Wouldn’t it be nice to curl up with a good book right about now? If you use the Kindle ebook platform, you can pick up one of my all-time favorite novels on sale right now for just $1.99. It’s The Road, by Cormac McCarthy, and you can get it at Amazon for barely any money at all. It tells the story of a father and his son trying to survive in a post-apocalyptic America that’s been scorched of nearly all other life.
McCarthy is known for having dense, poetic prose, but he’s at his most readable in The Road. The book is comprised of many short sections, often just a paragraph long, with plenty of white space between each one. Here’s a scene-setting excerpt from near the beginning:
“With the first gray light he rose and left the boy sleeping and walked out to the road and squatted and studied the country to the south. Barren, silent, godless. He thought the month was October but he wasnt sure. He hadnt kept a calendar for years. They were moving south. There’d be no surviving another winter here.”
Notice the lack of apostrophes in some of the words. McCarthy famously doesn’t use quotation marks, either, but you almost always know who’s speaking. The sparse punctuation and the occasional unusual word choice create a unique tone in all of his work.
But whereas some of his other books, like Blood Meridian (often considered his masterpiece), are almost plotless and endlessly violent, The Road tells a simpler story of survival that's easy to follow. It has characters you can root for, even if a major victory is just them discovering unopened canned food in an abandoned cellar.
The Road won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for fiction and went on to be turned into a movie starring Viggo Mortensen (the book is way better). It's one of his most popular novels; others include No Country for Old Men and All the Pretty Horses.
McCarthy was famously reclusive, rarely agreeing to be interviewed, but Oprah picked The Road for her book club and scored one of those rare interviews.
Cormac McCarthy died in 2023, but he carved out a singular voice in American fiction. I’ve read about half of his books, and of those, I’d say The Road is by far the best entry point into his work. I can't recommend it highly enough, especially for $1.99.