No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy
No Country for Old Men is a novel that came and went awfully damned fast this summer. The reviews were mixed, ranging from dismissive in the New York Times to a Kirkus review that compared McCarthy to William Faulkner. James Woods in the New Yorker observed that is tough to write a shoot ‘em up then duck for philosophical cover at the end ( paraphrasing). Michiko Kakutani wanted Bell’s long winded monologues left on the proverbial cutting room floor. Of course if McCarthy had done that, he’d have none of the thematic integrity Woods alluded to, just a lot of bodies rotting in the noon day sun. The carnage that results from the discovery of two million dollars in the wild dominates the first half of the novel, a burst of ominiscient prose that could summed up with the phrase ” and then he shot him.” McCarthy has moved beyond the need for quotation marks in dialogue. Yup. He’s a goner.
Bell’s speeches are the most interesting passages in the book. What occurs after the action in the novel is resolved is that Bell reverts to narrator without a cause, a man left high and dry by his author. The suspense that could have been created by the book’s set up vaporizes a full thumb length before the story ends; the last fifty pages are designed to repudiate the opening two hundred and fifty. McCarthy drove down a well paved highway before veering off to explore the hinterland. All the kids in the beackseat needed a bathroom break.
McCarthy ducked the genre he chose to work in, a brutal yet interesting crime novel, and dragged in a literary finish. Like Budweiser in a champagne flute this is a story that can’t wait to escape, find a barroom floor to puddle on. McCarthy wrote a novel. Then he shot it.