The protagonists in Cormac McCarthy’s novel, The Road, are a middle-aged man and his young son, who walk the earth in the aftermath of nuclear holocaust, looking for canned food in abandoned houses as they journey southward to the gulf. The man is relentless in his determination to survive and protect his son from other survivors who have resorted to cannibalism. The novel does not come anywhere close to Shakespearean characterization (you won’t find Falstaff here), but the love that the father feels for his son is enough to make the reading experience powerful. And if you think Job had it rough, read The Road. It took a level of commitment on my part just to trudge through the debris with these characters in this vividly rendered setting. McCarthy has top-shelf talent when it comes to descriptive writing. His sentences are short, like Hemingway’s, and he almost never uses commas. Nor does he need them: "On the far side of the river valley the road passed through a stark black burn. Charred and limbless trunks of trees stretching away on every side. Ash moving over the road and the sagging hands of blind wire strung from the blackened lightpoles whining thinly in the wind." ("Let the day perish wherein I was born..." Oh, wait, that’s Job.) Read The Road, at any rate, if you like brilliantly depicted landscape, tough journeys, and rewarding father-son stories.

Review by Todd Robins