The Road

By Cormac McCarthy

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction 2007

Something terrible has happened to the Earth, some huge ecological disaster or perhaps a horrible war. Whatever it was it has left the world, cold, barren and burned.
A few people have managed to survive, hanging on mainly by preying on each other. One man and his young son have clung to survival for as long as they can where they currently live but things are getting very desperate. The man decides to head out to a new locale, some place where food and shelter can be found, southward and to the ocean. He doesn't have much time because he is ill and knows he is probably dying. He just wants to get his son to safety. So they embark on a dangerous trek, hiding out against marauders, stumbling across timely caches of food and supplies. The man does the best he can but sometimes things go really hard for them. But they struggle onward to the promise of some kind of life and security.

Well, isn't this a cheerful little book? People roasting newborn babies over campfires. Charred burned corpses littering the highways. Hopelessness and despair and impending death. Yup, a real hoot.
Lots of readers found this book uplifting and inspiring. To me it was just so depressing and gruesome. I couldn't take it and had to set it aside for several months. I don't need to be hit over the head with a brick, which is exactly what this book does to the reader. Not to my taste at all.

For another review, see The New York Times.

New Words (Apparently the author is fond of unusual words. These definitions may not be accurate as some of these words are very hard to track down.)

Gryke: also grike; a fissure. 'He descended into a gryke in the stone and there he crouched coughing and he coughed for a long time.'

Meconium: greenish substance that builds up in the bowels of a growing fetus and is normally discharged shortly after birth. 'The improbable appearance of the small crown of the head. Streaked with blood and lank black hair. The rank meconium.'

Rachitic: of, relating to, or affected by rickets; resembling or suggesting the condition of one suffering from rickets. 'He was lean, wiry, rachitic.'

Siwash camp: a camp out without a tent or supplies. 'When it was a bit lighter he rose and walked out and cut a perimeter about their siwash camp looking for sign but other than their own faint track through the ash he saw nothing.'

Claggy: sticky or tacky. 'The gray and rotting teeth. Claggy with human flesh.'

Parsible also parsable; parse means to break a sentence down into component parts. "He'd had this feeling before, beyond the numbness and the dull despair. The world shrinking down about a raw core of parsible entities.'

Intestate: having no legal will, one who dies without a will. 'He walked out in the gray light and stood and he saw for a brief moment the absolute truth of the world. The cold relentless circling of the intestate earth.'

Patterans: any of several coded signs left along a road or on a non-gypsy house by one gypsy comrade to another. 'They began to come upon from time to time small cairns of rock by the roadside. They were signs in gypsy language, lost patterans.'

Pampooties: soft shoe, moccasin or slipper, usually made of leather. 'They'd wrapped their feet in sailcloth and bound them up in blue plastic pampooties cut from a tarp and they left strange tracks in their comings and going.'

Salitter: essence of God. 'He walked out into the road and stood. The silence. The salitter drying from the earth.'

Crozzled: crushed, squashed, shrunken. 'The incinerate corpses shrunk to the size of a child and propped on the bare springs of the seats. Ten thousand dreams ensepulchred within their crozzled hearts.'

Hydroptic: swollen. 'The ponderous counterspectacle of things ceasing to be. The sweeping waste, hydroptic and coldly secular.'