February '08 book club: The Road by Cormac McCarthy

Next up the much talked about Cormac McCarthy book, The Road.

The way in which I'm handling the Fiction Book Club's reading here is not useful. Each month, I've been posting what we're going to read and since I'm usually screeching into our meetings while reading the last few pages, I never have anything useful to say about the next month's book. It would be better if I posted after I've read the book and could include opinion...so going forward, I'll have to change my evil ways.

Meanwhile, since I trust his judgment completely, I'm quoting Dennis Lehane here from the review that he wrote for Amazon. It's much longer than this ... and had he not mentioned the father's love for his son by the fourth sentence, I doubt that I could even open this book:

Cormac McCarthy sets his new novel, The Road, in a post-apocalyptic blight of gray skies that drizzle ash, a world in which all matter of wildlife is extinct, starvation is not only prevalent but nearly all-encompassing, and marauding bands of cannibals roam the environment with pieces of human flesh stuck between their teeth. If this sounds oppressive and dispiriting, it is. McCarthy may have just set to paper the definitive vision of the world after nuclear war, and in this recent age of relentless saber-rattling by the global powers, it's not much of a leap to feel his vision could be not far off the mark nor, sadly, right around the corner. Stealing across this horrific (and that's the only word for it) landscape are an unnamed man and his emaciated son, a boy probably around the age of ten. It is the love the father feels for his son, a love as deep and acute as his grief, that could surprise readers of McCarthy's previous work.