In Defense Of: No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy

This 2005 novel gets unfairly maligned by “serious scholars” who view it as a bottom entry of McCarthy’s canon, an amped Western with cornpone sentimentality courtesy of its main character and sometime narrator, Sheriff Ed Tom Bell. No Country for Old Men certainly doesn’t have Blood Meridian’s epic nature or the heartbreaking universality of The Road. It’s not as tight as Child of God or as sprawling as Suttree. Yet, because of this, I believe it is a deceptively brilliant book. By not presenting itself as a masterwork, it can mask itself as genre fiction to seamlessly explore its themes. The novel examines what happens when desperate characters cross paths and how the resulting action has a ripple effect on the metaphysical world.

            In early 1980s Texas, the Mexican drug trade thrives. Sometimes police officers look the other way. Sometimes they have no choice but to let it happen. Llewellyn Moss, a Vietnam vet with a young wife, finds a satchel of money from a drug deal gone wrong. Inside the satchel is two million dollars. He takes the satchel, knowing the owners of this money will stop at nothing to reclaim it. As one of the characters say, “When would you stop looking for your two million dollars?” Moss sends his wife into hiding and sets out to get the Mexican cartel and the monstrous hitman, Anton Chigurh, off his back. What Moss and Sheriff Bell, who takes responsibility for tracking down Moss since he’s a citizen of his county, don’t realize is that Chigurh has broken ranks with his employer and wants the money himself. His former employer, a nameless man who occupies a high-rise in downtown Houston, sends another hitman, Carson Wells, to kill Chigurh and Moss, and find the money. Sounds complicated, but No Country’s plot is simply told, with easy readability.

Here is McCarthy’s starkest prose. Sometimes it’s just pages of untagged dialogue. I had to reread certain sections, especially the one-liners, to get a grip on who was speaking. McCarthy hardly uses commas and never quotations marks. He claims they clutter the page. Here, I agree with him. They would slow the novel’s action. Everything in this book moves forward. It does not stop for asides or backstories unless they come out of the mouths of characters to serve as an addition to what has gone before. Unlike the novel’s  review by James Wood, the prose is not overblown, over-mythic, or whatever ham-fisted terms he wants to throw about. The prose reflects the content and subject matter. Without it, McCarthy’s purposes would suffer.

The book is composed of two sections, one a third-person perspective, the other narrated by Sheriff Bell. Bell’s narration, while compelling, is all aside, backstory, and rumination. Most criticism is thrown at this narration. It sounds hokey at first. Bell seems like a stereotype. Yet, what his character experiences in the novel’s last fifty pages fleshes him out as a human being. What he reveals to his uncle, how he treats his wife, and the imagery of his final dream, leaves the reader wondering if what the Texas-Mexico border has wrought throughout history is what it must answer for in the present. Thematically this last section of the novel clicks. The genre falls away and you're left with understated, hard-hitting literature.

A word of warning: if you do not like violence, stay away from this novel. Most of its characters do not live to see its final pages. They are hitmen, runaways, drug dealers, and disillusioned lawmen. It is not a pleasant experience. But for all the killing, maiming, and biblical prophecy in his work, McCarthy maintains a wry sense of humor. There were streaks of it in Blood Meridian, but No Country for Old Men may be his funniest novel. It’s not a comedy. It’s just peppered with characters whose thoughts and speech made me smile. Even Chigurh has funny moments. Thinking of his former employers: “They must have thought he thought they thought that he thought they were pretty stupid.” As another example, Carson Wells corners Moss and tries to get him to reveal where he has hidden the satchel of money. To soften him up, Wells tells him he served in Vietnam, too. Moss replies, “What’s that make me? Your buddy?” This kind of humor is a welcome relief from the tension that permeates the novel.

            Although its overshadowed by its Oscar-winning adaptation, No Country for Old Men betters the film (which I adore, especially Javier Bardem) because of McCarthy’s prose, carefully crafted characters, and inclusion of what makes Bell, and in turn the novel, tick. McCarthy must be commended for not only the novel itself, but for creating one of literature’s greatest villains. Anton Chigurh uses a cattlegun, a silenced shotgun, and his bare hands to kill, but his philosophizing and reason for being so deplorable inspires true disgust in the reader. While I single out Chigurh as an accomplishment, the whole novel is excellent. Rumor has it No Country for Old Men was a 600-page manuscript publishers pared down for marketability. The public may never read those extra 300 pages. What we have now, however, more than suffices. A