Cormac McMonthly: No Country for Old Men (2005)
It has done got way beyond anything you might of thought about even a few years ago.
Cormac McCarthy was one of the greatest American writers of fiction. During his life, he published 12 novels. Over the course of this year, I have been reading one of those novels each month, in publishing order, and reflecting on the experience here. Welcome to Cormac McMonthly.
This newsletter is not the work of a young man, though I didn’t realize that when I started it nearly a year ago. It’s become clearer to me over time.
I’m concerned now, about the state of the world, in a way I wasn’t and couldn’t have been when I was younger.
I guess every generation reaches a point where it looks around and says, everything’s going to hell in a handbasket. I try not to boil my sentiments down to anything that simple, but the more I see today’s youth behaving in ways I don’t and doing things that would not naturally occur to me to do, the more some ugly instinct within me recoils. I hate to admit it.
And yes, death stalks all of us at every turn. Yes, you too, gentle reader.
In No Country for Old Men, that looming spectre of death seems to be Cormac McCarthy’s primary concern. I mean, it kind of always does, in all of his work, but here especially.
This book shocked me. Not because of its depictions of violence, or its bleakness. You can’t read eight McCarthy novels in a year and not be inured to those aspects by the time you reach the ninth one.
This book’s simplicity shocked me. Coming off of the Border Trilogy, No Country feels stripped down. Intentionally streamlined. Like someone dumped a McCarthy novel into ChatGPT and prompted it to do a rewrite in the style of Lee Child.
There are few long-winded philosophical ruminations. Few painterly descriptions of landscapes or gutters.
Characters perform actions that are detailed and easy to follow. Gun parts are described vividly, with liberal use of manufacturer names.
I’ve heard that the novel was originally written as a screenplay, and that is indeed how it reads. It’s propulsive in a way that McCarthy isn’t, in prior works. The fat has been stripped away. It’s all sinewy. Ropey muscles and scar tissue.
Until it isn’t.
Past a certain climactic point in the narrative, the book seems to get lost, as if it walked into a room and can’t remember why it came there. So it sits down in an easy chair and, having let go of the main plot threads, decides to regale the reader with some old, uneasy memories. They’re told entertainingly enough. But, like listening to an elderly relative speak, it’s not over nearly soon enough, and feels myopic in its intention.
Well.
I think it all hinges on the question posed by the book’s title. We’re talking about one of two things here, and I’m not entirely convinced of which it is, which means it’s probably both.
Certainly, the title refers to America, that mystical canvas about which and upon which Ol’ Cormie applies his brushstrokes. It has become inhospitable to men who remember how it used to be, or how it was supposed to be in theory. America ain’t no place for those men, who are, by their nature, now old.
I wonder whether the title also suggests that there simply is no country for old men. Not anywhere in the world. Perhaps it hasn’t been invented yet, and perhaps it never can be. Because if there’s one thing history has repeatedly proven, it’s that the concept of country has always been decided and upheld by groups of relatively young and ambitious men.
Through the process of aging, the body weakens, but the mind’s time horizon stretches long. Comparisons start being made between the way things are now – seen through the lens of a less potent version of a once-strong self – to the way things once were, when the self was powerful and full of hope and comparably unwise.
The dope dealers no longer even pretend to give a damn about the law, and the law knows that’s a damn shame.
An aging novelist wonders whether he’s said all he can in novel form, and whether the public has any more appetite for printed words. Maybe it’s time to give movies a try.
A middle-aged nobody has unlimited ability to publish his thoughts thanks to technological advancements, and chooses to wring his hands over whether kids today are staring at screens too much of the time.
There’s no place for old men to go, so they invent their own places, which are thought palaces devoted to the way they think things once were. And that once is always better than the now, on the whole.
And then there’s death.
Speaking of which, I’m surprised to find that I’ve yet to type the words Anton Chigurh. Maybe I’m subconsciously avoiding him. Understandable, given his predilections.
Anton Chigurh is often cited as McCarthy’s best – or at least most famous – character. That’s a shame. Coming off of McCarthy’s earlier works, in which complex and extremely unlikable men vie for the reader’s attention and force the reader into uncomfortable, introspective situations, Chigurh reads like a Batman villain. He’s a cartoon, and generally an uninteresting one.
Chigurh kills people with a bolt stunner, and makes them call coin flips to determine their fate. He will not stop killing because he has decided that killing is his thing that he does. It simply can’t be helped; please understand.
This is all extremely silly, by McCarthy standards.
Eventually Chigurh kills all of the necessary plot-relevant characters in the story and is spirited away by a car crash.
Was I the only one reminded of Poochie going back to his home planet?
Llewelyn Moss, for my money, was far more interesting. His attempt to outrun the inevitable, his increasingly frantic and desperate decision making, felt real. Though he was pushed to extremes, and forced to make choices most of us will never have to make, he lived this book’s other truth.
We, all of us, are merely the cumulative results of every step we’ve taken previously, and nothing more. Eventually, we run out of steps we can take. Some of us prematurely. And maybe those are the lucky ones.
After all, there is
Cormac McMonthly
January: The Orchard Keeper (1965)
February: Outer Dark (1968)
March: Child of God (1973)
May: Blood Meridian, or, The Evening Redness in the West (1985)
June: All the Pretty Horses (1992)
July: The Crossing (1994)
August: Cities of the Plain (1998)
“I wonder whether the title also suggests that there simply is no country for old men. Not anywhere in the world. Perhaps it hasn’t been invented yet, and perhaps it never can be.”
Great review. The movie was my first experience with Cormac as a teen. I thought Anton was so cool, and the violence a lot of fun to watch. Now, it’s the older folks in the tale that resonate.