"No Country for Old Men" by Cormac McCarthy

This will be my second year teaching The Road to my junior classes, so I thought reading another McCarthy novel might be useful. Anyone who's read The Road could clearly identify No Country for Old Men as another McCarthy work--it shares the former's spare prose, minimalist punctuation, subtext-heavy dialogue, and cryptic maxims. Despite the many similarities, they're substantively different books--among other things, No Country's action-heavy plot contrasts The Road's endless (yet purposeful) tedium. While I prefer The Road, particularly for its worth in discussion, I still found No Country hypnotic, appealing despite my inclination toward eye rolls. 

There's something masculine and Western in the way McCarthy writes. It didn't come across as forcefully for me in The Road, a book devoid of women, but the tone is very much on display in No Country. The book is populated by independent men, men of the Code. They're stoic and principled, even when those principles are absurd and harmful. The women in the book, by contrast, are vulnerable and emotional--the symbolic representation of the men's inner caring that they don't reveal to the world. Certainly we're supposed to believe Bell and Moss love their wives (Bell explicitly and Moss because he resists the "temptation" of a desperate teenage runaway), but that loves feels patriarchal, not equal. The women sit and wait for the men to return and grant their affection.  

What to make of that? Is is descriptive or proscriptive? Simply reflecting a certain kind of man, a certain expectation of masculinity, or idolizing and romanticizing such a characterization? I'm not sure there's a clear answer, but I couldn't shrug off that the men in the book--Moss and Chigurh especially--are meant to be cool. And I couldn't shrug off the ickiness I felt whenever they spoke to a woman. Her concern for him or for life written off as irrelevant.

And yet I can't say I disliked the book. Chigurh's a psychopathic murderer, but his nearly inhuman strength and relentless fulfillment of his obligations makes him an obvious antihero. The swirling and intersecting storylines build suspense. Like George R.R. Martin, McCarthy's not afraid to kill off an apparent protagonist without warning. He also resists the lure of a climactic final battle, having Sheriff Bell walk away at the end rather than pursue Chigurh.

The Road resonated deeply with me as a parent. I can't read the final scene without weeping uncontrollably, and in the context of the novel's apocalyptic setting, the Man's love and devotion for his son feels true and enduring. No Country didn't feel as meaningful in comparison, despite the blurb-emphasized line "How does a man decide in what order to abandon his life?” Still, I finished it in an easy three days, which is praise in and of itself.

Side note: When I taught The Road last year, we discussed the book's lack of traditional punctuation. There are no quotation marks, and McCarthy often omits apostrophes in contractions. We'd suggested the omissions reflected the Man and the Boy's world--one without society's constructs. The father and son's world was stripped to its bare minimum, much like McCarthy's punctuation. However, I hadn't realized that style was indicative of all of McCarthy's works, so when I saw similar conventions in No Country, I wondered whether my earlier analysis was invalid. In other words, if McCarthy always writes that way, then is the style still a rhetorical choice significant to this particular work? I ultimately decided it was. Though No Country exists within the real world (more or less--it's rather sensationalized), its characters exist on society's fringes. The lack of punctuation mirrors the Western aesthetic.

"Survival Math: Notes on an All-American Family" by Mitchell S. Jackson

Where to start with Survival Math, part memoir, part historical analysis, part ethnographic study? Mitchell Jackson's book is the story his upbringing and the Black men in his life, centered in Portland, Oregon. Through his and others' personal stories, he explores expectations of masculinity, the pimp life, the draw of drug culture, and gangs. The cultural elements could feel well-tread or stereotypical, but Jackson's introspection and empathy help them feel meaningful. 

The most meaningful--and jarring--section for me was his discussion of women. Jackson describes expectations of men that demand poor treatment of women, treatment that Jackson freely admits his participated in himself. These abuses were not just of his youth, either. He explains juggling various women, lying and manipulating them, well into adulthood. Maybe it was just jarring to see a man describe his harm with such candor. But, then again, that candor itself is unsettling. By virtue of being our honest, open, and forthright protagonist, Jackson gains our sympathy and understanding. Thus, when he openly acknowledges his many abuses of women, he paradoxically becomes even more sympathetic. I'm not sure what to make of that, and I'm not sure Jackson is either. He lets the women he's wronged tell their side of the story, verbatim, at the end of that section, and the most telling is Statement Four:

Ok, so your asking all of us who may or may not hv been broken to help? Just trying to understand cuz the irony feels really sad... (119)

Jackson spends a lot of time on the expectations of behavior, which include not only how men treat women but also how men treat other men. Such expectations demand bravado and often led to jail or death. He also describes the normalization of using and selling drugs. Jackson has no solutions for these cycles of violence and incarceration, but he does paint a portrait that allows the reader to see how easy it is for them to continue. 

Throughout the book, Jackson covers such issues by switching from intimate personal stories to sophisticated theses on cultural patterns with little warning. The unusual mishmash of genre can, like his content, be startling, particularly because his book follows the same pattern stylistically. 

I spent a lot of time thinking of The Grammarians, which I recently finished, while reading. The books have almost nothing in common, but the twins of the Grammarians argued over "standard English" versus colloquial, and I realized Jackson might just be the compromise the twins need to bring them together. His book weaves the casual vernacular of his upbringing with the lofty syntax and vocabulary of academia, often in the same sentence. Take his discussion of Black men and white women:

Much, but never enough, has been said about the extreme violence white men have been willing to perpetrate in the name of chivalric and paternal protection of the women they've invested (burdened?) with the expectation of piousness, whom they've weighted with lifetime roles as the incubators and progenitors of the white race. But let me call it, white men were never protecting the purity of white women, for couldn't no mortal woman satisfy his needs nohow. (71)

Though not the explicit focus of his book, Jackson's style is itself a commentary, a challenge that colloquial equals uneducated or unworthy or that "standard" English means a life of ease. 

I would suggest there's times the loftiness can feel a hindrance. Take the end of that paragraph: "Indeed, the white man has committed malevolence after malevolence to secure his hegemony over the apple: perforce, his most prized possession. She being vital to his dominion over whomever and whatever he envisaged," where both "malevolence" and "envisaged" seem needlessly verbose. Similarly, some of the segues into fruit seeds of Don Giovanni might have been a little long.

Surprisingly, Jackson spends almost no time on what, at first glance, a reader might expect to be the focus of the book: his "escape" from his "troubled" upbringing. Here's a former drug-dealer who spent time in jail and yet is now a lauded, published author and NYU writing professor. The American Dream in reality! But while Jackson is undoubtedly successful, I think part of his point is that while he's avoided jail and death, he hasn't "escaped" his upbringing nor is his story some easy pathway to success. He spends some time on why he was able to make it out fairly unscathed, including his unwillingness to murder and his willingness to step down, but his book isn't meant as a treatise on how with grit and hard work anyone can make it. With a little bad luck, Jackson could easily be one of the many he knows who didn't survive.

"The Boys in the Boat" by Daniel James Brown

I've been hearing praise for Boys in the Boat for quite awhile, but I'd put off reading it. It's nonfiction (though I've found I'm getting over my nonfiction prejudice quite nicely); it's about sports; it takes place in the 1930s. Nonetheless, when I finally convinced myself to read Boys in the Boat, I was reminded that there's a good reason heroic sports stories resonate. Even when the reader knows the outcome (and the American team's 1936 Olympic gold medal is known from the beginning), we can't help but be moved by a story of struggle and ultimate definitive win. 

Brown frames the tale of the University of Washington's eight-oar crew through the lens of Joe Rantz, a determined young man mostly abandoned by his family growing up. For Rantz, rowing is motivation and validation of his worth. In the sport he finds the camaraderie and family he lacked as a child. Though Rantz centers the story, much of the book's power comes from its classic American Dream framework. The University of Washington's crew is made primarily of working-class boys; their heart and grit propel them to success against the elite, privileged crews of the East and also against Hiter's Germany.

It's a glossy view of history--Western physicality vs. Eastern elitism. American hard work vs. Nazi propaganda and tyranny. But I also don't doubt that the crew's experiences on the team were as monumental as they describe. I know many people, including myself, look back on high school and college competitions with a kind of nostalgia that can't be shattered. Compared to the real world, athletic competition is straightforward and simple.

Brown's glossy view extends to his characters, most of which fit familiar molds. Boat-builder Pocock is the archetypal "wise old man"; coach Ulbrickson is the taciturn father figure the boys need; Rantz is the scrappy, never-give-up hero. But darn is it moving anyway. I found myself on the edge of my seat during pivotal races, particularly the final gold medal match, where I wanted to scream at severely-ill Hume to just make it through!

Brown is able to make rowing, a sport that today is again considered a field of the elite, into something quintessentially American: the power of the individual harnessed for the success of the group. Against my tendency toward pessimism, I'll admit it's a beautiful tale.

"The Grammarians" by Cathleen Schine

The Grammarians, so we're told, is a book about twins who love--and fight over--words, a passion which (according to the blurb) comes to climax in a fight over a beloved Webster's Dictionary. With such a summary and a title like The Grammarians, it's easy to believe the book is comprised of witty repartee about vocabulary, obscure arguments about punctuation use. Such reductiveness--girls whose passion for language is all-consuming!--can come off twee, even among readers who also like to discuss favorite words (I learned "eephus" the other day and adore its oomph) and praise the versatile colon (which may or may not have been my Halloween costume this year). Not wanting to see my passion made into mockery (see: science and The Big Bang Theory), I'd avoided the book despite seeing it praised. 

But, as the saying goes, don't trust a book by its cover--or by its title and its blurb, which were probably written by someone who thinks a colon can only introduce a list.

(By the way, what is up with the FOUR parentheticals in the opening paragraph? I'm aware they're excessive, and yet I'm loath to remove them, dear [non-existent] reader, as I'm feeling rather 19th-century amiable today. Don't worry, I'll give up the affectation.) 

The Grammarians is about Laurel and Daphne, two identical twins who do love language--both the secret language by which they communicate and the words inscribed in their beloved Webster's Dictionary. And their lives do intersect and conflict over the written word. Daphne eventually becomes a newspaper copyeditor with a popular--and pedantic--column grousing over the demise of the English language. Laurel ends up a "found verse" poet, rearranging old, colloquial, and grammatically-incorrect correspondence to form modern poems. Lauren and Daphne fight over many things, including whether "good" language is an unchanging truth or a social construction of the privileged, but the mention of the fight over the dictionary in the blub is both a spoiler and a misdirect, as it occurs in the last twenty or so pages of the novel.

Ultimately, the heart of the sisters' conflict is not language but their relationship to each other, the push and pull as each seeks to be similar to each other and also independent. When, for example, Laurel gets engaged, Daphne rushes to find a spouse too, in order to have a double wedding. They're thrilled to experience the life moment together. But when Laurel chooses to be a stay-at-home mother rather than pursue a career, Daphne is incensed. For Daphne, especially, Laurel's choice to make decisions different than Daphne (especially when Laurel gets a nose job, thereby condemning both their noses) reads as condemnation of Daphne herself. It's a messy relationship that anyone with a sister or best friend can identify with.

Thus, though language provides a connecting thread in the novel, it's not really the focus of the novel. Much of both women's lives are separate from debates over the written word. Schine follows the sisters from birth through late age, but she isn't interested in a methodical retelling of their lives. Instead, the novel jumps around, covering some events in great detail before jumping forward with little concern about the time skipped. Some characters, such as their cousin Brian, get a lot of page time but don't seem particularly connected to the greater whole. The effect is a (paradoxically) full but partial snapshot of two smart, independent, and stubborn sisters.