No Country for Old Men

[Dave Monroe]

July 24, 2005
'No Country for Old Men': Texas Noir
By WALTER KIRN

LIKE classic French cooking, the best American crime
fiction relies on a limited number of simple
ingredients (which may be why it's so popular in
France). Too much temptation. Too little wisdom. Too
many weak, bad men. Too few strong, good ones. And
spread over everything, freedom. Freedom and space.
The freedom (perhaps illusory) to make poor choices
and the space (as real as the highways) to flee their
consequences -- temporarily, at least. Corny and crude
in the way of all great folk art, the intrinsically
pessimistic crime novel -- as opposed to the basically
optimistic detective novel -- is not about the
workings of human justice but the dominion of inhuman
time. As devised and refined by James M. Cain, Jim
Thompson and their gloomy paperback peers, the crime
novel aimed its cheap handgun at the heart of
America's most prized beliefs about its destiny: that
the loot we've scooped up will belong to us forever
and that history allows clean getaways.

Cormac McCarthy's ''No Country for Old Men'' is as
bracing a variation on these noir orthodoxies as any
fan of the genre could expect, although his admirers
may not be sure at first about quite how to take the
book, which doesn't bend its genre or transcend it but
determinedly straightens it back out. After the
critical and popular triumphs of ''All the Pretty
Horses'' and its sequels (known collectively as the
Border Trilogy), the late-middle-aged McCarthy found
himself so thoroughly trussed in garlands and draped
in medals that it's a wonder he could breathe, let
alone pick up his pen again. Hailed for having
elevated the western from a pop amusement to a
high-art form and designated as Hemingway and
Faulkner's sole legitimate successor, he might have
been wise to let his writing hand be removed at the
wrist, embalmed and bronzed.

Instead, he decided to have some nasty fun and write
like a fellow who was still alive, shedding the murky,
grand German philosophizing that bogged down the last
two installments of his trilogy for a sleeker, slimmer
linguistic manner and a darting movie-ready narrative
that rips along like hell on wheels because it has no
desire to break new ground, only to burn rubber on
hard-packed old ground, thereby packing it down
harder.

The compulsory drug deal gone wrong that drops the
flag on this race with the devil takes place in the
desert, in the West Texas jurisdiction of Sheriff
Bell, an unreconstructed patriarchal geezer for whom
aggressively enforcing the law is less important than
passively keeping the peace. He's a watchdog, not an
attack dog, content to doze until wrongdoers give him
no option but to bite, which he does without breaking
the skin, if possible. His drawling, cracker-barrel
soliloquies overflow with crusty red-state sentiments
that may or may not represent the author's feelings
but probably don't violate them terribly. Bell, no
public radio moral relativist, has walked over too
much cactus in his lifetime to care about the tender
sensibilities of those who've stayed safely in their
flower gardens. Satan exists, the world is getting
worse, and God is too busy with other matters to care.
He's written us off and moved on to fresh creations.

''She kept on, kept on. Finally told me, said: I dont
like the way this country is headed. I want my
granddaughter to be able to have an abortion. And I
said well mam I dont think you got any worries about
the way the country is headed. The way I see it goin I
dont have much doubt but what she'll be able to have
an abortion. I'm goin to say that not only will she be
able to have an abortion, she'll be able to have you
put to sleep. Which pretty much ended the
conversation.''

Bell's melancholy ride into the sunset is interrupted
when Llewelyn Moss, a local man out hunting antelope,
happens upon a briefcase stuffed with cash and
casually flings his soul into the pit by bending over
to pick it up rather than heading straight home to his
wife, which is where men belong but find it hard to
stay (the book's definition of original sin). The only
question that remains is how long his gory punishment
will take, and how many innocents will perish with
him. McCarthy's snake-and-scorpion theology offers his
characters no second chances, and it hints that their
first chances never, in fact, existed. Moss scampers
off with the dough because he must, and the gun-toting
demons who chase him have no choice, either. The drug
trade that yielded the money is also fated; a
landslide of evil stirred by one kicked pebble that
won't let up until the Second Coming. ''It starts,''
Bell thinks, ''when you begin to overlook bad manners.
Any time you quit hearin Sir and Mam the end is pretty
much in sight.''

The ''broken windows'' theory of crime prevention has
never been so drastically condensed. Is this
countrified bleak fundamentalism a spoof? At times,
the whole novel borders on caricature, so
unremittingly hard-boiled that it threatens to turn to
steam. The streamlined, barely punctuated sentences
delineate the grisly action -- from running gun
battles on small-town Main Streets to the agonized
bandaging of bullet wounds in obscure motel rooms --
in the point-by-point manner of a technical manual,
enumerating every muzzle blast and diagraming every
ambush as though violence were a dry industrial
process. The characters' states of mind rate little
commentary and are completely dissolved in their
behavior, which consists of fleeing and fighting and
little else. The women involved are on hand to cower,
grieve and plead for explanations of the mayhem that
the men who've unleashed it decline to give them,
partly out of old-school chivalry but mostly because
they don't have any answers. All the men have is
momentum and loaded weapons, which seem to fire of
their own volition, since that's what loaded weapons
like to do.

''It's a mess, aint it Sheriff?'' Bell's deputy asks
him. ''If it aint it'll do till a mess gets here,''
Bell responds. McCarthy's dialogue is like this: every
question sets up a one-two punch, and most of the
sparring partners sound alike. Chigurh, the chief
villain, throws the cleanest jabs. He's a strict,
conscientious, self-taught psychopath who vigilantly
maintains his mental ill health. He's purged himself
of all qualms and second thoughts so as to function
smoothly in the world that Bell, the Goldwaterian
granddad, has grown unfit for. When in doubt -- and
Chigurh rarely is -- he shoots someone point-blank or
pierces his forehead with a pneumatic instrument
designed for slaughtering cattle. He wears this tool
strapped to his body like a prosthesis, and the story
leaves no doubt that he'll prevail over beings who
aren't so well equipped. Chigurh has achieved an evil
state of grace that the ambivalent masses will never
know.

Such sinister high hokum might be ridiculous if
McCarthy didn't keep it moving faster than the reader
can pause to think about it. He's a whiz with the
joystick, a master-level gamer who changes screens and
situations every few pages. The choreographed
conflicts, set on a stage as big as Texas but as
spiritually claustrophobic as a back-room cockfight
ring, resolve themselves with a mechanistic certitude
that satisfies the brain's brute love of pattern and
bypasses its lofty emotional centers. Like Bell, we
can only sit back and watch the horror, not wishfully
influence its outcome. The clock has been wound, the
key's been thrown away, and the round will not end
until the hands reach midnight. The book leaves the
feeling that we don't have long to wait.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/24/books/review/24KIRNL.html?8bu&emc=bu

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