No Country for Old Men

Thoughts on Cormac McCarthy’s Famous Novel

Photo by Adam Thomas on Unsplash

*Originally published 2/2/2023

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!