No Country for Old Men: Book Review

I just finished reading No Country for Old Men, by Cormac McCarthy. I also watched the movie adaptation of the book made by the Coen brothers, and I think the movie did an excellent job adapting the story for what it was, with some interesting choices made. I'll touch upon the movie in places, though this review will primarily be about the book.

This book is most aptly described by relating to you the author; it is rather similar to Stephen King—just mention the author, and you can get the general idea and sell the book on that alone. McCarthy is known for his neo-western/anti-western novels that are characterized by their violence, their brutal realism, and distinctive prose style. The neo-western/anti-western description alone is seemingly contradictory, yet I've found that it describes this book perfectly (I'm not the one who came up with it). Along a similar train of thought, McCarthy's books have been described as both highly nihilistic and highly moralistic by people. Yet, after reading this book, I can see both sides.

(As a slight aside, I think there are two kinds of (moral) nihilism that tend to get used in common parlance. One kind of nihilism is the rejection of objective values (of good and evil). The other kind of nihilism is not really nihilism if you're going off the above definition; in this version, you presuppose the concepts of good and evil and show that the world does not reflect them. One is a conceptual rejection of good and evil, and the other is a rejection of the idea that these concepts can be instantiated. Those using the latter might claim nihilism because people don't care about making the world a better place, while the former will question why we ought to make the world "better," anyway; what does that even mean? They often bleed into one another since I think people conflate them, and this, I think, is how two opposing ideas can apply to the same work. McCarthy is nihilistic according to the latter definition, as the opposed to the former.)

No Country for Old Men, in particular, is about a man who stumbled across a bag of money at a scene of a drug trade gone wrong, kicking off a string of violence as the owners of the money try to take the money back.

Overall, I'm not sure how I feel. There were a lot of good parts to the story, but McCarthy's prose rubs me the wrong way, and I questioned some of the story craft decisions at the very end. My opinion is evolving over time, so we'll see how I feel when I finish writing the first draft of this review.

Strides (No Spoilers)

What I liked most about this story was the violence and the brutal realism. This should be obvious. And No Country delivers on this in spades. He does not hold back on showing the consequences of the fighting, even devoting whole sequences to showing how the characters respond to their injuries. There are no terminators in this story. People get shot, and they have to deal with the injuries, including treatments and finding shelter.

People often associate brutal realism with violence, and while I think that is part of it, I also think that there is component that emphasizes human ineptitude. The story cuts out the cinematic elements that you normally get in stories and replaces them with the continual theme that we don't have the power or the wiles the achieve world changing events. Gone is Mitch McDeere, and in comes Jimmy McNulty, for a depressing reminder that we can't do shit. So, this book is a lot like The Terror, which I reviewed a little while back.

I also liked the character voice. I don't necessarily mean for the specific characters, but for the Texan culture that is portrayed in the story. I imagine this is because of McCarthy's own life, living in the South. The exception for specific characters would be Anton Chigurh, who has a distinctive feel to him, because everything about his character contrasts with what is normal.

Of course, Anton Chigurh is the character that carries the story. His is a sociopathic monster with no concept of humor, who single-mindedly goes about his macabre business with terrifying effectiveness. You really do get the idea that Moss is going to meet his match when coming toe to toe with him.

While Moss was not the most interesting character, he was still a great addition. He made smart decisions along the way that did not push the boundaries of what I am willing to accept. My favorite depictions of intelligence are where they aren't superhuman in their displays, but are heavily constrained, yet still making all the best decisions, and Moss very much hit this mark.

Stumbles (No Spoilers)

The start of the negatives has to do with the prose. As usual, I think this is a preference. Either way, I did not appreciate his tendency to cut out punctuation. While the dialogue was surprisingly easy to follow for what it was, I still don't find the lack of quotations compelling. The overall feeling it gave the story was making it seem more dreamlike and less grounded, which doesn't really fit the kind of story being told.

And the lack of commas was another problem. The use of conjunctions in place of commas has a technical term, polysyndeton, and it leads to this repetitive rhythm to his writing that I did not care for. Instead of saying, "He went into the bathroom to shower and shave, before turning in for the night," he might say, "He went in the bathroom and showered and shaved and returned to his bedroom and went to sleep." He apparently prefers simple declarative sentences. And I can see the appeal in this, and I can even say I would take this over the syntactic abominations I saw while skimming the discursive trash known as Infinite Jest, but I still want some creativity in my writing.

I also did not appreciate the stripped back approach to writing. McCarthy spares every word in this book. He doesn't even use transition sentences or paragraphs, often jumping from some piece of dialogue "I'm on my way to the crime scene" to actually being there in literally the next sentence. Apparently, this is not characteristic of most of McCarthy's works, however. This was originally a screenplay, and he simply translated the story into a novel. It makes sense, but I find it harder to get immersed in the story and the lives of the characters if there are obvious breaks or jumps in the narrative that pull you out and make you think about the story as a story, rather than allowing you to live in it. The appeal of adding padding to stories is the immersive power and the feeling that the characters and the world are real.

The one benefit, of course, is that I'm not sifting through an exorbitant tome of words, words, and more words. (And you can insert another snipe of your preference at Infinite Jest here). At the same time, my own novel is also incredibly long, so I have my obvious preference.

I also took issue with a lot of the plot progression, though this might be downstream of the stripped back approach that McCarthy took when writing this book. I often got the sense that scenes were just happening, without much concept of cause and effect. The reason I think this is more due to the stripped back approach, and therefore, a matter of execution, is that I looked up summaries and read reviews of the book and this clarified the progression of the events for me. I think McCarthy could have spent more time fleshing out the story beats so things would feel more natural.

Anther systematic issue with the novel is that McCarthy almost never gives any insight into the thoughts of the characters. He simply describes their actions from over and above. The only exceptions are the hard-to-read stream of consciousness passages that begin each chapter. But the lack of this inside information seems to eliminate the purpose of writing the novel, when that is one of the key benefits that books have over visual mediums. This is one of the reasons that the movie is just as good, if not better than the book.

Another issue is the ending of the novel. This is more involved than the non-spoiler section can allow, so I will simply say that it is a problem of execution in one sense, a lost opportunity in another sense, and an overlong ending in the last sense.

Overall, my reaction is quite mixed. I'll give it a 5/10.

Strides (Spoilers)

The iconic coin toss scene is only a minor spoiler (indeed, some might deny that it is a spoiler at all), and the movie adapts it in a way that makes the sequence more compelling. Chigurh breaks social conventions, making the whole conversation incredibly awkward and uncomfortable, and Bordem's portrayal, with his excessive eye contact and facial expressions, brings the scene to life in a way that is stunningly effective.

I also really enjoyed the confrontation between Chigurh and Wells, and feel much the same about the movie's portrayal, especially with the small changes they made, with the phone going off during their conversation and that leading directly to the conversation between Moss and Chigurh.

Stumbles (Spoilers)

My main spoiler-filled issues with the book are three issues related to the ending. Let me start by saying what I am not complaining about. I don't care that Moss was killed. It should be obvious to anyone who has read any of my reviews that I don't care for happy endings and generally prefer bittersweet and outright bitter endings. The ending is problematic because of its execution: why was his death offscreen?

This is something that I have thought about quite a bit, and I actually thought that the movie might change this, but the movie did nothing. And I try to think about the merits of making certain literary decisions; I can understand the benefits of writing a stripped back book, even if I generally don't appreciate them. Yet, I don't really understand the reasoning behind this choice. The only thing that comes to mind is that it is a subversion showing that the book and its central theme is not really about Moss, but about Bell, which makes sense in retrospect. But I think this idea is more than adequately communicated by his (onscreen) death and the closure of the story through Bell's eyes.

So, why was the death offscreen? Why did we simply hear about it after the fact, when we could have been treated to a tense scene that ends with Moss seriously injured, before moving to Bell's perspective to show us his death? I have no idea. And this is a trend in some literary fiction stories that I have noticed, and I don't know why. I wish I could think of some examples, but none are coming to mind right now.

Another related issue is why the death had to be caused by a rival band of Mexican's that kind of appear in the story out of nowhere. Of course, the story shows that they are looking for him and it makes clear that it is not just Chigurh (and Wells) looking for the money. Yet, there was little to no focus on them. Even the death scene places no focus on them because it was off-screen. They just pop in, shoot him, are killed, and then are gone.

There seems to be this trend in writing where people seem to think that unpredictability is so important that we might as well ignore the other aspects of writing. And since this came out in 2005 I can't really say this is part of that trend, but it seems to be following the same idea. You expect a final confrontation between Moss and Chigurh, yet that doesn't happen! Gotchya! Random Mexicans kill him! Off screen, too! You never saw that coming.

Here's a hot take: an entirely predictable story where the reader watches in horror as the inevitable unfolds before them is far more compelling than this over-reliance on surprise.

And finally, I thought the ending was far too long. And this is really odd given how stripped back the book is in every other respect. You would expect the story to tie up those threads and cut the reel without mercy, but apparently McCarthy wanted to take his time. The movie improved on this by cutting it down, so I'll grant points there.

Conclusion

Overall, my reaction is quite mixed. I'll give it a 5/10.