No Country for Old Men

Thoughts on Cormac McCarthy’s Famous Novel

Photo by Adam Thomas on Unsplash

Cormac McCarthy—born 1933, age 89, still living—is one of those wildly famous literary authors who I’ve heard writers yap about for years yet have only read twice. (His highly popular post-apocalypse novel The Road and the 1973 novel, Child of God.) Everyone knows the main titles: The Road; Blood Meridian; No Country for Old Men; etc. Born in Rhode Island but raised in Tennessee, he published his first novel at age 32, in 1965.

McCarthy is one of those rare artists who, like younger author Jonathan Franzen, seem to be able to wield the creative sword of being both literary and plot-driven and suspenseful. Not that these two writers are anywhere near the “only” authors to do this, of course. But it’s much less common. Usually you’ve got an author like Stephen King, who is genuinely deep and insightful in his way, but who ultimately mainly writes powerful stories for entertainment. (Nothing at all wrong with that. No judgment here.) Or you’ve got the flip side of the coin: Susan Sontag, say, in the sixties, or Ottessa Moshfegh now, both fantastic authors but highly literary and without (often) much plot or suspense. *(A good contemporary refutation to this might be Emma Cline’s 2016 literary novel, also brimming with plot and suspense, The Girls, a novelization about the Manson girls in the sixties.)

But, similar to my favorite 19th century Russian author, Dostoevsky, McCarthy has been able to pump out a plethora of prose which is not only plot-driven and incredibly suspenseful (and full of juicy cliff-hangers), but also spectacularly “literary,” meaning full of metaphor and symbolism and deeper, under-the-surface meaning.

I tried to read No Country for Old Men three or four times. I can’t recall anymore where or when I bought a used dog-eared paperback copy (Green Apple Books in San Francisco? The Strand in Manhattan?) but I know I’ve had the book with me for years, following me around along with the hundreds of other books I’ve lugged from the west to east coast since 2019.

Why couldn’t I finish it? (In fact I only made it about 65 pages in, at best.) Honestly: I don’t know. It’s funny how sometimes a certain book feels unreadable to you at a certain time, and then weeks or months or years later it suddenly comes alive for you, like early blooming love. That’s one of the magical things about books, about reading: The novels and memoirs stay the same but we, the people reading them, change over time. So each time we go back it’s different; each time we interpret and grasp deeper and different gems of truth. This happened to me with a reread during Covid in 2020 with The Catcher in the Rye. Reading it as an adult, while actually living in Manhattan, and as an older man (older meaning 40, haha) changed everything.

But with McCarthy, at least for me, it was also his profoundly chiseled, unique, hard-won literary voice and style. This is what has largely made him the author he is known as. If you’ve never read his work: Try it. It’s not for everyone. At least not now. You might be like me: After a few tries you may hurl the book across the room and throw your hands in the air only to return to it a couple years later and think, Wow! A contemporary Hemingway only better!

Reading No Country for Old Men was, for me, akin to eating four or five deeply rich dark chocolates. I don’t particularly like dark chocolate. Too rich for my taste. Yet there’s something about the glory of that taste after you’ve swallowed it; something subtle that lingers. This describes McCarthy’s writing. Rich chocolate. The characters are working-class Texans. The dialogue is perfect and precise in every way imaginable. McCarthy uses a very unique stylistic device: He uses indentations of sentences for dialogue instead of quotation marks. Like Hemingway, who I’m certain must have been his hero at some point, he uses the contraction “and” zealously and often, sometimes four, five, even six times in a single sentence. Much of the sentences have little or no punctuation. Periods, yes. But often no commas, and most often no apostrophes. McCarthy is trying (and I think succeeding) to nail the cadence, the natural rhythm, the music as it were of these working-class Texan people. (The book takes place in Texas, 1980.)

The premise is very simple: A 36-year-old man (Llewelyn Moss), while hunting in the desert, happens to bump into a crashed, shot-to-smithereens car filled with bullet holes and dead drug dealers and steals, amidst the chaos, a case containing $2.4 million cash. Not bad, right? But then, of course, nothing in life is free. Especially money. People come after him. He runs. Thus the story ensues. We get several points of view, including from the psychopathic, grotesque villain, Chigurh.

I don’t know what finally made me pick up this book again and finally read it all the way through in a few days. (Fast read, 309 pages.)

I love the novel for many reasons, but one is that McCarthy does not give us a happy ending. Talk about realism. Basically no one comes out happy or unscathed. We don’t read this book to feel good about life, ourselves, contemporary culture. Published in 2005, the slim book is a shaking finger aimed at Atheism, a lack of traditional values; the chaos of the Gospel According to Individuality versus Community; the randomness of contemporary violence; an obsession with Mammon; the scourge of youth living loose and fast; the loss of God and The Family; etc. I am not saying these are McCarthy’s themes in his real life, or what he cares about personally, but they’re the themes that animate No Country for Old Men.

I think McCarthy nails the fear and inevitability of societal change. Especially when in the sheriff-narrator’s POV (sheriff Bell, the main character who helps solve the riddle (partially) of Moss/Chigurh/the drug war gone bad. We get plenty of Bell’s POV, but we also get little separate-from-the-main-plot two, three page sideline comments from Bell, all in italics. Here’s one. Keep in mind this is taking place in 1980 Texas, roughly five years after the Vietnam War ended, and roughly the same since the start of American punk rock:

*(improper grammar/punctuation is McCarthy’s style and on purpose)

“I think we are all of us ill prepared for what is to come and I dont care what shape it takes. And whatever comes my guess is that it will have small power to sustain us. These old people I talk to, if you could of told em that there would be people on the streets of our Texas towns with green hair and bones in their noses speakin a language they couldnt even understand, well, they just flat out wouldnt of believed you.”

Reading the above quote showcases McCarthy’s voice and syntactical, punctuation and diction style. It reads easy but I’m certain it wasn’t easy to craft. Voice and style are never easy. That’s what makes writing a craft: If done well it looks and reads easy when it’s anything but. I felt as I moved through the pages that McCarthy probably spent a long, long time finding and honing that voice and style, and meticulously going over words and phrases and sentences, polishing and pruning to make sure it sounded as real and authentic as feasible. Think of Hemingway: His sentences come off as simple and easy and basic. And technically speaking, they are. But were his books easy to write? Of course not. (Read Hem’s memoir A Moveable Feast for a more in-depth look at his writing struggles and process.)

In the end my only real “complaint” about the novel was its length. Not specifically that it was 309 pages. A novel can be any length really. Look at War & Peace, say, or David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. Both those books crest at over 1,000 pages. But they’re probably just the right length for what they are. There are general industry guidelines for length based on genre (science-fiction, for example, due to world-building often goes significantly longer; young adult generally goes a tad shorter; etc) but of course there’s variability within these genres. A powerful novel by a famous author with a big audience takes what it takes.

I felt the novel would have been perfect at about 250 pages, plus or minus 10-20 pages on either side. The issue I had was with the final 50-60 pages. Everything had been wrapped up nicely. With the villain, Chigurh, and with Moss. The novel starts with Moss’s POV and we end with sheriff Bell’s POV. That’s fine. No issue for me there. But I think after everything had been tied up plot-wise, around page 250, 260, the novel could have ended right there, with maybe a few brief pages from Bell around his life and perspective on what’d happened and on his future in retirement and on the sadness and baseness of contemporary mankind.

Yet what McCarthy does instead is tack on an extra 50-60 pages of deep moral theorizing and thinking which towards the end began to feel, for me, like a badly planned lecture. It started to morph from powerful novel (art) into McCarthy telling the reader what he felt Bell’s values were and possibly, maybe, what his own were. (Maybe not.) In other words: For me it felt superfluous; unnecessary. He could have clipped most if not all of those final 50 pages and I’d have walked away a totally happy, satisfied customer.

But, what’s a little brief overwriting compared to the meat of what he gave us in No Country for Old Men? There’s no denying the novel is a spastic, genius piece of literature. It makes me want to read more. That’s the brilliance and irony of men of letters who are as talented as McCarthy: Even when they don’t do it “perfectly” (does anybody?), they still shock and startle us into the realization that they are who they are for a very good reason.

This is art of the highest form, even if jagged. Maybe that even does make it perfect: The novel reaches out and cuts you up like a knife.