By Cormac McCarthy. Knopf, 241 pp, $30, hardcover.

All the pretty words that have come before to hail and condemn the writing of Cormac McCarthy apply to The Road: bloody, pessimistic, biblical, muscular, sentimental, comma-phobic, and so beautiful. The Road is a less gaudy postapocalyptic inversion of McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, a book that remythologized the settling of the American West to include the carnage and idiocy enacted by those drunk on manifest destiny.

In this simpler novel, a father and young son also stagger toward the West Coast through a debauched landscape in search of…something. Ash, rain, charcoal—that’s the planet. McCarthy’s tonalities are less baroque than in his earlier works, but the message is the same: humans are evil, and there will be no redemption. Cue the Main Street showdown, the arrow through the quadriceps, the rotisseried baby. (Those vulnerable to gloom: wait for a glittery spring afternoon to read The Road.)

Go back to “so beautiful”. The Road is a small novel, a series of brief episodes—some a paragraph, others a page or so—each surrounded by white space in which to recover from the latest brush with bloody coughing, or to rest up for the journey’s next starvation. Many close with dialogue between the man and the boy (neither named), a sparse and heart-startling life-death negotiation without punctuation’s clutter. These often end with the boy’s shattering, understated incantation: “Okay.”

The world may be grey—even snow falls ashen—but the man tries for the comfort of black and white: people are good or bad, there is life and inevitable death. The child isn’t so comforted, and the book becomes a profound debate between father and son as to the world’s new moral chaos and how each will choose to live until death. Choice—and not just a feel-good decision to limit greenhouse gases or decry war—is the book’s revelation. Regardless of the gradual end of the world, humans—one to one, day to day—can choose how much to hurt, how much dishonesty to enact and dignity to debase. No matter the road, McCarthy shows, a child’s work is to remind the father of these choices.