"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.