No Country for Old Men
1900
- fiction
- drug traffic
- sheriffs
- treasure-trove
- treasure troves
- suspense fiction
- literature
- psychological fiction
- fiction, suspense
- fiction, psychological
The story
In his blistering new novel, Cormac McCarthy returns to the Texas-Mexico border, setting of his famed *Border Trilogy.* The time is our own, when rustlers have given way to drug-runners and small towns have become free-fire zones. One day, a good old boy named Llewellyn Moss finds a pickup truck surrounded by a bodyguard of dead men. A load of heroin and two million dollars in cash are still in the back. When Moss takes the money, he sets off a chain reaction of catastrophic violence that not even the law--in the person of aging, disillusioned Sheriff Bell--can contain. As Moss tries to evade his pursuers--in particular a mysterious mastermind who flips coins for human lives--McCarthy simultaneously strips down the American crime novel and broadens its concerns to encompass themes as ancient as the Bible and as bloodily contemporary as this morning's headlines. *No Country for Old Men* is a triumph. (From the Trade Paperback edition)
What it’s like
Sparse, unadorned sentences with no quotation marks, so dialogue drifts into the narration like weather. Long stretches of dry West Texas desert, scrub, highway and motel rooms are rendered in flat, exact detail: heat shimmer, dust, bare bulbs, cheap coffee, the hum of a pickup at night. The prose has a scriptural cadence, with an unhurried rhythm that alternates between terse action and slow, meditative passages where an aging lawman reflects on the country he is losing. The mood is bleak and watchful, with a dry, sardonic undertow and long stretches of quiet dread. The violence is sudden, blunt and often graphic, arriving with little warning and landing hard rather than lingering in gore. There is little sexual content. It suits a slow, attentive read on a still afternoon or late at night, and it rewards readers who want lean, austere language, moral weight, and a bleak, unsentimental view of a changing frontier. It is not gentle.
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