I just finished No Country For Old Men and I'm having trouble with it.
I can say it is likely the grimmest book I have ever read. It's a book where Hope sits on the sidelines with its head in its hands while Depravity goes about its business efficiently and rather creatively. I'm not sure what to make of it - was this kick in the stomach good for me or not?
I do disagree with James Wood's assessment of it as "unimportant" (if this is unimportant, The Book Against God, Wood's own novel, is nonexistent) but I will agree with him when he calls the book frustrating. By the end it has devolved into an extended essay by McCarthy on the inevitability of chaos. I didn't think Coetzee got away with the same sort of disguised philosophizing in Elizabeth Costello and I don't want to let McCarthy gets off the hook either. The first two-thirds of the book are brutal and compelling but (and I don't want to give away too much here), the way in which all of that is discarded in service of the Revelation of St. Cormac feels like a cheat.
It's not like McCarthy's made a career out of being maudlin. Child of God with its necrophiliac serial killer protagonist didn't spook me like this. Blood Meridian was (to use an overused but apt phrase) an inquiry into the nature of evil - and is in my opinion one of the best American novels of the 20th Century. No Country For Old Men isn't about the nature of evil. It's a concession of defeat to it.
If anyone else has read/is reading/will read it, please tell me if I'm being too lillylivered about this.
4 comments:
For what it is worth, I panned NCFOM in last week's Time Out Chicago. This is the book that i wasn't sure I was allowed to trash on here before my review came out.
I really thought it was silly. It was like if Fellini directed a Chuck Norris movie: it was insistently oblique, but ultimately shallow.
The cowboy has no chaps.
To call it King James Bible diction would only right if the KJB were almost entirely in sentence fragments that contain five, six or more verbs. Otherwise, I'm with you.
If you haven't read any, how are you able to sum up this book so well?
I know, I know. I should go back and give Blood Meridian another go (it has been many years). But No Country... hasn't exactly made me excited to do so.
I've never read him either. I've got All the Pretty Horses on the shelf, and I've been tempted plenty of times, but not yet and this thread is making it less likely.
A certain Kentuckian once dismissed Cold Mountain in class as an inferior McCarthy knock-off -- which prompted me to buy All the Pretty Horses, because I loved Cold Mountain.
I tried reading the review but Time Out is stingy with the online content. Damn them.
At any rate, don't let this be a deterrant from Blood Meridian. There's nothing biblical about the diction but it is expansive, maximal - certainly not shallow. No Country and Blood Meridian haven't got a great deal in common.
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