The Road

Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 2007, is perhaps the most terrifying novel of the early twenty-first century, and it is terrifying in a way that distinguishes it from thriller or horror: the terror here is metaphysical. McCarthy imagines a post-catastrophe America-cause of the catastrophe unspecified, which is part of the horror-in which a father and his young son walk south through the ash-covered ruins of the world, carrying the fire, trying to reach the coast.

The novel’s prose is one of its primary aesthetic acts. McCarthy strips punctuation to its minimum-no quotation marks for dialogue, few apostrophes, short sentences that accumulate into something like geological strata-and the effect is to make the book feel as bare and relentless as the world it describes. Nothing is wasted; there is no warmth to spare. The prose itself enacts the novel’s situation.

What saves The Road from being merely an exercise in grimness is the relationship between the man and the boy, which is rendered with extraordinary tenderness and precision. The man is kept alive by love for the boy; the boy, born after whatever happened, has no memory of the world before and is in many ways morally superior to his father, whose protective ruthlessness has hardened into something troubling. The recurring question of whether they are “carrying the fire”-whether they are among the good guys-is the novel’s spiritual interrogation.

The Road is not a comfortable book, and McCarthy asks the reader to sit with questions that have no answers: what do we owe each other in extremity? What is a father’s love when it outstrips the world his child will inherit? It is a minor masterpiece of American darkness.