RaveThe Los Angeles TimesBarely 20 pages in, we get a glimpse of how this book is going to break our hearts … The father and boy are never named. In the hands of most other novelists, this would have the effect of reducing them to metaphors, but McCarthy is so accomplished that the reader senses the mysterious and intuitive changes between father and son that can't be articulated, let alone dramatized. One of the few tokens of hope The Road offers is that although the catastrophe that scorched the earth also burned away people's names, identity is fireproof.
Hari Kunzru
PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewKunzru’s awareness and discernment have particular value in an America of the moment where nothing less than the country’s meaning is at stake. White Tears is distinguished by a knowledge of blues at its deepest, a gift for observation at its most penetrating and stretches of plain old marvelous writing, some swallowing up the pages around them the way a single song swallows up the side of an album ... A little more than halfway through, when things happen that don’t entirely add up even on the book’s terms, the reader gets the feeling that the narrative relies on the author’s stellar writing a bit excessively. We feel ourselves skillfully maneuvered from this point to that rather than swept up by the novel’s momentum ... But in the final quarter the story regains its bearings, grasps us in its intensity and then gathers force, offering its strongest passages and revealing, in this Book of Secrets, the biggest secret of all.
