The Road

The Road is Cormac McCarthy's 2006 post-apocalyptic novel, the Pulitzer Prize winner and one of the great American novels of the twenty-first century. The premise is sparser than McCarthy's earlier work and the prose is correspondingly stripped: an unnamed father and his unnamed son walk south through a burned-out America years after an unexplained catastrophe has killed the sun, the plants, and most of humanity. They are heading for the coast. Neither knows why; both suspect it does not matter.

McCarthy's late-career prose is the major innovation of the novel and the reason it lands as something more than apocalyptic fiction. The minimal punctuation (no quotation marks, no apostrophes in contractions, paragraphs that move between voices without speaker tags) creates a prose surface that pulls the reader into the same slow patient walking the characters are doing. The cannibal-army sequence in the middle quarter remains one of the most harrowing passages in modern American literature. The father-son dialogue is some of the most carefully observed parenting prose any major novelist has written.

Recommended as required McCarthy reading, as the right starting point for readers who have not read his earlier work, and as one of the canonical post-apocalyptic novels of the contemporary era (Russell Hoban's Riddley Walker is the earlier cousin; Emily St. John Mandel's Station Eleven is the gentler successor). The 2009 John Hillcoat film and Tom Hanks-narrated audiobook are both worth attention. Five stars without reservation.