Prior to the 1992 publication of "All the Pretty Horses," Cormac McCarthy was what's known, with no especial merit, as a writer's writer. A notorious recluse, he labored away in relative obscurity, penning these ghastly but literate novels that wildly redefined the term Southern Gothic. McCarthy's early work, such as "Child of God" and "Outer Dark," dealt with the ultimate taboos - incest, necrophilia, cannibalism - in a violent, pared-down language that was equal parts Faulkner and Melville, and though these disarmingly gorgeous novels garnered a cult following and strong critical praise, they one by one fell out of print. At one point, McCarthy, who to this day types on an old Olivetti portable, had the electricity in his trailer shut off. Melville would have sympathized.
The publication of the Border Trilogy, of which "Horses" is the first volume, finally brought McCarthy the attention he deserved. The books won fistfuls of important literary awards, and a valiantly bad movie by a decent director was made of "All the Pretty Horses." A jealous gaggle of longtime fans and critics - none of whom, one reckons, likely have had their lights crimped for nonpayment - cried foul, accusing McCarthy of watering down both his style and subject matter to achieve mainstream success. Maybe to a degree, but what's really important is that McCarthy, now 72, was established. Publish-or-perish is off the table.
Word has it McCarthy last year put in a call to his publisher at Knopf, claiming to have five manuscripts more or less ready to go. McCarthy asked him which one he wanted, and the publisher said: whichever one you want to give me first. It's been seven years since McCarthy put out a new novel, and one imagines him lying low, waiting for the hoopla and huzzah to pass so he can - with a bit more financial security - start lobbing these perfectly constructed literary hand grenades into the world.
"No Country for Old Men" may take some folks by surprise. The novel is, for all outward appearances, a standard crime story, almost pulp in its requisite elements and narrative arc. A flawed but essentially good-hearted man named Moss, out hunting game on the south Texas plains, stumbles upon the grisly aftermath of what appears to be a drug deal gone awry. Bodies are everywhere. Rooting around, he discovers a government attaché case packed with some $2-million-plus in used bills, and after a moment's consideration Moss decides to keep it. That moment is never enough. This single, essentially existential act of spontaneous proprietorship unleashes a hell's fury of events, as drug dealers, hitmen, hitmen hired to hit the hitmen and good old law enforcement pursue the money and the Moss attached to it.
The form is custom-made for a writer like McCarthy. As he proved in his mid-career masterpiece "Blood Meridian," McCarthy has a philosopher's flair for depicting the workings of fate, and an almost anachronistic sense of the Manichean workings of good and evil. In a sense, the mechanism of the crime novel is simply mortality writ large, as characters confront a sped-up version of life's spiritual peril, and McCarthy has great fun with the genre's built-in shadings of danger and doom. In the character of Chigurh (pronounced sugar), an assassin hired to recover the money, McCarthy has created a thing of pure evil, a universal monster whose spiritual ruminations add a satanic spice to his utter amorality. Chirgurh's weapon of choice is a pneumatic hammer-plunger used to kill cattle; prior to hitting the button, he lays his hand on his victim's forehead like a priest. In the pantheon of bad guys, Chigurh ranks somewhere between Iago and Hannibal Lecter.
The third principal character in "No Country for Old Men" is Sheriff Bell, the besieged moral backbone of the novel and, one suspects, something of a stand-in for the author himself. Bell's first-person reminiscences of being a lifelong small-town lawkeeper provide a kind of narrative stitching between the main chapters; they also offer a slyly sad commentary on the present state of society. "Theres always been narcotics. But people dont just up and decide to dope theirselves for no reason. By the millions. I dont have no answer about that. In particular I dont have no answer to take heart from." Bell is the crotchety geezer whose sense of change is in itself a bad omen, a sign of the cultural apocalypse. If he offers light, it is only of the dimmest kind.
The biggest pleasure of this novel is the way McCarthy juggles such seemingly hackneyed elements in a well-worn genre to concoct something fresh and surprising. The writing is honed to its barest elements, and the narrative moves with power and precision and a sort of violent poetic certainty. About two-thirds of the way in, the story takes a completely unsuspected twist that confounds every expectation of how a crime novel should work, shaking the world into a new, shocking perspective. It is classic McCarthy: no heroes here, and not for lack of opportunity.
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