No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy

McCarthy, in case you don't know him, is probably most famous for his "Border" trilogy, one of which, All the Pretty Horses, was made into a movie recently. He's been writing for around forty years though, so he's no newcomer. He also released a book called The Road just a few months ago, which is a sort of post-apocalyptic work, although in no way like the Left Behind series.

You might read this book and be deeply touched by McCarthy's astounding prose. You might read this book and put it down three-quarters of the way through because of the almost pointless story. Either way, I would say you're right. The caveat is that this book is not about the story. It's about the meaning of the story.

The story is basically that a drug deal goes bad, a young Vietnam vet finds the money (the book is set in the early 80s), and he ends up going on the run from a psychopathic killer set on retrieving that money. A Texas sheriff follows both of them, trying to save Moss, the Vet, from Chigur, the killer. The story is told from the point of view of Moss and the Sheriff mostly, although at the end the narrative does follow the killer as well.

I enjoyed the writing. It's especially good if you listen to the audiobook, where the reader enacts appropriate accents (Texas accents), or if you can make the characters sound like that in your head. It makes more sense that way. McCarthy almost matches the dryness of Steinbeck's The Red Pony in the dustiness of his prose, and it worked well.

The problem, for me, was that this book was organized as a straightforward chase/thriller...until the chase ended and there was still a quarter of the book left. That wasn't the only problem. You would expect that when the killer catches up with the vet, that would be the climactic scene. And yet such scene is completely absent. The narrative skips right by it and you find out post-mortem from the sheriff. And then the book goes on anyway, not to tie up loose ends but mainly so that the sheriff can talk a lot about his thoughts. Not that hearing from the sheriff was bad; he did have a lot to offer. But McCarthy really shouldn't have written all that chase stuff if it was going to be so pointless, which it was. Heck, he adds in a character in the middle of the story only to have him killed off a couple of chapters later. Why? I have no clue. He served no purpose whatsoever.

If this was going to be some retrospective by the sheriff, it should have been that; not a chase set in real-time. It would even have made more sense that way, and it would certainly have been worth it if he could have taken that story and made some coherent point out of it.

The sheriff, I think, is a the method by which McCarthy can explicitly expound on the theme of the book without stepping in as a godlike narrator, which would have been unberably cheesy. However, I just don't think McCarthy used him to best advantage, and the book left me wondering what the point was in reading it.

If you're a McCarthy fan, by all means read it. The reviewers on Amazon seem to have enjoyed it much more than I did. Otherwise, you can really live without it.