That’s the mentality of the publishing industry to every single new writer out there.

Is that what it is? A ‘middle school’ mentality?

The only thing more worthless than The Road is McCarthy’s devotees.

The novel is certainly stark and that fits the barren landscape. The dialogue is poignant and direct and I loved the lack of descriptions: let the emotion do the talking. But, it was too repetitive and he drops the fire analogy only to pick it back up in the end as a quick wrap up. The predictable ending seemed opportunistic rather than heartwarming and I disagree with the original take… the father and son didn’t have to fight off a “the bands of ravenous ghouls who maurade the roads…” What, they came across three people total on The Road, and one of them was blind. I appreciate the doom and gloom, I’d-rather-light-a-candle-than-curse-your-darkness type books, but this was repetitive and predictable.

I can understand how this book is not some people’s “cup of tea”, but what I cannot understand is nit-picking the man’s writing style. Step outside your middle school language arts class mentality and give credit to something different, unique, and outside the standardized box.

Upon completion, I thought it would be kinder to toss it in the garbage rather than pass it along.

The book would have relayed its ideas with the bonus of cutting repetitive images had he written it as a short story. There are only so many ways to trek through monotonous ashlands, hide from brigands, and seek hidden caches of food. No need to carry on about it for chapter after chapter.

As for the theme, those higher human virtues came a bit late in the story, since society was already kaput. So the guy loves his son. So what? Most people love their children and even value them above themselves. Why this is suddenly profound in a post apocalyptic setting where most other suvivors are painted as baby-eating road warriors (by design, I might add) eludes me.

Then there were the gaping holes in believability. There were many of those. How many years did ‘the man’ and ‘the boy’ stay in one place? Eating what? Drinking what? Then they’re suddenly slurping out of cans that must have been a decade old?

No, I really don’t care if the MFA’s out there are waxing orgasmic over this spot of lit-ruh-chur. If a writer breaks the spell of credibility in genre fiction by leaving big holes where they simply don’t want to come up with explanations, the effect is the same in non-genre works like The Road.

I didn’t care for the gimmicky style, either. Apparently, McCarthy has decided that punctuation is for lesser mortals. Funny me, I thought we use punctuation, speech tags, and other other such gew gaws for good reasons.

Strangely, i almost did not read it, I found the first few pages hard going and it requires you to completely engage with the book, if you don’t then it probably would be ‘boring’ (as some have commented here)…but it is a fantastically rewarding read – I read a comment that ‘everything the modern novel can be is here’. Surely true.

Let Me try to clarify some things for the people who still haven’t gotten the idea here.

-Punctuation: to begin with, who cares how the book is punctuated? It reads. I had no problem reading it, i didn’t have to stop and go back or double read any sentences. you just have to read it all the way through. Its not a book you can look up and look back down to. And for all of oyu that say he uses terrible English grammar and etc., i challenge you this: Do you not text and instead of putting “So where do you want to go out to eat tonight?” do most of you not put “whr u wnna go 2 eat 2nite?” in this day and age, i find that compared to the majority of the worlds grammar, this is excellent. even so, he did this to add more effect, which is a rare thing in literature when they actually literally use the words on the pagegs to make it a more dynamic reading experience.

-The Setting: what? you people cant handle a dark and not-so-rainbows-and-unicorns setting in a book/movie? Not everything in life has a happy ending. All of us can attest. I’ve been to places in my career that would make you wish you were in the book. This isn’t a faux-landscape. Take away the ashes and places like this really do exist. Smaller scale, mind you, but they do. And someone waaaaay at the top of the reviews mentioned jumping to cannibalism early…well the boy was born a few days after the end of the world happened. Given the context i would assume he is 10-13. That’s 10-13 years for humanity to lose all hope, ethics,morals, etc.

The Plot-Maybe some people just don’t like a nothing but happy go lucky fairytale. Do you really want to read a book where the apocalypse happens, but everyone finds away to flourish in little biospheres and dance around playing harps and laughing, having a good time? I don’t. I want to see what such an event can bring out in people. The lengths people would go to in order to survive and protect their own, but also what compassion and comradeship can develop. I want to see how far the hate of one human can be, but also how merciful they can be through all the maliciousness they have been subject to. (Example:The outcast who tries to steal their cart on the beach, and how the father strips him and leaves him there to die for it. Then takes his clothes back and leaves them on the street.)

You guys aren’t misunderstanding the book. Your just not trying hard enough to understand it. You negative reviewers are speaking about Literature etc. like you are experts who have been studying the subject your whole life, but I’m a 19 year old US Marine(yes, that shows a slight lack of intelligence :P all you devil dogs know what I’m saying.) and I see things perfectly clear. You have to be an outside of the box thinker. McCarthy is no Tolkien :) remind you (Yes, Tolkien got MAD involved in story line, history of the plot, etc. That’s what i mean by that) HeMcCarthy doesn’t need to go into the details. The book isn’t called ‘The Apocalypse’ or ‘The proper use of grammar in the English language’ or ‘A Book That You Would Think Is Depressing, but it Actually Ends Really Positively’ its The Road. Its a post apocalyptic story about a son and father trying to survive and keep each other going through their love because they are afraid if they are gone they will leave the other ‘in the dark’ (particularly the father.) cmon you guys. I just graduated High School a year and a half ago and I understand these concepts. If you cannot relate to the emotions in this book, you haven’t lived life long enough.

Pure Love in the bond of a father and son. Pure survival instincts and the will to kill all who threaten. The willingness to die, but the drive to keep alive. The battle of right and wrong and how easy it is to totter on that borderline. Good book. I sent it to my Fiance to read, and i’m going to experience it again once i get back home.

The story was good, certainly. The idea is excellent. I really enjoy post-apocalyptic stories. The grammar and sentence structure choices the author chose, however, were not really my style. At first I overlooked them and kept going, but, as the story progressed, they began distracting me. I’m not criticizing his style, just saying it didn’t work for me.

I think this book is a cult book, to be perfectly honest, similar to the “Twilight” series and “The Shack”. People go crazy over them and so, unconsciously, readers instantly love the book(s), not seeing flaws.

Overall, the story was intriguing and realistic. Unfortunately, the writing style detracted significantly from the value of the story.

** out of ****.

That said, and I have no doubt that this is a masterpiece, I have constant difficulties with McCarthy because his landscapes and feelings and needs and behaviour are never, ever mine. He seems to write of souls that are drifted out into worlds I have no understanding of, and how they speak and what they want are not so much bleak and uncompromising, but meditations on a perspective I just don’t share; this may very well be to do with a particular form of masculinity, though I have no trouble with Shakespeare. McCarthy is undoubtedly a genius and this is a passionate book, not to mention probably quite true as the human race are constantly doing things like this, and forever will, and it’s wonderful to read someone who sculpts language so well, but it’s all just so basic. I actually preferred this one to All The Pretty Horses, which is meant to be romantic, but there are always these characters in a McCarthy book, building fires and collecting branches and toughing it out in hostile conditions with bits of terse bracken and uncomfortable bedding with but a rag of hope to their back, and personally – though I’m going to be reading The Road over and over because it’s like some volcano, and lacerating – there’s no way I could personally exist in that book or any other one he’s written unless I was a dead tree. I feel for those trees.

The other thing about this book is that you really see what it all looks like, the rain and the snow and these burnt houses with the paint peeling off them; it’s so visual. And the style is mesmeric and incantatory, suitable of course to be that way with death in every breath. But what’s that fish doing at the end? I though nothing lived and all was over? And it seems to have the whole world on it, on its scales, which indicates promise and rebirth. He’s a softy, that Cormac McCarthy, I’d have killed off everyone. He’s created some sort of chance amongst all the rubble, but I’m not so sure. I am not at all sure that the validity of human love and Grace is but a stick in the wind against the power of human evil and stupidity, and some of the comments made against this book will bear me out on that one, because they’re really an attack on Art and sensitivity, and when placed right in the great flame of great art, which this book actually is, and still continue to fail to see anything, well, we need no apocalypse to weep for the human race, something I spend most of time doing anyway.

I quite liked the love in this book, found it beautiful and unlikely. The whole book’s like that really. It reminds me of the work of certain artists where the images look like dead grass or have no intrinsic aesthetic purchase but stay and stay. That in itself is McCarthy’s greatest claim to distinction, that his pictures are memorable and imprint themselves on the mind. I wish I’d written it really but I am just not the type. And I do think it was very clever of him to create such lasting images using such a limited palate – no colour anywhere, all black and white and grey – ‘casket black’ he said at one point – like an etching. It’s really a sequence of drawings this book, with the horror and the love imprinted on every one.

“The blackness he woke to on those nights was sightless and impenatrable. A blackness to hurt your ears with listening. Often he had to get up. No sound but the wind in the bare and blackened trees. He rose and stood tottering in that cold autistic dark with his arms outheld for balance while the vestibular calculations in his skull cranked out their reckonings. An old chronicle. To seek out the upright. No fall but preceded by a declination. He took great marching steps into the nothingness, counting them against his return. Eyes closed, arms oaring. Upright to what? Something nameless in the night, lode or matrix. To which he and the stars were common satellite. Like the great pendulum in its rotunda scribing through the long day movements of the universe of which you may say it knows nothing and yet know it must.”

Silly.

At first I was disturbed at the total collapse of the rules of grammar and English. Strunk & White would be appalled. The more I read, the more I realized McCarthy did this to make a point. That point, as I see it, is that all the “rules” of the world and society had collapsed. Disappeared. In a post-apocalyptic world the only rule is survival. By dispensing with quote marks, etc., McCarthy illustrates the world as bleak and sparse. On purpose.

I cried like a baby at the end. My son, tough guy that he is, did as well. We both said it is sad beyond words. My brother, otoh, didn’t. He found it uplifting. The devotion, the stripped-of-everything-extraneous model of a good father. I see his point, and he’s right. The Man is the essential father. A demonstration in words of what can be. The story is sad, but that’s the way of the world, of life, even without the end of the world being upon us. (What’s the saying? “Life is veil of tears?”) The story is also uplifting, nothing so blunt as ‘a call’ to be good, but a reflection of the capability of good.

Not a writer, so have no thoughts on his style (though it worked for me, us, in that we all found it beautiful to read), but my opinion is that McCarthy has written about the essence of good in humans. And for some reason that makes me want to burst into tears.

What kind of word is authoring???

Its very well written and draws you in and you do believe its real.
I wanted it to be a happier ending but kind of knew all along that it wouldn’t be as it wasn’t that kind of book!

Maybe the boy could survive and have a life worth living? hard to imagine. but why do stories always have to have happy endings anyway?

It certainly affected me and touched me for quite a long time afterwards.

I think the genius of this book is that you kind of physically feel it, its certainly different to anything else I’ve ever read.
This definitely touched a different emotional part of me, I think because its on such a huge scale, we are talking about the end of the world here, and yet we only care cos its seen through the eyes of two people.

But this book was a very good philosophical book about family values and makes us think about what we live for and make us question ourselves about our values. Also, i think the author did not intend to make this a well structured and well written but to really pass on his message.

I agree with everything Damir and Ryan et al said. If only Cormac McCarthy had written the Bible, it’s be a darn sight shorter and hell of lot more interesting and profound.