No Country for Old Men

Cormac McCarthy

The defining trait of every Cormac McCarthy novel to date is that it has defined the notion that the more difficult a book is to read, the more rewarding it will be than any author's work since Gunter Grass completed the Danzig Trilogy. When I got a new McCarthy novel, I sat myself down and prepare for three months of struggling with language, but knew that I would have, at the end, read one of the finest, most fulfilling novels I had read that year.

Now, eight years since his last published novel, McCarthy drops *No Country for Old Men* on the heads of an unsuspecting public. And McCarthy has created in this book something he has never created before: a truly readable novel. I got through the three hundred five pages (and it's slight for a McCarthy, too-- perhaps his shortest book since *Child of God*) in slightly over two weeks. It took me twice that to read *Child of God*, for heaven's sake.

One might reasonably expect that an increase in the readability (which of course translates to "commercial accessibility") of McCarthy's output might lead to a concomitant decrease in the satisfaction one gets from a McCarthy novel. I can very happily say that such has not in the least occurred. While *No Country for Old Men* is not the pinnacle of brilliance that was *Blood Meridian*, very few novels are, and it is almost unfair to compare anything, even McCarthy's other works, to the perfection of *Blood Meridian*. *No Country for Old Men*, however, easily holds its own with the rest of McCarthy's considerable opus.

The book centers, as much as it can center, on Ed Tom Bell, the sheriff of a small border county in Texas. One of the residents of said county, Llewellyn Moss, stumbles upon a drug deal gone very bad out in the desert. He finds a cache of money in the wreckage and takes it for himself, triggering a manhunt both by hired assassin Anton Chigurh and by Bell, who wants to bring Moss in and protect him. Bell is the key character only by virtue of the fact that he gets the most screen time (a short monologue of Bell's opens each of the novel's thirteen chapters); Moss and Chigurh also get a good amount of time, along with some minor characters.

The story is told, as fans of McCarthy's will not be surprised to find, in impressionist fashion. In a Cormac McCarthy novel, there is no such thing as a climax, a denouement, or any of the other literary terms you hear even less often than those. There is a narrative, and McCarthy spins it, telling you as much by the pieces of the story he leaves out as by those he relates, forcing the reader to fill in a number of details, looking for things that don't really exist. It is a country that is solely McCarthy's, at this point in time, and he treads it well. But he's carved out a new section of this territory, one that's closer to what you're used to reading. This book is more a conventional thriller, as much as anything McCarthy writes can be called "conventional," and it seems the holes one expects with impressionist writing are slightly smaller (with one exception, early on in the novel, that will be easily recognizable).

To heap any Cormac McCarthy novel with the usual superlatives ("a stunning achievement" keeps buzzing around in my head) would be to do a disservice to the novel. Charles Hatton said of Secretariat, after his record-shattering Belmont Stakes victory, "his only point of reference is himself." Cormac McCarthy is one of the handful of living American novelists (Wendy Walker, Kathe Koja, and Barry Hannah being the other three I'm aware of) to whom that statement can be applied without reservation. No Country for Old Men does McCarthy's corpus justice. Read it.