The Generations Divide
McCarthy's crime novel
I don’t know what I was expecting when I started No Country for Old Men. I had never seen the movie, though I recognized the title. I had no idea where it was set or what it was about. I was immediately enraptured.
Something that really struck me about his writing in the book…he doesn’t give you insight into a character’s feelings or thoughts. Everything is action, talking, observation, and it’s left to the reader’s imagination to see behind the smile or lack thereof. In that way, it mimics real human experience in the world.
We watch, observe, listen, and glean so much about the people around us. It may not be right, as in we perceive wrongly, but it is how we form narratives in our own mind. McCarthy’s style reads very much like, “He walked to the road and looked out,” and you may know in that moment the character is nervous, based on the setting, the events that just happened, dialogue further along. He doesn’t need to explicitly say, “He was nervous as he walked to the road, and looked about furtively.”
It’s a lesson in effective storytelling, and the definition of show, don’t tell. Reading his books is like watching a movie (no wonder so many of his stories have been made into films). I don’t need it spelled out for me. I don’t have to be in someone’s head. I can see in my mind’s eye exactly what is happening. It is wonderfully captivating.
The story follows a group of men as their worlds collide through choice and circumstance. Anton Chigurh (pronounced like Shi-gur, almost sugar), Llewelyn Moss, and Ed Tom Bell. Moss, a hunter who stumbles on the aftermath of a drug deal gone bad. He can’t resist the bag of cash left behind. Chigurh is a criminal, a sociopath on a murder spree who picks up on Moss’s trail and goes after him for the money. Bell is the aging sheriff who tries to save Moss from his own decisions.
Chapters are broken up by Bell’s musings on current events. The crumbling of social order, the moral decline of American youth.
I read in the papers here a while back some teachers came across a survey that was sent out back in the thirties to a number of schools around the country. Had this questionnaire about what was the problems with teachin in the schools. And they come across these forms, they'd been filled out and sent in from around the country answerin these questions. And the biggest problems they could name was things like talkin in class and runnin in the hallways. Chewin gum. Copyin homework. Things of that nature. So they got one of them forms that was blank and printed up a bunch of em and sent em back out to the same schools. Forty years later. Well, here come the answers back. Rape, arson, murder. Drugs. Suicide. So think about that. Because a lot of the time when I say anything about how the world is goin to hell in a handbasket people will just sort of smile and tell me I'm gettin old. That it's one of the symptoms. But my feelin about that is that anybody that cant tell the difference between rapin and murderin people and chewin gum has got a whole lot bigger of a problem than what I've got. Forty years is not a long time neither. Maybe the next forty of it will bring some of em out from under the ether. If it ain’t too late.
-Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men
Sound familiar? It does to me too. Is there a single generation that hasn’t gone on to imagine the next one is fucking it up, big time? I don’t think so.
What always strikes me is that I don’t think the world has changed that much since the beginning of history. Social rules do make certain behaviors more or less prevalent. They work to a large extent. There is rampant disrespect from kids in schools now. I don’t think that was always the case.
But the idea that crime, arson, rape, murder, barely happened before? I doubt it. It was easier to cover up, especially in the wild American landscape. Now we have forensics, surveillance, mass media. We have access to just about every major crime across the country, even the world.
Something that used to be a small town story now makes national headlines, and that happens over and over again. Much of the pessimism I see around me has to do with news. The constant cycle of crime reporting, bleak climate projections, and the focus on the most extreme people in our society will do that to you.
There is something to this book, the post-Vietnam hopelessness in America, much of which has persisted. My father has talked with me about this many times. He grew up in the 50’s, a time when American optimism and pride was at an all-time high. He remembers playing with toy soldiers as a child, feeling totally confident that he lived in the best country on the planet.
As a teenager, he wore the black, anti-war armbands in protest of the war. My grandfather was in Vietnam at the time, an Army colonel, working in strategy and logistics. There was a break in their relationship then, one that my dad said never quite healed, and for him, a forever changed outlook on America. Disappointment doesn’t begin to cover it, and truthfully, I think we are still experiencing the effects of that cynicism.
In No Country for Old Men, Bell, the old sheriff pondering the social decline of a nation, is a WWII veteran. Moss on the other hand, is a Vietnam veteran. There is a generational divide, two views of the world and the part they play in it at work here. Bell doesn’t recognize the place he lives anymore, the country he loves. The younger people probably don’t believe the country ever was what Bell thought it was.
These old people I talk to, if you could of told em that there would be people on the streets of our Texas towns with green hair and bones in their noses speaking a language they couldn't even understand, well, they just flat out wouldn't of believed you. But what if you'd of told em it was their own grandchildren?
-Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men
Hands down, the most chilling scene in the entire novel is Chigurh’s coin-toss in the gas station. The tension, as the owner tries to shoo Chigurh out the door, telling him it’s closing time. Chigurh’s responses are so out of tune with how any normal person would react. The owner can sense he is dangerous, and treads carefully as he tries to end his work day.
Chigurh insists that the man call a coin, a strange ceremony he sometimes uses on potential victims before he kills them. The man asks what he’s calling, and Chigurh’s reponse: why does that matter? Everything in life is about as random as the coin-toss to Chigurh, a series of decisions that brought you to where you are now, in the present. You just didn’t know it.
A lot of my own questions, the thoughts that often give birth to stories, follow along this line of thinking. I’m plagued and fascinated by the randomness and simultaneous synchronicity that life is. I read narratives into everyday events, connect things that are unconnected, and wonder, so often, why one decision leads one person back home at night, and another to their death bed.
If you’re interested in more thoughts on McCarthy and other authors, please read Michael Mohr’s post on No Country for Old Men. This is one of two Substacks he writes, and both are wonderful.
No Country For Old Men is my favorite of the four McCarthy novels I've read due to the setting and the theme. From what I understand the novel was originally written as a screenplay so that might have something to do with its externality. The movie is fantastic.
Now, I will have to say, while I love McCarthy he's not my favorite writer because I want internality of thought. I prefer introspective writing that goes into deep dives, something he engages with in The Passanger, but his other novels are very external.
That coin flip scene as it plays out in the movie is one of the more intense cinematic experiences of all time.