While on the planes to and from Florida the other week I make my way through Cormac McCarthy’s new novel The Road. One of the best books I’ve read in a while. I suppose it also qualifies as a genre novel of sorts — a man and a boy, both nameless, struggling for survival as they wander through a number of devastated, ashen postapocalyptic landscapes. But this pared-down story line takes a back seat to the mesmerizing tone of the book, the language of it, the steady pulse of brief, strange, discontinuous passages, separated from each other by double returns, reading almost like prose poems, fading into the narrative for only a few beats at a time before fading out again. As though even the plot has been scoured away, leaving behind a story told solely through, in Eliot’s phrase, a heap of broken images.

They bore on south in the days and weeks to follow. Solitary and dogged. A raw hill country. Aluminum houses. At times they could see stretches of the interstate highway below them through the bare stands of secondgrowth timber. Cold and growing colder. Just beyond the high gap in the mountains they stood and looked out over the great gulf to the south where the country as far as they could see was burned away, the blackened shapes of rock standing out of the shoals of ash and billows of ash rising up and blowing downcountry through the waste. The track of the dull sun moving unseen beyond the murk.

I finish the book and find it powerful and enthralling and unsettling, with a kind of terrible, harrowing quiet throughout. The elemental quiet of the world they travel through, the foreboding quiet of the story’s pace, the implacable quiet of the writing.