8.26.2005
Way out west
Last night I finished reading Cormac McCarthy's latest novel No Country For Old Men, and it was not only the quickest McCarthy read I've ever experienced, but also the one that left me most undecided in my reaction to the book.
That partly stems from intense discussions on the web about the book that I read before I'd even seen the book. There was much debate about whether the book was a thriller, and if so, if it was up to McCarthy's usual standards. Debates about genre are tiresome, and as an avid mystery fan I find them insulting. A smart thriller is better than a stuffy bit of literary pretension any day. My mixed feelings about this book, then, stem from the fact that it is slight and even a bit disjointed in its plotting, and provides more of a visceral rush than an intellectual one. The book follows three characters for the most part -- Llewelyn Moss, a welder who happens across the aftermath of a drug deal gone bad and makes off with $2 million in cash; Anton Chigurh, a bounty hunter of sorts who tracks Moss and takes out anyone in his path; and Sheriff Bell, who feels increasingly helpless in the face of the rising violence brought by the border drug trade between his rural Texas and Mexico.
It seems as if the story is set in the present day, and even the jacket flap text says that the book is "set in our own time along the bloody frontier between Texas and Mexico." The only giveway is mention of a coin that is used to decide the fate of a peripheral character. Chigurh makes a convenience store clerk study the coin, which, by landing heads up, saved him from being shot. He asks the clerk to read the date on the coin, and is told it is from 1958. Chigurh says the coin traveled 22 years to reach the clerk to play that pivotal role at that moment. That sounds like a book set in 1980 to me. The point is, McCarthy writes of such rural, rustic people, places and themes, that his books seem essentially timeless. Without that marker -- and references to "mobiles" that could be phones or walkie talkies -- it would be hard to pin the book to a time any more specifically than "the latter half of the 20th century."
In Bookforum, Madison Smartt Bell offers what may be the most even-handed review yet filed about the book. "Dostoevsky was, on one level, a writer of thrillers, and Nabokov was wrong to sneer at him for it. No Country for Old Men offers much more hard-driving suspense than any of McCarthy's previous works; in fact the plot's motor is so overdriven that one tends to read too fast to savor the writerly nuances," he writes.
James Wood in the New Yorker is particularly pointed in noting the flaws he sees in the book, saying that the rote nature of a thriller "is the perfect vehicle for McCarthy's deterministic mythmaking, matching his metaphysical cheapness with a slickness unto death all its own."
That review sparked heated debate online, particularly at the Reading Experience blog, where Wood and blogger Daniel Green go back and forth about morality and the value of character depth in fiction. It's a fascinating discussion, if for no other reason than that you rarely get to see a writer stick up for his work in so dynamic a fashion.
In the end, the book was definitely entertaining and thought-provoking. If it wasn't as satisfying as All the Pretty Horses or earlier work like Blood Meridian, it is certainly a worthy addition to McCarthy's significant body of work.
That partly stems from intense discussions on the web about the book that I read before I'd even seen the book. There was much debate about whether the book was a thriller, and if so, if it was up to McCarthy's usual standards. Debates about genre are tiresome, and as an avid mystery fan I find them insulting. A smart thriller is better than a stuffy bit of literary pretension any day. My mixed feelings about this book, then, stem from the fact that it is slight and even a bit disjointed in its plotting, and provides more of a visceral rush than an intellectual one. The book follows three characters for the most part -- Llewelyn Moss, a welder who happens across the aftermath of a drug deal gone bad and makes off with $2 million in cash; Anton Chigurh, a bounty hunter of sorts who tracks Moss and takes out anyone in his path; and Sheriff Bell, who feels increasingly helpless in the face of the rising violence brought by the border drug trade between his rural Texas and Mexico.
It seems as if the story is set in the present day, and even the jacket flap text says that the book is "set in our own time along the bloody frontier between Texas and Mexico." The only giveway is mention of a coin that is used to decide the fate of a peripheral character. Chigurh makes a convenience store clerk study the coin, which, by landing heads up, saved him from being shot. He asks the clerk to read the date on the coin, and is told it is from 1958. Chigurh says the coin traveled 22 years to reach the clerk to play that pivotal role at that moment. That sounds like a book set in 1980 to me. The point is, McCarthy writes of such rural, rustic people, places and themes, that his books seem essentially timeless. Without that marker -- and references to "mobiles" that could be phones or walkie talkies -- it would be hard to pin the book to a time any more specifically than "the latter half of the 20th century."
In Bookforum, Madison Smartt Bell offers what may be the most even-handed review yet filed about the book. "Dostoevsky was, on one level, a writer of thrillers, and Nabokov was wrong to sneer at him for it. No Country for Old Men offers much more hard-driving suspense than any of McCarthy's previous works; in fact the plot's motor is so overdriven that one tends to read too fast to savor the writerly nuances," he writes.
James Wood in the New Yorker is particularly pointed in noting the flaws he sees in the book, saying that the rote nature of a thriller "is the perfect vehicle for McCarthy's deterministic mythmaking, matching his metaphysical cheapness with a slickness unto death all its own."
That review sparked heated debate online, particularly at the Reading Experience blog, where Wood and blogger Daniel Green go back and forth about morality and the value of character depth in fiction. It's a fascinating discussion, if for no other reason than that you rarely get to see a writer stick up for his work in so dynamic a fashion.
In the end, the book was definitely entertaining and thought-provoking. If it wasn't as satisfying as All the Pretty Horses or earlier work like Blood Meridian, it is certainly a worthy addition to McCarthy's significant body of work.
