(originally posted around 20 June 2007 - edited slightly)

Title: The Road

Author: Cormac McCarthy

Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf

Year: 2006

By now, most folks have at least heard of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. After all, not only did it win the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and a host of other awards, it was named to Oprah’s book club which put it on supermarket shelves everywhere.

Regardless of Oprah, however, I knew I’d be reading it eventually anyway, so I went out of my way to avoid all the hype. And even though I didn’t read a single review, or even short synopsis, still the buzz was impossible to ignore. By the time I actually picked it up, despite my best efforts, I knew the basics of the plot. I hunkered down in my favorite chair and contemplated switching to something else, thinking that my efforts to remain relatively pure of outside influence were wasted. I wanted to approach the novel fresh, not only in an attempt to see if the book lived up to the hype it had generated, but to escape the inevitable effect that hype would have upon me. After all it isn’t every day that a genre book gets critical acclaim, let alone my favorite genre. In the end, I settled back, propped up my feet, and turned to page one. By the time I turned to page two, McCarthy had become an instant favorite.

Had I the time, I would have read The Road straight through, but unfortunately real life forced me to spread it out over four days. The upside of this is that each day I was able to look forward to something very, very special.

McCarthy tells a very personal, character driven story set in severely dystopian future. And when I say dystopian, I don’t do near enough credit to the bleak environment McCarthy creates. The primary storyline, of course, is a journey through devastation and a struggle for survival. But there are other, deeper, more profound, and more important issues McCarthy allows his characters to explore. It is at once a story of despair and coming of age, of truth and vengeance, and of love and horror. It is a journey not only of location, but of mind, the evolution of a character’s dedication to something of a higher order than just physical survival, for more than just the environmental landscape has been turned sour and barren, and more is at stake than just survival.

The structure of the novel itself lends itself to the sparse, bleak, and relentless narrative style McCarthy employs. In this, the influence of authors such as William Faulkner and Flannery O’Conner is unmistakable. While not nearly as heavy handed as Faulkner, McCarthy’s form and technique are precisely tailored to great supportive effect, and while some have criticized it as stylistic trope, McCarthy is successful in submerging the reader not only in the story he is telling, but the world he has created. Submerged as in, up to your eyeballs in story, character, and environment.

Not only is The Road an absolute must read for any fan of genre fiction, it blurs and blends the line between science fiction, literary fiction, and mainstream fiction, giving it high marks regardless of what shelf you happen to find it upon in Borders or Barnes and Noble.