages that are wrenchingly elegiac.

The Onion A.V. Club Noel Murray

The Road is tonally spot-on, moving from one terse passage to the next, and continually horrifying readers just when the story seems to be heading to a more hopeful place.

The Observer Adam Mars-Jones

Part of the achievement of The Road is its poetic description of landscapes from which the possibility of poetry would seem to have been stripped, along with their ability to support life.

LA Weekly Michelle Huneven

A compulsive read, and I was often deep in its thrall — that’s my whorish heart.

The New York Times Book Review William Kennedy

The Road is the most readable of his works, and consistently brilliant in its imagining of the posthumous condition of nature and civilization.

Boston Globe Gail Caldwell

Beyond the inherent technical difficulties of concocting the unthinkable, McCarthy has rendered a greater and more subtle story that makes The Road riveting.

Christian Science Monitor Yvonne Zipp

The love between the father and the son is one of the most profound relationships McCarthy has ever written, and the strength of it helps raise the novel - despite considerable gore - above nihilistic horror.

New York Observer Adam Begley

What kept me reading was neither the boy’s precious goodness nor the dark allure of total annihilation—it was Mr. McCarthy’s writing, the sheer beauty of the language. [9 Oct 2006]

Houston Chronicle Earl L. Dachslager

Presumably the reason for all this secretiveness is to lend the story an air of mystery, to turn it into a parable of the moral and physical degeneration of our time. But for a parable to succeed, it needs to have some clear point or message. The Road has neither, other than to say that after an earth-destroying event, things will go hard for the survivors.

The New Yorker

Even by McCarthy’s standards, the horrors here - an infant "headless and gutted and blackening on the spit" - are extreme, and, deprived of historical context, his brutality can seem willful. But McCarthy’s prose retains its ability to seduce.

The average user rating for this book is 8.4 (out of 10) based on 178 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.

Sarah M. gave it a2:
This book stunk! At the time I was reading it, I never knew and was always hoping on the next page McCarthy would "reminisce" and let me know why the world was in such devestation, how it all began... The ending was cut short.... I didn't think the whole book would be "I'm cold, should we go in? okay, you never talk, blah, blah, blah, won't read one of his books again

Bill L. gave it a3:
This is an example of the dumbing down of our society. Best read and loved by the downtrodden and negative thinkers, typical of the leftovers of the 1960's and 70's.

Tom D. gave it a9:
I didnt read it, i listened to it on a 600 mile trip. It was riviting, the gray tone descriptions as apposed to the lush green farm land glued us to the story and at time, we actually had to stop the cd player and catch our breaths. Im tring to read or listen to all the Pulitizers and this one met all expectations. I am so thankful to be living our easy lifestyle.

Steve C. gave it a4:
A depressing book, really shocked at all the positive reviews by the critics, Lucifer's Hammer was a MUCH better book about the same subject. There just wasn't much in the book that was interesting or worth reading, just non-stop downers.

[Anonymous] gave it a10:
Emotionally raw is where McCarthy left me. It doesn't get better than this.

Chris B. gave it a4:
This book is well written, and it does have a message. Although 90% of it reads like some sort of a survival manual. Overwhelming amount of things described with a lot of detail. This may be the book to have in the world after the final disaster. Characters are well portrayed especially the boy. Read it if you want to get deeply depressed though. It is definitely a good work but the one that takes you way down.

CHRIS J. gave it a5:
the book just explained too much on the setting its 150 pages in and still talking about the gray snow and cold weather i already know the conditions characters arent elaborated enough and it is confusing at times when the story shifts from 3rd person to 1st and back to 3rd

The Road by Cormac McCarthy

The Road
by Cormac McCarthy