Never-Ending Fire

The Road
by Cormac McCarthy
Vintage Books, 2007
(287 pages, $14.95, paperback)

reviewed by Robert Elder

As I read The Road, I kept imagining two people sitting on a darkened stage with the ruins of the world around them, one saying, “Everything is gone,” and the other asking, “What is left?” Cormac McCarthy is probably best known for All the Pretty Horses, and for his unflinching commitment to portrayals of human depravity.

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Robert Elder is currently writing a dissertation at Emory University on honor culture and Evangelical Christianity in the nineteenth-century American South. He writes the weblog, Clio and Calvin. He lives in Decatur, Georgia, with his wife Catherine, and is a member of Christ Church Presbyterian.

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