Originally Posted by Fruitonica

I just finished The Road by Cormac McCarthy, and I'm feeling slightly ambivalent. It never really clicked for me and I don't really understand the piles of critical acclaim heaped on it.

The sparse prose is at times beautiful and profound, especially the final passage, but most of the time it just felt solid and workman like, not adding or detracting from the story.

The structure of the story was repetitive, and all of the descriptions of setting up camp blur into one. And I actually found the overwhelming bleakness and futility to be too much.

What saves it is the interaction between the man and boy, which is just perfect, swaying between touching and unsettling.