I finished Cormac McCarthy's The Road over the holiday. It's shown up on a few best-of-2006 lists, and I can kind of see why. The thing is, it's a pretty loose book, not much happens, though it's a lovely read. And it has an unhappy ending, so it's par for the course for me.

The story - such as it is - is about a man and his son (no names, just "the man" and "the boy") who wander a post-nuclear wasteland. I'm guessing post-nuclear, because there are references to explosions, and burnt out cities. There's nothing explicit, though, and the holocaust could have been anything. But that doesn't hurt the book, and instead makes it eerier. Nothing is alive, it seems, except for a few human beings. No animals populate this book, and it seems the only plant left is grass, and even then I had doubts (there's only one explicit mention of grass, and it's in passing).

The man and boy see horrible things in their travels - cannibalism, murder, disease, and so on - and can do very little about it. The man carries a revolver with two or three bullets. When he leaves the boy alone, he tells the boy how to commit suicide, you know, just in case cannibals attack.

My one reservation is that as great as the writing is in this book, there is no story. The man and boy wander around for a while. Sometimes they're hungry, other times, they find food. Sometimes they see horrible things, usually they don't. The man is sick. The boy is malnourished. That's about it.

This is all written in beautiful prose, but since I left the book at my parents' house, you're not going to get to read any of it here. I would say you could see where this story is going, but since there's no real story of which to speak, there's not much to forsee. The man is sick. What do you think happens? The boy knows what to do with the pistol in case cannibals show up. What do you think happens? I'd say read it to find out. But either wait for the paper back, or get it out of your local library.

And yes, it has a depressing ending, just in case you were wondering.