The Road by Cormac McCarthy

August 11, 2023 4:27 PM

A father and his son walk alone through burned America. Nothing moves in the ravaged landscape save the ash on the wind.

Their destination is the coast, although they don't know what, if anything, awaits them there. They have nothing; just a pistol to defend themselves against the lawless bands that stalk the road, the clothes they are wearing, a cart of scavenged food—and each other.

A New York Times Notable Book • One of the Best Books of the Year: The Boston Globe, The Denver Post, The Kansas City Star, Los Angeles Times, New York, People, Rocky Mountain News, Time, The Village Voice, and The Washington Post

posted by miss-lapin (12 comments total)

Good book.

Bleak.
posted by kyrademon at 4:01 AM on August 12, 2023 [3 favorites]

A metaphor for life in the form of post-apocalyptic thriller. I liked it. But I will never read again.
posted by Stuka at 12:32 PM on August 12, 2023 [5 favorites]

Terrific book, but that one scene -- you know the one -- basically blots out all the other details from my memory.
I'll never read it again, either.
posted by martin q blank at 5:13 PM on August 12, 2023 [4 favorites]

I don't know if I can say I liked it, but I appreciated it. It was visceral to the point I sometimes felt like I could taste the pervasive ashiness of that world. And the vast emptiness of it.

There were some other scenes that got me in addition to That Scene like the headless baby on a spit. That one was also a gut punch for me.
posted by miss-lapin at 7:50 PM on August 12, 2023

that one scene -- you know the one

I recently reread the book(On Father's Day, because I'm perverse but also too chicken to read Affliction) and I don't know what you mean.
posted by Alvy Ampersand at 9:19 PM on August 12, 2023 [3 favorites]

I'm assuming it's the scene where Papa and the boy go into a house and discover a bunch of people in the basement being used for food. The house is essentially being used as a trap.
posted by miss-lapin at 9:25 PM on August 12, 2023 [2 favorites]

I thought about this book for years before I finally read it. When it first came out, my sister strongly warned me not to read it. My son was a baby at the time and I was extra emotional about everything, but especially anything to do with kids, the way you are when you've just recently had a baby, so I figured I should listen to her and stay far away from it. But the idea of the story, or what I imagined the story was, stuck with me. The warning scared me but also made me curious. And eventually I decided that as long as what I knew of that bleak story was already a recurring part of my mental landscape I might as well actually read the book. I've never read anything else that filled me with so much heart-pounding tension. But the big surprise for me was that it basically had a happy ending! I was not expecting that at all. My idea was that it ended the way it began, with the boy and his father still on the road alone, still trying to stay alive and make it somewhere but almost certainly doomed. As bleak as the book was, I had been picturing something so much bleaker. The hopefulness at the end was a nice reward for making it through all the horror.
posted by Redstart at 10:06 PM on August 12, 2023 [3 favorites]

This book/movie fall into the category of great works i will almost certainly never read/watch again.

However, like Redstart my kiddo was a toddler at the time when the movie came out and i read the book in advance of that. I was struggling mightily to be a good father (turns out that was because I'm trans and was trying to fit a role that created a lot of stress even with the stress of parenting). This story gave me something to hold onto (plus Viggo's as good a guy to emulate as anyone).
posted by kokaku at 7:20 AM on August 13, 2023 [1 favorite]

I found The Road after it won the 2007 Tournament of Books. The finale judge describes her experience of going to watch her young children sleep after reading it. That should have been enough to convince me not to read it, but I did. I remember crying in the train station at a one-footed pigeon. Crying as I walked down the street to work. It felt strange to interact with people between when I put the book down and picked it up again.

When the movie came out, I ordered it from Netflix, when they still sent DVDs in little envelopes. The DVD sat and sat in my living room, and I never convinced myself to watch it. I never have.

The detail that set the tone of the book for me is within the first few pages: the rearview mirror rigged on their shopping cart. Such a small detail that conveys how dangerous the world is for them.
posted by gladly at 4:00 PM on August 13, 2023 [2 favorites]

The line that killed me, "wow".
posted by Johnny Hazard at 4:00 PM on August 13, 2023

I feel like I should re-read this because it's been years, but I don't know if I can because I just remember sinking into a deep, deep funk that lasted for weeks after finishing it. All I can recall thinking over and over again was "the wife was right"
posted by drewbage1847 at 9:30 AM on August 15, 2023 [3 favorites]

Crisis makes people come together. Love each other. Support each other.

Absolutely. I don't think the book is at all realistic in its view of how people would act post apocalypse. Hopefully we'll never find out, but I'm pretty sure there would be a lot of people grouping together and helping each other and almost no ruthless everyone-for-himself murder and cannabalism.
posted by Redstart at 10:50 AM on August 20, 2023