Alex V. Cook's reviewrating:
I always imagined my dad was the most adept person at spoiling a cross-country roadtrip, but now I'm picturing Cormac McCarthy's research trip for The Road, cascading through the mountains to the coast, stopping the RV at every bucolic vista and babbling brook and imagining them all as unspeakably dead and entombed in ash and horror. Soggy, corrosive death everywhere.
This book really is as good as they say it is. It is possibly Hemmingway good. Maybe. Probably about as close as anyone will get. It makes you do all the things that a horrific story will make you do: it makes you look at your pantry with worry, it makes you think about voting, it makes you fix things around the house, it makes you hug your babies close, it will hopefully make you at least tear up. He is up there with Knut Hamsun and Jack London in writing about starvation, but his devout belief in ethics and grace under pressure is the real coup.
Time, language, character, love, conflict, circumstance are stripped bare as the landscape and the cabinets of all those abandoned houses, and the plot is not the most surprising thing in the world, but the book is a little corny, painfully flinty, impossibly cruel (though it could have been crueler, I mean, they get off easy compared to some in the book) and consistently perfect, with absolutely nothing left over.
xposted at goodreads
Time, language, character, love, conflict, circumstance are stripped bare as the landscape and the cabinets of all those abandoned houses, and the plot is not the most surprising thing in the world (bordering on parable), and the book is a little corny, painfully flinty, impossibly cruel (though it could have been crueler, I mean, they get off easy compared to some in the book) and consistently perfect, with absolutely nothing left over. Link
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