No Country for Old Men
by: Cormac McCarthy
Published by: Vintage Books (Movie Tie-In Edition)
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Reviewed by Nick Capo, Assistant Professor of English, Illinois College
The recent movie version of No Country for Old Men undoubtedly will draw additional readers to the book. In his eleventh novel, Cormac McCarthy continues to explore American mythology, the human capacity for violence or evil, and the varieties of manhood. Told primarily from the perspectives of three characters, No Country for Old Men is a riveting, although disturbing, story.
The story’s precipitating event is a large heroin deal that ends in a shootout. Criminal organizations on both sides of the U.S.-Mexican border then send hirelings to retrieve the drugs and money. Anton Chigurh, a psychopathic assassin, heads toward the Texas desert to retrieve the money. Llewelyn Moss, a hunter and Vietnam veteran, happens upon the dead or dying drug dealers and decides to take a briefcase filled with $2.4 million. Sheriff Ed Tom Bell, another veteran, tries to sort out the chaos that is leaving dead bodies scattered across the region.
In this novel, Cormac McCarthy merges the conventions of a thriller with the bleak realism and artistic experimentation of contemporary literary fiction. (Some readers might dislike the minimalist punctuation, the use of regional dialect, and the graphic descriptions.) The book’s male characters struggle to achieve their ends in a conflict that is unkind to women who stray into it.
Set roughly a decade after Vietnam, No Country for Old Men examines the effects of violence on men and on the society to which they return. Unfolding when the trafficking of “hard” drugs (cocaine, heroin) was booming, it connects Vietnam and societal vices (drug use, greed) as symptoms of a deeper malaise.
As Sheriff Ed Tom Bell explains to a young reporter, “It starts when you begin to overlook bad manners. Any time you quit hearin Sir and Mam the end is pretty much in sight . . . You finally get into the sort of breakdown in mercantile ethics that leaves people sitting around out in the desert dead in their vehicles and by then it’s just too late.”
In Sheriff Bell’s world, one unlucky encounter, one bad decision, will cost you either your humanity or your life.
Armchair Interviews says: Powerful story, well told.
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