Cheerful read before 12/5

[Ya Sam]

The Road
Cormac McCarthy. Knopf, $24 (288p) ISBN 0-307-26543-9

Violence, in McCarthy’s postapocalyptic tour de force, has been visited 
worldwide in the form of a "long shear of light and then a series of low 
concussions" that leaves cities and forests burned, birds and fish dead and 
the earth shrouded in gray clouds of ash. In this landscape, an unnamed man 
and his young son journey down a road to get to the sea. (The man’s wife, 
who gave birth to the boy after calamity struck, has killed herself.) They 
carry blankets and scavenged food in a shopping cart, and the man is armed 
with a revolver loaded with his last two bullets. Beyond the ever-present 
possibility of starvation lies the threat of roving bands of cannibalistic 
thugs. The man assures the boy that the two of them are "good guys," but 
from the way his father treats other stray survivors the boy sees that his 
father has turned into an amoral survivalist, tenuously attached to the 
morality of the past by his fierce love for his son. McCarthy establishes 
himself here as the closest thing in American literature to an Old Testament 
prophet, trolling the blackest registers of human emotion to create a 
haunting and grim novel about civilization’s slow death after the power goes 
out. (Oct.)

http://www.publishersweekly.com/article/CA6355293.html

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