Book Review: No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy

I strayed off the path of my reading list, but only by way of a country road.

A couple weeks ago I found No Country For Old Men by Cormac McCarthy for sale at Half Price Books. I'd eyed it since picking up Blood Meridien and, later, The Road, which is on my reading list posted previously.

Let's just get this out of the way. Cormac McCarthy is a sunnuvabitch of a writer. This book is not for the faint hearted. My wife would probably throw it across the room and yell at me for making her read this depressing as hell mess.

I loved it.

It's a book that teases your sympathies. It begins with Llewellyn Moss, a Texas veteran of Vietnam who lives in a trailer and spends his time hunting. He finds a drug deal gone wrong in the desert countryside. Dead drug dealers abound, as do dangerous firearms, heroin, and a bundle of millions of dollars. Moss takes the money and runs, knowing full well he just kicked off a bloodbath, and he's likely to see some of his own blood spilled. He does, and much worse.

McCarthy paints scenery with a kind of language that his southern Texas denizens would appreciate. How he captures such vivid beauty and horror with what at first blush looks like broken grammar and colloquial ignorance is a mystery. His prose is Faulkner-esque. It captures the music of a people that his own narrator describes as "common as dirt."

In the works I've seen from McCarthy, this is his trademark. He writes this sparse prose devoid of much punctuation. Few apostrophes. No quotation marks, so the dialogue blends in with the prose. Hell, he writes sentences that would get his old grammar school teacher to break out the brass ruler on his knuckles. No verbs. A sentence, at once barren and colorful. (Take that, grammar school teacher!)

He also does a trick of shifting perspectives. He begins a new perspective with a pronoun, often "he." The effect is that we're piecing together this mess of a moving crime scene story, and I think it makes the reader pay more attention, to sit up and consider not only who's doing what, but especially how they compare to one another.

At times, my tired eyes had to re-read a sentence, perk up my mind's ears and hear the colloquial phrase. But, it's all there. Every mean as hell piece.

At its core, this is a story with a painful resolution. For me, at least, the story wasn't about what I presumed. I waited for something, some kind of justice to the awful killing spree of Anton Chigurh, the hitman after Moss.

It never comes. Which means that whatever I thought I was paying attention to was misguided. McCarthy sucker punched me with Moss. He had me hooked the moment Moss was stupid and decent enough to go back out to the dying drug dealer with a jug of water. And, same for that girl he got killed. Cocksure and all, I still love Llewellyn Moss.

But it's the sheriff. That's were the story is, it turns out. And, the story is a kind of apocalypse for the Western. It's the sheriff's last round, and he knows he's done. He is. I feel sorry for that old boy, as they'd say in Texas.

He's no Llewellyn Moss, but I can't say I blame him. Neither am I.

No Country for Old Men: A

Evening alchemy

The job goes ever as the job must, with apologies to Seamus Heaney.

Fortunately, today there was plenty to enjoy. It was my night to cook. I got ambitious and tried to make chicken pad thai, one of my favorite treats at local Thai eateries. The experiment was a god awful smelling mess at first. That ubiquitous Thai ingredient, fish sauce, is potent stuff. Canada and the kids huddled in the front room while I tried to turn lead into gold for dinner.

Damnedest thing was, I managed to make it remarkably edible. We ate pad thai, and it had the right flavor, but not well blended. I could taste each ingredient, especially that fish sauce. It needed a subtler hand or a secret I don't know. But, it was successful for a first stab.

After dinner, I told Canada I'd but us a new album. She quickly turned cynical and translated that as "Album for Matt." Then, I made her listen and pick out the voices. She pegged Alison Krauss straight. That other vocal took a few minutes, but it hit her. Robert Plant.

Raising Sand is another bit of magic ingredients. I'd never have guessed Plant and Krauss would pair up and release an album. Turns out the thing's damn good! Melodic and wistful, sprinkled with a bluesy swagger here and there. I picked it up on Amazon to test out their new MP3 downloads. A little bit of browser fuss didn't outweigh their cheaper prices and lack of pesky digital rights management! Now, Canada and I can share tunes of an album with two of our favorite artists.

There's gold in there somewhere.

October devolution

It's harvest time in Iowa, but the sky isn't cooperating. We've had a caravan of clouds rolling west to east for days. It just spits enough rain all the time to keep things damp, but sometimes it comes down hard and pounds the vent outside my bedroom window like an out of tune drum.

I'd like to blame the weather, the lack of sunny days for not keeping up this blog, but I'm not fooling anyone, least of all myself. I haven't wanted to post or do much else for that matter. We're stuck in one hell of a rut at home anymore, and work's a drag.

Three weeks ago, I caught a cold that managed to trickle its way into a nagging, coughing infection. It wore me down, and still traces remain. When I get a cold, things don't taste right. Things just don't taste much at all.

I wish I could blame the cold for all of that. I can't. It's one of those ruts where the flavor is gone from nearly everything. My favorite music doesn't sound right. The house doesn't comfort. I've no urge to read. No drive to create.

This week, I saw an old college buddy for the first time in years. We hadn't changed too much. Still the wry humor. I'd missed him more than I realized, and it got me thinking about other college buddies and friends. It stood in glaring contrast to work, where my friends amount to a hip old hippie who used to be my boss.

And, with that, I knew how many foolish turns I've taken in my work. I chased after a lonely path. I worked for years as "the kid" among a bunch of boomers. I had few peers, and none that I stayed with along that road. Now, I'm the veteran among a bunch of kids, and still have no peers, no pals to counsel and seek counsel from. I say this is foolish because I can see it plainly now, where before it never entered my energetic little brain. I sometimes still find comfort, even pride on quiet lunches and solitary accomplishments.

It's a fool's pride, and now I'm finding out how little I can accomplish. And, how bad I am,  how distrustful of friends in and out of work. My most recent attempts at remedying the situation are either too timid or too insane. There is no happy medium, no exit.

Book Review: Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson

I finished Cryptonomicon last night, the next block in my wall of reading for 2007. The 910 page whopper wrapped me up for a while. It's a multi-viewpoint tale interweaving an amusing WWII conspiracy of Axis gold and Allied code breakers and operatives with their modern day descendants.

Author Neal Stephenson is verbose, and devilishly clever. He hops from character to character, and zeroes in on intricate details that swirl into essays of bizarre events and amusingly distorted views of everything from insects to submarines to Captain Crunch. The bit on how protagonist Randy, a modern day hacker and descendant of near-autistic code breaker Lawrence Waterhouse, eats Cap'n Crunch in the Philipines is usually the sort of thing that would drive me nuts, wasting space on Randy's minutiae-ridden life. But, Stephenson pulls it off. I found it endearing. Indeed, in Randy's case in particular, the minutiae is crucial to realizing how absurd and, well, safe his life is. It contrasts highly with Bobby Shaftoe, a morphine addicted WWII jarhead who's all action and not much thought. He literally goes out in a blaze of glory (pun intended -- his beloved is Glory, Philipine goddess and grandmother of Randy's girlfriend in the modern day).

And this tells us a lot about both eras. It is not a simple-minded condemnation of the modern era losers to ther bygone heroic era, either. Through his characters, Stephenson reveals the complex and abstract difficulties of the modern day, and the mortal and brutally simple difficulties of the war.

The books is, at its core, an ode to nerds. Randy and friends are fantasy role-playing hackers who get mixed up in baroque Philipine politics as they try to establish a virtual data center and create their own currency. They barely know what they've gotten themselves into.

And neither do I. That's the main flaw in the book. Randy's never really in danger. He's paranoid, and bad things happen to him. But, the structure of the book is basically flat. It ends mostly as it begins and as it continues. It remains amusing, even engrossing, throught out, particuarly the WWII era characters Lawrence, Bobby and Japanese soldier and engineer Goto Dengo, whose survivial tale against god awful tropical disease, straffing, sharks, cannibals, and building his own tomb is epic.

Stephenson sprinkles in some brilliantly fun explanations of cryptography. In one chapter, he includes real-life genius Alan Turing on a bike ride with Lawrence. He explains the famous Enigma code with a wonderful bike chain metaphor. Other chapters have equations, Unix code, line graphs (for ejaculations!) and other amusing diagrams in a kind of hyper-nerd nod to Vonnegut.

Despite its too-even build, the big novel was hugely entertaining. I kept turning those hundreds of pages, and become fond of Randy, in no small part because I identified with his white guy nerdiness.

Cryptonomicon: B+

Three

Today was a day of trains and zoos and Spiderman. My son turned three, and we spoiled him as much as we could. Pizza and waffles. Tigers and frogs. Cake! Oh my.

I've been reading Cryptonomicon, and finally reach that page count where I'm suckered in. Stephenson's chapters are frenetic minutiae with kick-in-the-gut closers that keep me turning the pages. The book is thick -- over 900 pages. At my careful pace I'm not likely to finish soon. But, I'm hooked on the interwoven story line of WWII cryptography and millennial Internet biz wheeling and dealing. I'm eager to see where it all goes.

A friend and I have kicked off a writing exercise exchange to keep on task. We started with a simple 1,000 word piece with bite. I quoted a snippet in the previous post. I surprised myself with a simple, straight-shooting piece of fiction that I turned out to enjoy quite a bit. Our next step is cleaning up the 1,000 words, maybe expanding them into 2,000.

Now if I can catch a break from all the homefront activities to repair some water issues on the house. Once I get that cleaned up, it'll be a load off my mind. I'm always amazed how stressed I get with home repairs, even ones that aren't worth losing sleep over. Give me a week, some drywall patching, a new window sill, and I'll be young again.

What do you know?

I got into a voice working on a short piece. A friend and I are working on some writing exercises together. Our first item is a short, tight piece involving a man and woman who have some relationship -- either family or sexual.

I floundered around for ideas, but the one I couldn't keep out of my head was simple and straightforward. I think it'll become part of a larger piece I put together. It's about a guy who comes back to Iowa because his Dad's been missing for months, and he needs to put his Dad's things in order. I'm still working on even the very short vignette, but I surprised myself with some details:

The refrigerator thrummed needlessly. Mitch stood, scratching his torso beneath his wrinkled white tee, staring at the empty wire racks. Only a paper plate sprinkled with baking soda remained. His sister Julia had cleaned the house in the summer, when the rotten things within had shriveled, forgotten and neglected in those strange weeks when everyone they knew trekked through the spring mud expecting any moment to find Charlie Hammond’s dead body. When they all stopped looking Mitch went back to work and Julia spent a day throwing out her father’s foil-covered Tupperware filled with mold and muck and pouring out a slush of milk that curled in her nostrils and reached down to yank at her insides. She drank one of her daddy’s last beers -- a Michelob Light --  alone, sobbing on the kitchen floor until school let out for the day.

Goodbye Blue Monday

One of my favorite authors died tonight. Kurt Vonnegut was 84.

Loving his goofy, bleakly humored novels seems like some guilty pleasure to me. I remember once when I went back to visit my favorite English professor at the University of Iowa years after graduation, he asked me what I was reading. Already embarrassed that I hadn't been reading much at all, I told him the only thing that was true. "Some Vonnegut. Breakfast of Champions."

I get the feeling he bit his tongue to keep from revealing some displeasure. "Oh that," I could almost hear him say, like I was reading stuff that's too damn easy! Maybe I was wrong. Hell, at least he got me to read some Jonathan Lethem. Good ol' Brooks.

It's just whenever someone asks me my favorite authors, I keep thinking saying Vonnegut is like saying "Well, I read this book in high school and it was funny and good the end." I'm supposed to say clever bullshit like "So-and-so has such incredible structure!"

Breakfast of Champions is probably my favorite novel. I mean, the guy draws a picture of his asshole for crissakes, which makes me laugh. Yet, every time I read it -- it's among the very few books I'll read over and over again -- I just about die inside for ol' Kilgore Trout. Poor bastard. Today, I think I know how he feels.

Make me young. Make me young. Make me young.

Nothing?

So it goes.

Reading list

The Iowa weather's turned cold again. We had wonderful weather, spring waking up the ground and the trees. Now, there are lazy fat flakes in the morning sky, just enough to remind me that April likes to tease.

I got used to the warmth, actually. Seven days in the Carribbean will do that, extreme sunburn or not! We spent St. Patty's day drinking with the Irish, and days after slurping down enough rum to make us forget the sunscreen. Somehow, along the way, I managed to shed enough stress to actually look forward to coming back.

Back home now, things are mostly the same. Still no movement on any moving, which is to say that our real estate saga continues.

Canada gets all the good stuff! She's just wrapping up her master's degree; next weekend is her final class. And, just yesterday she received the work transfer she requested to return teaching at the city's academy high school. She's thrilled, and I'm proud.

For years, I've been so busily distracted on a number of personal projects that I've neglected reading. But, I'm happy to say I've been reading a lot lately. I read Charles Frazier's Thirteen Moons (A-), which is a wonderfully troubling book, despite appearances to the contrary. I also read John Scalzi's Old Man's War (C+), which was a quick and dirty read, and that about sums up it's quality, too. Entertaining, but not terribly so.

I've got a stack of ten books, and my goal is to read all of them before year's end. Given my slow pace, that may be quite a feat! I snuck in the Scalzi book as well as Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion. But, otherwise, the books are:

• Thirteen Moons by Charles Frazier (Read! A-)


• Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson (Read! B+)


• The Road by Cormac MacCarthy (Read: A-)


• Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie (Read! A-)


• White Noise by Don Delillo (Read! C+)


• The Wizard by Gene Wolfe


• Blood and Thunder by Hampton Sides


• Snow by Orhan Pamuk


• Pattern Recognition by William Gibson


• Fortress of Solitude by Jonathan Lethem

I've also got The Demolished Man by Alfred Bester sitting around somewhere. The rest of my (many) books are packed away for a move that never happened. I can always unpack them and come up with several more lists of ten!

Edited to add November 13, 2007:
No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy (Read! A)

Edited to add September 5, 2008:
A Gentleman's Game by Greg Rucka (Read! A)
Private Wars by Greg Rucka (Read! B-)
Captain Alatriste by Arturo Perez-Reverte (Read! B+, No blog review)
The Alchemist by Paul Coelho (Read! D)
White Noise by Don Delillo (Read! C+)

Edited to add October 14, 2008:
On Writing by Stephen King (Read! B+, No blog review)
The Club Dumas by Arturo Perez-Reverte (Read! B-)

Deja vu, all over again

It seems lightning does strike twice. Unbelievable.

We had a signed contract to sell our house. Again. It is now meaningless. Again. No sale, no deal, back to where we started. Last time it was the buyer had no power of attorney because he had some mental deficiency. This time, it was some woman who broke up with her boyfriend, and her credit ain't enough without him.

This is the second time we've done this in as many months. And, once again, we had a new house picked out, ready to make an offer on.

Canada was crushed, in tears. I'm just angry, which is odd because I thought I was past that with numbness now. Whole new levels of anger, what fun. We've been trying to sell our house for -- not an exageration -- over two and a half years.

We had to give up the house a good friend built for us because we couldn't sell. It went to someone else, months later, after everyone had thrown money in a hole first. He hasn't really spoken to us since. We estimate we've shown our current house to at least 100 different people, perhaps as many as 150. Which means we've changed our schedules and cleaned up the house top to bottom no fewer than 70-80 times. That alone is very stressful.

We are literally paying people to buy our house (that is, we're losing money on the deals we're agreeing to in the order of a few thousand dollars). Right now, all my things are in boxes behind me. But, they have nowhere to go.

I know how they feel.

Another one

I turned 32 today. And, here I am too tired to type much else. I've entered a new position at work, and it's kicking me to pieces. I've been toting around a new Moleskin journal like some kind of totemic fetish, and all those damn blank pages are getting heavier in my pocket.

Too good to be true

My wife and I have been trying to sell our house for over two years. Just before Christmas, we tried to figure out what to do about it. It ended in a humorous bet. I bet her that our house would not sell by next Christmas. She agreed, being convinced the house would sell well before. The loser of the bet would have to feed Marlow, our dog, every day for six months. Right now, we trade off days to feed Marlow, and it's become the dreaded before-bed, colder-than-a-grave-digger's-ass task.

So, in good humor, I had been feeding the dog every day since I learned we sold the house. Yesterday, I found out reports of my loss had been greatly exaggerated. I'd say I'm surprised, but I'm not. The house deal fell through because the buyer (I use the term loosely) is mentally incompetent.

That's right. Only people who cannot make contractual obligations because of some unusual disability are crazy enough to buy our house. Which means, of course, that they can't buy our house. And they didn't.

By my count my wife has about five days of catching up to do on feeding the dog. Hey, I'll take what I can get at this point. I'm so beyond anger and frustration I don't even have words for it anymore. So, I just laugh about it, but really feel pretty hollow.

Housekeeping

It's a new year, and with it came a couple big changes for me. One is my resolve to keep writing here at Riverwords. To that end, I'm going to alter the settings for comments so that they immediately appear.

Our Holidays were wonderful and relaxing. It was a joy to watch the kids go wild on Christmas morning, and we had more than our fair share of parties, good wine, food, and family and friends.

The other big change I mentioned was a shake-up at work. On my first day back to work after the long holiday vacation, I found out my job has been dramatically changed, and that I now manage seven people. It means I'll also have to manage seven days of fewer hours. It's simultaneously exciting and dizzying, as the shift is a significant one at my company.

But, the good news is that I'm just starting some work on a new piece of fiction. I'll be sharing portions of it here this month.

Happy New Year to everyone.