No Country for Old Men

Author: Cormac McCarthy
Publishing Info: Published in 2005 by Knopf Publishing Group
Suggested Reading Level: Age 18+

Synopsis:
No Country for Old Men follows three main characters through both a literal and mental journey beginning in a rural Texas county in 1980. One of the characters is Llewelyn Moss, a young, newly married man, out hunting near the Mexico/Texas border who stumbles upon a drug deal gone bad and the two plus million dollars that was supposed to be exchanged there. The second character is Anton Chigurh, a psychopathic head hunter who takes it upon himself to find the two million and kill everyone he comes in contact with in the process. The third is Sheriff Ed Tom Bell, the law officer in charge of the area where the drug-deal-gone-bad went down.

When Moss finds the money, he knows if he takes it, it’s going to change his life forever, though he doesn’t know if that’s good or bad, but he hikes it out anyway. Quickly he is tracked down by both sides of the drug deal, but manages to stay one step ahead of them for a while. He gets his wife somewhere safe, leaves town, and finds a hotel room in California. After Chigurh finds him there, he manages to barely escape with his life. Wounded, he makes it to a hospital in Mexico where he is able to recover for a short while. On his way back to Texas, he picks up a fifteen-year-old girl who is hitchhiking, and she ends up being his undoing (though he is never unfaithful to his wife—the girl just distracts his attention enough to let Chigurh get the jump on him).

Meanwhile Sheriff Bell finds the massacre, figures out that Moss is in trouble, and starts trying to track him down. Interspersed throughout the book, we also get short chapters which seem to be journal entries written by Bell giving his thoughts—mostly on his work. He sees the country in general, and his county specifically, as having rapidly and drastically deteriorated. His experience in having helped convict a man of murder and then watching him die when the death penalty was enforced disturbed him deeply. This experience, along with tracking down the merciless Chigurh, whose dead bodies start piling up, make him realize that being a sheriff of a rural county is no longer what it used to be. He begins to realize that this country is rapidly becoming a place where “old men”—the generation who fought in wars and believed in loyalty and integrity, and who trusted their country to take care of them—don’t belong. This coming-to-terms also gives him the courage to finally confide in his wife about an incident that occurred while he fought in WWII that has haunted him ever since.
Eventually, Chigurh catches up with Moss and kills him and the hitchhiker, then kills Moss’s wife out of his screwed-up sense of justice, kills everyone on the opposing side of the drug bust, and proposes what we can only guess to be another deadly money-making scheme with the side he wants to deal with. Bell retires, moving with his wife to another county, where he no longer has to try to fight a battle he doesn’t think he (or anyone else) can win.

Analysis:
No Country for Old Men was not what I was expecting. I had read The Road which is McCarthy’s most recent book (and winner of the Pulitzer) and LOVED it, even though it was an apocalyptic story that was quite dark. No Country for Old Men was not as dark, but in my opinion, not nearly as well written. Neither novel uses punctuation to delineate dialog, but in The Road there are really only two characters. No Country for Old Men has 4 times that many characters and the lack of punctuation just made things confusing. The chapters skipped from viewpoint to viewpoint without warning or indication at the beginning of the chapter that it had skipped. This made for a lot of re-reading once I’d figured out who we were following. The end of the book was also off-putting, not because it didn’t end how I expected it to (at all), but because it was anti-climactic and didn’t really make me think about anything important enough to make the diversion from literary tradition worth it.

No Country for Old Men isn’t a bad book, but it isn’t great either. It was a fun read until about two-thirds of the way through, and then it was a little preachy and disappointing. It’s definitely an adult read because there is quite a bit of gore, since McCarthy gives us the details of most of Chigurh’s murders throughout the book. Also, I’m not sure teens would yet understand or care about the theme that gives the book its title: the question of whether an older generation just isn’t able to adapt to a new way of living, or if maybe the younger generation is happily walking down the path to destruction.

I’m kind of split in my decision on this one. But if you’re only going to read one McCarthy book, definitely go for The Road instead.