Cormac McCarthy's New Apoacalypse Novel

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Nuclear holocaust has reduced the world to ash and rubble. A man and his son, "each the other's world entire," trek without purpose down a road to nowhere in death-defying starvation. Along the way, they pass renegades barbecuing their infants. There is no plot to Cormac McCarthy's harrowing, brilliant new novel, a worthy successor to his masterpiece, Blood Meridian, because human history has drawn to a close.

The Road at times resembles Robinson Crusoe. The man reveals a profusion of ingenuity, siphoning drops of gasoline, digging deep into the burrows of an abandoned survival shelter for precious stores of food, even suturing his own deep, bloody wound inflicted by a sniper.

The Road is no less a heart-wrenching paean to fatherhood. The man nurtures the boy, teaches him and protects him, and sacrifices his own longing for death so that his son might survive. The world is "barren, silent, godless," and "largely populated by men who would eat your children in front of your eyes." The man instructs his son that "good guys" yet remain, and the novel's ending brings that truth home.