The Road

While I found The Road interesting and at some level gripping, in the end I thought it was overrated. Sure, love and hope are a reason to live, and the stark struggles of life in a wasteland always have that attraction that is not unlike driving by a bad car wreck on the highway, hard to turn away from, but difficult to look at also. However, the writing is so sparse that I couldn't help but wonder if it was overly simplistic. Occasionally, especially in the last paragraph, I found myself wondering if McCarthy was being simplistic and obtuse just to be simplistic and obtuse, but without any real point (or willingness to reveal that he did not have a point).

Read it once, and enjoy it, but it doesn't deserve the Pulitzer.