No Country for Old Men
- Jun 28
- 3 min read
Updated: 4 days ago
★★★★★
Cormac McCarthy has been on my reading list for years. Though he’s written many more books (but not that many more), I know he’s most famous for a handful: All the Pretty Horses, Suttree, The Sunset Limited, Blood Meridian, and, of course, The Road and No Country for Old Men. The latter two were turned into movies in 2009 and 2007, respectively, while the latter of those two was directed by one of my all-time favorites, the Coen Brothers, and went on to win four Oscars, including Best Picture. Because I own the Blu-ray and have seen the film countless times, I can see that this doesn’t seem like the best place to start with McCarthy. But this is the McCarthy that was available for two dollars at the bookseller’s booth at the local antique shop, so this is the McCarthy I read first.
And what a firecracker of a book! I took it with me, along with a couple of other already-in-progress books, on my trip to the Berkshires for Wilco’s Solid Sound Festival at Mass MoCA in North Adams, Massachusetts. No Country for Old Men was a welcome break from the unexpected headiness of Martin Shaw’s A Branch from the Lightning Tree, whose review is also forthcoming, and was so dangerously good that I was often more than happy to sit at Bright Ideas Brewing on the Mass MoCA campus and sip craft pints of their Czechs Out Pilsner while I missed out on bands I’d paid good money to see. (Not to worry, I saw all the bands I went there to see, just not all the bands I could have seen.)
If you don’t know the story, you know where to find a synopsis. If you don’t know McCarthy’s writing style, you could look that up, too, but I’ll save you the effort: He uses punctuation sparingly, replacing most commas with “and;” prefers simple, declarative sentences; thinks colons are “idiocy;” and doesn’t use quotation marks for dialogue. Aside from the simple, declarative sentences, his other grammatical choices sounded gimmicky, and that, above all else, is probably what took me so long to finally read him. But they are far from gimmicky, and though it must be difficult to be his editor, those choices—at least with regard to this book—gave the narrative such a propulsive energy that it was nearly impossible to put down.
Before this, I was thinking I’d only read a couple of novels after seeing their movie adaptations, but it turns out to be a much longer list than I expected (though one is a collection of interconnected short stories, another is a play, and a third is a documentary): Less than Zero, Jesus’ Son, Deliverance, The Mosquito Coast, Lolita, The Wild Things (the Dave Eggers version of the film he co-wrote with Spike Jonze), Glengarry Glen Ross, and Blood Memory: The Tragic Decline and Improbable Resurrection of the American Buffalo. But never before had I read a book after seeing the adaptation I’d seen as many times as I’d seen No Country for Old Men. As expected, it took some time before I stopped trying to map the book to the movie, stopped hearing the voices of the actors as I read the dialogue, and stopped comparing one with the other. Once all that settled down and I was into the book for its own merits, it turned out to be one of my all-time favorite works of fiction, and Sheriff Ed Tom Bell, played magnificently in the film by Tommy Lee Jones, gets a far greater role in the book than in the movie, and might be my all-time favorite fictional character.
I’m not sure which McCarthy I’ll read next—it’ll likely depend on what turns up at the antique shop—but I hope I come across it soon. If his other works even come close to matching the power of No Country for Old Men, I’ll be one of his biggest fans.
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