No Country for Old Men

I finished reading Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men this weekend, having practically binged it over the course of a few days. The tl;dr version of my thoughts are basically that I found the book to be extremely gripping. Basically, every scene with Chigurh had me asking “what is this crazy fucker gonna do next?”

I’ve never actually seen the movie, though I’ve obviously heard great things about Javier Bardem’s portrayal of Chigurh so, that might be next on my list. In addition to never having seen the movie, I’ve also never read any of McCarthy’s other work before this one. At first, I was genuinely confused about the way he wrote dialogue, but I actually grew to really enjoy his approach as I got further into the book. McCarthy’s prose and dialogue feel like they become this singular, coherent voice; almost a stream of consciousness in a way that feels somehow both casual and strangely immersive? Was it hard to follow who was talking a few times? Yes. Mostly because a majority of the southern/Texan characters speak the same way. But the unpretentiousness of the dialogue was honestly pretty refreshing.

As far as plot goes, No Country didn’t go where I thought it was going to go in the slightest. The first half of the book points to what I thought would have been a fairly explosive final act. Instead (and I’ll be as light on spoilers here as possible), the final act ends with a very intentional whimper followed by an almost meditative denouement. As someone who largely reads for theme, I found the ending to be just right, but I can imagine some people being pretty put off by what happens.

And now that I’ve mentioned theme… I want to dig in with some of my gut-level thoughts on just that.

While I was reading, I was reminded a bit of East of Eden by Steinbeck. From my perspective, both books really try to investigate the idea of legacy, and do so through this lens of examining the changing of American values across generations. Both books identify a sort of mythologized “older America” that is rapidly becoming a corrupted “new America.” Then, both books reject that premise outright.

East of Eden does so in a way that feels deeply personal. Steinbeck places the center of this investigation firmly within the Trask family tree and uses the cyclical nature of their lives and draws parallels to the Book of Genesis to examine the idea. The ultimate catharsis of the book,“Timshel,” becomes the single idea that rejects the notion of some inherent corruption both within the characters and the world around them as it aims to impart this sense of individualized free will onto everyone. In that way, Steinbeck highlights how America’s history has always been about the actions of individuals, and the argument effectively becomes “we can save our own nation from corruption through our own actions.”

If East of Eden is The Book of Genesis, then No Country for Old Men is the Book of Revelations. While Steinbeck argues that the corruption of a mythologized, better world can be stopped by individual action, McCarthy seems far more interested in rejecting any kind of “mythological past” altogether. He goes to great lengths interrogating the idea that the past was some shining, glorious thing, and that goodness, decency, moral corruption, greed, and desire are all simply sides of the same coin.

More than that, however, McCarthy brings this sort of deterministic, interdependent view to the table. All throughout No Country, characters remark that the places we arrive to in life are a result of both our individual actions and the circumstrances around us. The freedom Timshel might afford someone becomes increasingly more narrow as circumstances pile on top of circumstances. Chigurh kills his victims because his actions and the actions of countless others have brought him and his victim together. He still pulls the trigger, yes. But their death is seen, in his eyes, as almost nothing more than “bad luck.”

In No Country for Old Men, the world is painted in shades of gray. Every action we take muddies the picture further. The book wants us to stop and ask, “is this action mine, or a byproduct of circumstance?” McCarthy doesn’t really lands on an answer, allowing even that to be a shade of gray, and I think the book is better for it.

Anyway… since this is my first review/discussion of a book, I felt inclined to give it a rating. But I’m realizing that this would probably be reductive. I’ll say this much instead: I enjoyed No Country for Old Men quite a bit, and I’ll probably read The Road soon too.