It would be worth looking into whether there's a mini-epidemic of depression sweeping America at the moment. Oprah's Book Club recently read Cormac McCarthy's The Road, and while it's an amazing and rewarding read, it's also an emotionally draining one.

In fact, it's a strange choice all around for Oprah, who hasn't exactly avoided the painful, but who has mostly trusted books that ultimately uplift their audiences and reaffirm the power of life and love. Oprah has taken a lot of flack, rightly or wrongly, for some of those choices, and there's been a fair bit of argument over whether her club is good in that it promotes reading, or bad in that it promotes the reading of maudlin, sentimental fluff. Whichever side of that debate you take, it's hard to argue that she's thrown another softball with The Road.

First of all, Cormac McCarthy's artistic reputation is as close to bullet-proof as they come. He's routinely hailed as the modern-day William Faulkner or Herman Melville, and even as one of the best living American writers. His previous novels (Suttree, Blood Meridian, All the Pretty Horses, No Country for Old Men, to name a few) have found a smallish, but devoted and admiring audience. All the Pretty Horses won him the National Book Award (and some mainstream success) in 1992, and critics have been almost universally rapturous in their praise.

Secondly, and more importantly, The Road is not a book that uplifts its readers. It takes place some 10 years after an unspecified global holocaust (possibly nuclear), and follows the daily struggles of an unnamed man and his young son as they wind their slow way across the country in search of food and a warmer climate. And then it gets bleak. All sources of food have been depleted; the landscape is sterile and dead, and preserved food has long since been scavenged into history. The vast majority of the population has died away. Small bands of roving marauders and cannibals are a constant threat. A fine, white ash covers everything. All that seems to remain of the pre-disaster world is the fierce and complicated connection between the man and the boy. This relationship is the central focus of The Road, and over time, it seems to reward Oprah's faith in the book.

The story moves not much faster than the characters themselves, which is to say, not very fast. Critics of the book have complained about the plodding pace, the spare, repetitive dialogue, and the lack of plot-driven action. But that slow repetitive pace allows the heart of the narrative to unfurl itself as the book progresses. The man, we learn, is carrying a gun in which he has saved two bullets — one for himself and one for the boy. We learn that at some point in the past, the boy's mother made her choice to use her bullet. And we learn that the man is deeply concerned that a time will come when he will have to choose the bullets over capture by cannibals, and that he won't be able to do what he needs to. This is the crux of the book: how strong is the will to live and protect the next generation? At what point is death the only option? If that point comes, can we make the choice for another?

McCarthy's style allows these questions to present themselves subtly, almost invisibly. As we listen to the man's hollow attempts to reassure his son; as we lie awake with him while he thinks about their options and knows they're starving; as we watch the repetitive and pointless task of searching abandoned farms for the bite of overlooked food that will keep them going another day: all these quiet and desperate moments build upon each other and make the central questions more urgent with every page. Without our even realizing it, McCarthy puts us in the story. The bleak hopelessness of the passing days begins to weigh on the reader as it does on the two refugees.

Along the way, things do happen, and rarely are they good things. McCarthy has been known to shock audiences with stark portrayals of brutal and disgusting violence. Blood Meridian, in particular, is operatic in its relentless, slow-motion depictions of massacre and rape. The Road doesn't go quite as far as that, but there are a number of very disturbing scenes that serve primarily to challenge readers to choose, like the man must, between compassion and pure, animal survival. In this world, there is no way to help, there is no food to spare, and every other living creature is a probable predator. We can feel his pain as he is forced to teach the boy to ignore the plights of others and run.

There are rare moments of respite, however. The love between the man and the boy, both so much older than their years, is at times extremely moving. As they talk about the past or try to find some faint spark of happiness in the present, and especially when they have found some food, their relationship is compact and intense. As McCarthy puts it, they are "each the other's world entire." Neither has any other human contact and they are too careful to ever spend more than a few moments apart. The scenes that find them resting and sitting together — playing checkers for example — are touching and tender, but are almost more painful than any other scene, since we know how suddenly we'll be jolted back to the reality of the story. Ultimately, the journey must continue, and to the end of the book, the two must keep working to find other established refugees and a reliable source of food and shelter.

McCarthy's distinctive writing style is here in full force. He doesn't use quotation marks for his terse dialogue and provides very little in the way of punctuation to aid reading. His sentences are short and dry and tend to have a biblical rhythm to them. The descriptions and narration are neutral and disinterested, allowing the thoughts, words and deeds of the man and the boy to tell the story. The whole book exudes the grayness of the ashy landscape and heightens the bleak hopelessness of the situation. At the same time, though, every sentence seems loaded with tension and emotion:

A couple weeks after Oprah announced The Road as her next book, it won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, and Cormac McCarthy agreed to appear on her show for his first-ever televised interview. The spotlight generated by these two events must certainly have made him uncomfortable: at 74, he lives quietly in New Mexico with his wife and a young son (to whom The Road is dedicated), and has avoided publicity his whole career. In the interview, though, he is surprisingly friendly, and he fields Oprah's fluffier questions with grace and modesty. He gives the sense that the bleak, brutal tenor of his books is less due to his personality than to his dedication to seeing an idea through, no matter how painful the experience might be. On the surface, The Road is painful indeed, but its core is more hopeful than we have any reason to expect from McCarthy. The book doesn't seem like a great choice for Oprah's more optimistic readers, but McCarthy surprises us with just enough warmth and honest, raw emotion to qualify.

-Colin Leach


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