The Road has received numerous positive reviews and honors since its publication. The review aggregator Metacritic reported the book had an average score of 90 out of 100, based on thirty-one reviews.[11] Critics have deemed it "heartbreaking", "haunting", and "emotionally shattering".[12][13][14] In Literary Review, Sebastian Shakespeare wrote: “McCarthy transforms what could have been a ludicrous story into a tense psychological drama about a man living on the edge of sanity. It is remarkable for its acuity, empathy and insight.”[15] The Village Voice referred to it as "McCarthy's purest fable yet."[12] In a New York Review of Books article, author Michael Chabon heralded the novel. Discussing the novel's relation to established genres, Chabon insists The Road is not science fiction; although "the adventure story in both its modern and epic forms... structures the narrative", Chabon says, "ultimately it is as a lyrical epic of horror that The Road is best understood."[16] Entertainment Weekly in June 2008 named The Road the best book, fiction or non-fiction, of the past 25 years[17] and put it on its end-of-the-decade "best-of" list, saying, "With its spare prose, McCarthy's post-apocalyptic odyssey from 2006 managed to be both harrowing and heartbreaking."[18] In 2019, the novel was ranked 17th on The Guardian's list of the 100 best books of the 21st century.[19]
On March 28, 2007, the selection of The Road as the next novel in Oprah Winfrey's Book Club was announced. A televised interview on The Oprah Winfrey Show was conducted on June 5, 2007, McCarthy's first, although he had been interviewed for the print media before.[9] The announcement of McCarthy's television appearance surprised his followers. "Wait a minute until I can pick my jaw up off the floor," said John Wegner, an English professor at Angelo State University in San Angelo, Texas, and editor of The Cormac McCarthy Journal, when told of the interview.[20] During Winfrey's interview, McCarthy insisted his son, John Francis, was also his co-author, as some of the conversations between the father and son in the novel were based upon conversations between McCarthy and John Francis in real life. McCarthy also dedicated the novel to his son, possibly as an expression of paternal love as well as a depiction of it, although he did not say as much in the interview.[8]
On November 5, 2019, the BBC News listed The Road on its list of the 100 most inspiring novels.[21] Although the text does not explicitly mention climate change, The Guardian listed it as one of the five best climate change novels[22] and George Monbiot has called it "the most important environmental book ever written" for depicting a world without a biosphere.[23][24]
Awards and nominations
In 2006, McCarthy was awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in fiction and the Believer Book Award and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction.[25] On April 16, 2007, the novel was awarded the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for fiction.[26] In 2012, it was shortlisted for the Best of the James Tait Black.[27][28]
