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This week Nick Shimkin recommends a novel by Cormac McCarthy.




“No Country For Old Men” by Cormac McCarthy

Some works of literature subscribe to preexisting genres, while others exist to overturn them. In Cormac McCarthy’s searing neo-western novel “No Country For Old Men,” the author sets up a traditional mystery-thriller (albeit one with hefty questions of morality and fate) and proceeds to upend narrative conventions at every turn.

The story is simple enough: a trailer-trash Texan named Llewelyn Moss out hunting antelope in the desert stumbles onto a bloodbath – a horrific scene of corpses, rotting dogs and shot up trucks; the remnants of a drug deal gone horribly awry – and decides to make off with a cool $2 million he finds near the scene. The act sets in motion a cat-and-mouse chase with biblical implications, as a soulless psychopath named Anton Chigurgh is tasked with retrieving the loot and soon picks up his scent. A beleaguered county sheriff named Ed Tom Bell is after them both, and the novel is interspersed with his world-weary ruminations on how things got to be so bad. The bulk of the novel unfolds as a merciless, full-throttle chase sequence, the narrative baton being passed between the three men: Bell as the force of good; Chigurgh as terrifying, unadulterated evil; and Moss as the symbol of modern man’s folly, hopelessly caught in the middle, bound to pay for his greed.

The book sweeps you along like a gale force wind, and after a sudden, seeming anticlimax, McCarthy only sucks you in further with his visceral, violent text. To me the greatest strength of the novel is McCarthy’s ability to contrast the vast, empty and unforgiving West Texas landscape with scenes, characters, and even moods that are sharp, cunning, and to-the-point. McCarthy, whose other novels display a similar understanding of the expansive Texas border country, balances artful prose with pointed dialogue and an ear for local jargon. His disregard for correct sentence formation and lack of quotations are jarring, but lend the tale a sort of barbed simplicity. In describing Moss on the initial hunt:

“The sun was up less than an hour and the shadow of the ridge and the datilla and the rocks fell far out across the floodplain below him… He lowered the binoculars and sat studying the land. Far to the south the raw mountains of Mexico. The breaks of the river. To the west the baked terracotta terrain of the running borderlands. He spat dryly and wiped his mouth on the shoulder of his cotton workshirt.”

Characters say only what needs to be said, often wryly or with a peculiar angle on things. When a deputy sheriff, surveying the blood-spattered scene in the desert, comments “Looks like a damn mess,” Bell replies, “If it ain’t it’ll do til the mess gets here.” McCarthy’s dialogue is as sparse as the landscape the characters inhabit, but rich with dramatic subtext, especially as the story draws to a solemn close.

Maverick American filmmakers Joel and Ethan Coen have made a film of “No Country For Old Men,” and have wisely stuck closely to the source material. In fact, the film is the most literal-minded (but certainly not dry) adaptation of a novel I’ve ever seen. Known for their stylistic excess, the Coen’s have stripped their film down to a bare minimum of enthralling chases, a trio of uncanny performances, and daunting widescreen landscapes. Chigurgh, largely left a blank slate in the book, has been rendered an instant classic movie badass by the talented Javier Bardem, who dispatches victims with a silenced shotgun and a pressurized steel cattle gun with McCarthy’s bone-chilling realism. Like McCarthy’s gripping book, the film forgoes all the rules of a thriller and heads somewhere cynical, bleak, and intensely fatalistic in the final act.


-Nick Shimkin