“The blackness he woke to on those nights was sightless and impenetrable. A blackness to hurt your ears with listening.”

“Where men cant [sic] live gods fare no better.”

How do you keep hope when there is little left to hope for? Worse yet, how do you convince others to hope when you are unsure if you have any hope left? Do you lie? Would that make it worse when they found out? Do you honestly confess your own doubts, risking making the other’s worse?

How encouraging to be when things are going badly is always tricky, whether to a friend who lost their job or a child trying a new sport. The extreme, though, is expertly painted by McCarthy in The Road. A post-apocalyptic father and son journey South in the hope of finding a warmer climate. The timid son is confronted by a reality that had his mother abandon them without hope years past, while his father does his best to keep the fire alive. They strike bargains: the son demands his father not give him a larger share of the food they find, for if he is dishonest in small things, how can he be trusted in large things? They face a world in which killing themselves might be merciful, rather than cruel: the father wonders this for himself, but cannot face the reality of doing the same to his son. Given his own doubts, however, how can he keep his son going?

The Road has won numerous awards, including the Pulitzer, and has also been turned into a relatively successful movie. McCarthy himself has had a series of bestselling books, including All the Pretty Horses, Blood Meridian, and No Country for Old Men, which in its movie version won Best Picture. He is also often mentioned as a candidate for the Nobel Prize for Literature. The Road is not an uplifting read, but it is an important read, and like all the best fiction, gives the reader a better understanding of his fellow humans and even himself.