BRIEFLY NOTED.

The Road, by Cormac McCarthy (Knopf; $24). In his new novel, McCarthy exchanges the bleak Western setting of previous works for an even bleaker post-apocalyptic one. As usual, lawless space engenders violence, but here a nuclear holocaust has reduced everything to ash, mummifying all but a few unlucky souls, who must kill or be killed (and eaten). The main characters are a father and his son, who was born a few nights after the bombs fell. "We're still the good guys," the man repeatedly assures the boy as they scavenge their way south for the winter, trying to avoid "bad guy" survival techniques. Even by McCarthy's standards, the horrors here--an infant "headless and gutted and blackening on the spit"--are extreme, and, deprived of historical context, his brutality can seem willful. But McCarthy's prose retains its ability to seduce--the deathscape is "like the onset of some cold glaucoma dimming away the world"--and there are nods to the gentler aspects of the human spirit.

Memorial, by Bruce Wagner (Simon & Schuster; $26). In this ambitious novel, four members of a Los Angeles family grapple with loneliness and pain while seeking financial and spiritual fulfillment. Joan is a minor architect striving to land the contract to design a memorial for two victims of the 2004 tsunami; her brother Chester hopes, after being injured during a prank reality show, to sue his way into a windfall. Their father, Ray, has his own lawsuit in the works, following a mistaken police raid on his house. Meanwhile, Marj, the matriarch, falls victim to an elaborate scam. Wagner sets up a delicate structural plan that mimics the family's progression from estrangement to a kind of intimacy. He comes close to overwhelming his characters with his own inimitable, trivia-dense voice, but ultimately he creates a tender vision of modern life, one in which preoccupations with popular culture are an imperfect carapace for the vulnerable hearts ...