By Gary Taylor

An unidentified man and his unidentified son trudge through a barren landscape in an unidentified future where an unidentified event has turned the world inside out.  On they go, foraging through the countryside in an odyssey of survival that also becomes a travelogue for despair.

Or, does it?

I had wanted to wait, and be the last person on earth to publish a review of this book. But, with the movie adaptation coming out November 25, I figured maybe I should go ahead and add my thoughts. By now—with a Pulitzer and an Oprah selection to its credit— I must assume you know the plot (there isn't one), the style (limited punctuation and other non-conformities) and the message (what is it?) Well, that's the beauty of The Road.

Like all lyrical journeys, The Road allows its readers to determine their own messages. And that's made all the reviews that much more interesting. I can't challenge the one-stars any more than I can challenge the fives. I give the book a four because I think The Road is too important as a cultural phenomenon to be ignored, and it takes no time at all to buzz through it. As a long-time McCarthy fan, I wasn't caught by surprise with the style, but those new to his work might find it a challenge. I'd encourage them to go slow and stick with it. The Road is worth the work.

And it might become a historically significant piece of literature for another reason, as well.  It might well rank as the seminal work that places Cormac McCarthy in line for a Nobel Prize as our generation's version of William Faulkner.  His body of work runs from the popular modern westerns of the Border Trilogy (All the Pretty Horses, The Crossing and Cities of the Plain) to the brutal and memorable Blood Meridian and on to the more contemporary crime thriller No Country for Old Men with a slew of lesser and sometimes bizarre earlier works tossed in for diversity (Child of God). Now, with The Road as McCarthy's crowning glory, his resume should certainly rank alongside his American Nobel predecessors of the 20th Century: Toni Morrison (1993), Saul Bellow (1976), John Steinbeck (1962), Ernest Hemingway (1954), William Faulkner (1949), Pearl Buck (1938), Eugene O'Neill (1936) and Sinclair Lewis (1930). Who can quibble with that?

While Dennis Lehane in one of the so-called celebrity reviews boils the message of The Road down to the single word "faith," I had a different reaction. For me, The Road emerged as a metaphor for each of our daily lives, as we go about our regular routines with a bit of hope and acceptance of responsibility. In McCarthy's post-apocalyptic vision, the hero and his son march forward to a destiny they can't really fathom, searching the landscape for tools of survival and doing the best they can. Faith? What else are they going to do? Sit in the road and cry? So, they move along in their post-apocalyptic world the way we move along in our pre-apocalyptic reality: as best we can. The more things change, the more we remain the same.

I'll be even more interested to see how Hollywood handles its film adaptation of this ambling, poetic saga. In contrast with No Country for Old Men—which begged for a cinematic version—the haunted plotlessness of The Road presents a greater challenge. Can any screenwriter jazz one of the book's vignettes into a compelling movie storyline without turning McCarthy's open-ended vision into an updated version of Mel Gibson doing Mad Max one more time? That's the next question for Cormac McCarthy on the road.

Cormac McCarthy is the author of several successful novels.  You can find the author online at www.cormacmccarthy.com

Gary Taylor is a veteran American journalist and author of the award-winning true crime memoir, Luggage By Kroger. He lives in Houston, Texas, where he covers the oil and gas industry for the newsletter Platts Oilgram News.

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