Review: No Country for Old Men

No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I am back to this novel for the third time, teaching it for the second, and I am again struck by its unblinking look at the indifference of the universe to the human condition. I like to set McCarthy into conversation with Don DeLillo. Where DeLillo writes about contemporary characters who seem unable to extricate themselves from the created world – whether of art, politics, or technology – McCarthy shows us characters who can’t escape the concrete, real-life of the human animal.

In McCarthy’s universe – in book after book – he arrives at the same point. Life is nasty, brutish and short. Our plans, whether of what we hope to accomplish or of what we think stands as our enduring accomplishments, are nothing more than specks of dust blown by indifferent winds. It’s a bleak theology, maybe the bleakest of any contemporary writer I know, but that doesn’t keep it from being uninspiring. In fact, while I may question it when I’m not reading McCarthy, when I am reading him I’m convinced he’s the greatest writer of his generation.

I also believe that McCarthy, unlike DeLillo whose topics change as he explores different aspects of contemporary culture, writes that same fundamental set of observations time after time. He’s thought long and hard about what existence promises us in the midst of our separate human hopes, and the answer is always the same: the heavens are empty. Anyone paying attention will know there’s no benign providence looking after us. And anyone thinking about it for long will come to see that the next alternative, that there is a malevolent force shaping events, doesn’t hold philosophical water. There’s only “luck,” – only good accidents or bad accidents – but they’re all accidents rather then the product of some great evil that would, in the sense of suggesting we’re part of some celestial plan, offer a perverse comfort.

No, McCarthy never blinks when it comes to asserting that we’re all alone and that our existence is fundamentally meaningless. If you can deal with that, though, if you can look nakedly at what the human condition implies, then you can go forward a little stronger than before. No one is promising you (or anyone else) anything. Use what strength you have to endure the world before us and, maybe, to look out for someone else who’s going through a hard patch of luck.

All that said, I think what distinguishes one McCarthy novel from another is genre. Going back to Suttree, I see him exploring one literary form after another as he articulates that same fundamental sense of existence. Suttree is, in many ways, a “beat” novel, an On the Road for someone who’s unimpressed by anything that poetry or jazz might offer. It’s about a man who’s chosen his own counter-culture life for the same abiding philosophical reasons as Dostoevsky’s Underground Man. And he’s done so with so deep a philosophical dive that he doesn’t feel the need to offer an apologia.

After that, in the historical Blood Meridian and then the more contemporary Border Trilogy, McCarthy explored that idea in his Westerns. And then he did so in the post-apocalyptic The Road.

But this, No Country for Old Men, is McCarthy dressing up his philosophy in the clothes of a noir murder not-quite mystery. We know from the start that the relentless Chigurh lies behind most of the near countless killings, and we see it unravel.

Our purported protagonist, Llewellyn Moss, finds $2.4 million in cash after a drug deal goes bad in the middle of the Texas desert. He sees what he’s found and knows he “can’t treat it like luck,” knows he has to try to put his experience into the context of some larger plan for himself.

Moss is savvy and competent. As a Gulf War veteran and a longtime hunter, he knows how to use guns and he knows how to anticipate what most potential enemies might try to do to him. None of it’s enough, though. He understands from the start how endangered he is if all that’s come to him is merely luck, merely a hiccup of the universe as it drops a fortune into his lap; because, if it’s merely luck that brings it to him, then it can be the same indifferent impulse that takes it away.

Chigurh, who’s ultimately over-the-top, understands himself as the embodiment of that indifference. In his most memorable scenes, he allows the result of a coin toss to determine whether he will kill or allow someone to live. He seems emotionless as he tells others that a heads-or-tails means life or death, and he seems to take neither pleasure nor thrill in the killing. He’s merely an agent of chance.

In the end, we are reminded that even he is subject to good or bad – but always indifferent – fortune, but that hardly matters as well. He’s made his point to everyone else he’s encountered in the novel.

Our final major character, though, is our titular point-of-view character and sometime narrator. Sheriff Ed Tom Bell is a seemingly good man, someone who’s committed to protecting the people of his county. He begins the book by describing how he felt compelled to visit on death row the one man he ever sent for execution, a confessed child murderer. Bell knows the man is guilty, but he feels compelled to see the result of the justice he’s enforced, feels obligated to the ritual of acknowledging the human nature of even the most depraved man he’s encountered.

But Bell finds, as the title’s reference to Yeats’s “Sailing to Byzantium” implies, that he lives in a “country,” – really a universe – where there’s no place for an old man. He does what he can to help Moss from a distance, but he comes to recognize the threat that Chigurh represents. He wants to call it evil, but the growing horror of the novel is his realization that it’s worse than evil, worse than the opposition to the god-centered view of the world he wants to be true.

Instead, he comes to see that Chigurh represents the negation of that world view. Chirgurh is the embodiment of his abiding fear that the universe might simply not give a damn about him or the people he tries to care for. In addition to the horror of the killings and the near-mindless rampage of Chigurh, we get the demoralizing unraveling of Bell’s faith in a decent world.

I won’t call this McCarthy’s greatest novel, but show me one that isn’t nonetheless great and you’ll surprise me. Instead, I’ll point out that, as an exploration of the noir tradition, it’s McCarthy finding the genre where he may well have been most at home all along. His Western/cowboy writing is devastatingly beautiful – and you have to read Blood Meridian if you think you have the stomach for powerful writing – but this seems where McCarthy was always inevitably heading. It’s a contemporary classic, and he’s a writer who, while never feeding you an easy escape from what it means to confront an empty universe, still inspires with the unblinking courage to share his difficult truth.


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