Cormac McCarthy’s Paradox of Choice: One Writer, Ten Novels, and a Career-Long Obsession

Published in Issue 16

Discussed in this essay:
• The Orchard Keeper, Cormac McCarthy. Vintage. $13.95. 256 pp.
• Outer Dark, Cormac McCarthy. Vintage. $13.95. 256 pp.
• Child of God, Cormac McCarthy. Vintage. $13.95. 206 pp.
• Suttree, Cormac McCarthy. Vintage. $14.95. 480 pp.
• Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy. Vintage. $14.95. 352 pp.
• All the Pretty Horses, Cormac McCarthy. Vintage. $14.95. 320 pp.
• The Crossing, Cormac McCarthy. Vintage. $14.95. 432 pp.
• Cities of the Plain, Cormac McCarthy. Vintage. $14.95. 292 pp.
• No Country for Old Men, Cormac McCarthy. Vintage. $14.00. 309 pp.
• The Road, Cormac McCarthy. Vintage. $14.95. 287 pp.

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No Country for Old Men

It is an achievement, although not necessarily a worthwhile one, that in his next book, No Country for Old Men, McCarthy will manage to make his plot even less resistant to friction. Now that we have come to No Country for Old Men, I must admit that before reading this novel I watched the movie, which, as adaptations go, hews particularly close to the book. This is probably because McCarthy’s novel is so bare bones that in many ways it is closer to a movie treatment than a novel. Unfortunately for McCarthy’s book, where the Coens have deviated from No Country they have generally made improvements: the many images and scenes that feel powerful and weighty in the Coens’ film generally lack the same force in McCarthy’s book. If you can call an adaptation that is so clearly superior to the original an critique thereof, then that’s what the Coens’ movie is: it is a reading of McCarthy’s book made via film, and it communicates what McCarthy was trying to say with greater economy and ambiguity

No Country for Old Men is about a rugged individualist workman who discovers over $2 million sitting around in a satchel at the site of a drug deal gone bad. He takes the money and returns home without being seen, and all appears well—except, he returns inexplicably to the scene of the crime to bring a drink of water to man who is dying of gunshot wounds and is clearly beyond the help of medicine. The drug-runners pick up his scent, and though he makes a valiant stand his fate is sealed. ¹

The book, though McCarthy’s weakest, does have two notable points, both of which revolve around the character Anton Chigurh, who has clear star power, more than any of McCarthy’s villains since the judge. Like the judge, he walks the line between human and supernatural: his air of invincibility, his mastery of the many guns in No Country (and, indeed, this book is a pornography of guns), his implacability and his ritual adherence of his own personal morality—all make for a character at once enigmatic, terrifying, and captivating. While Chigurh does not have the judge’s charisma, this is because he does not care to persuade men (only kill them and/or benefit from them); similarly, Chigurh’s life philosophy lacks the judge’s twisting statements because his is a strictly functional philosophy that has no need of elaboration.

Just as Chigurh’s murders are far colder and more execution-style than the judge’s great carnival of violence, his philosophy is that of a man whose work requires precision and discretion. The two men, though similar, are very much products of their eras. If the judge is possibly a god of war, then Chigurh is a barbaric human endowed by some higher creature. Compare the judge:

This is my claim, he said. And yet everywhere upon it are pockets of autonomous life. Autonomous. In order for it to be mine nothing must be permitted to occur upon it save by my dispensation.

And now Chigurh:

And you? What about your enemies? [Chigurh is asked]

I have no enemies. I dont permit such a thing.

In addition to showing the relation of the judge and Chigurh, these quotes neatly reveal just how far McCarthy’s prose has come since Blood Meridian.

The first notable thing about No Country is that Chigurh the freelance murderer is a monster through which McCarthy can convey the atrocity of what illegal drugs have made of Ciudad Juárez and the cross-border Americans who choose to become mixed up in the business. (One character declares: “I think if you were Satan and you were settin around trying to think up something that would just bring the human race to its knees what you would probably come up with is narcotics.”) The only other book I have read to illuminate with such power what drugs have done to pervert the region and ruin innocent lives is Roberto Bolano’s , whose slow-moving fourth section is like an adagio to McCarthy’s allegro. Chigurh’s malevolent morality is counterpointed by the titular old man, Ed Tom Bell, the county sheriff who is both aware of what an insignificance he is in the face of such distilled evil (“probably the only reason I’m even still alive is that they have no respect for me”) and whose old-school morality reminds us what the region was like before the drugs (and hippies) moved in.

The second way in which No Country is notable is its place as a bridge between Cities of the Plain and The Road. Although, as with Cities of the Plain, McCarthy remains uninterested in appearance or landscape beyond its necessity to plot, he does take pains to make his philosophizing less overt. He has given up his lengthy monologues (often delivered in the omniscient narrator’s voice) to enmesh his philosophy into dialogue, as when Chigurh challenges a gas station clerk to call a coin toss:

What’s the most you ever saw lost on a coin toss?

Sir?

I said what’s the most you ever saw lost on a coin toss.

Coin toss?

Coin toss.

I dont know. Folks dont generally bet on a coin toss . . .

Chigurh took a twenty-five cent piece from his pocket and flipped it spinning into the bluish glare of the fluorescent lights overhead. He caught it and slapped it onto the back of his forearm just above the bloody wrappings. Call it, he said.

Call it?

Yes.

For what?

Just call it.

Well I need to know what it is we’re callin here.

How would that change anything?

Chigurh’s coin is emblematic of his belief that our past choices define our future: there’s no need to say what they’re betting because events have long superseded any free will in the moment: Chigurh and the clerk are merely acting out preordained paths. It must be said that Chigurh, although a clear psychotic, shows strict allegiance to these beliefs: he clearly wants to kill the clerk (who seems to annoy him), but his respect for these forces is so great that he lets the coin dictate his decision. This philosophy also repays Chigurh: his detailed attention to what he can control and his almost religious respect for what he can’t what is what keeps him alive throughout the bloodbath that is No Country for Old Men.

It is worth comparing Chigurh’s treatment of the coin to the judge’s treatment of the same in Blood Meridian. Chigurh’s very blatant and flat philosophy contrasts with the judge’s, which, though similar, is far more enigmatic and open to interpretation:

The universe is no narrow thing and the order within it is not constrained by any latitude in its conception to repeat what exists in one part in any other part. Even in this world more things exist without our knowledge than with it and the order in creation which you see is that which you have put there, like a string in a maze, so that you shall not lose your way. For existence has its own order and that no man’s mind can compass, that mind itself being but a fact among others.

Brown spat into the fire. That’s some more of your craziness, he said.

The judge smiled. He placed the palms of his hands upon his chest and breathed the night air and he stepped closer and squatted and held up one hand. He turned that hand and there was a gold coin between his fingers. . . .

The judge swung his hand and the coin winked overhead in the firelight. It must have been fastened to some subtle lead, horesehair perhaps, for it circled the fire and returned to the judge and he caught it in his hand and smiled.

The arc of circling bodies is determined by the length of their tether, said the judge. . . .

He flung it and it cut an arc through the firelight and was gone in the darkness beyond. They watched the night where it had vanished and they watched the judge and in their watching some the one and some the other they were a common witness.

The coin, Davy, the coin, whispered the judge. He sat erect and raised his hand and smiled around.

The coin returned back out of the night and crossed the fire with a faint high droning and the judge’s raised hand was empty and then it held the coin.

McCarthy’s villains have always had more inherent interest than his heroes (perhaps because evil always seems stronger than good in his books) and in No Country for Old Men he miscalculates, showing us too little of Chigurh and too much of the far less interesting Ed Tom Bell. McCarthy makes the innovative choice of ending the novel’s main plot arc about seventy-five pages before the book actually comes to an end, and though this effectively demonstrates the insignificance of the book’s would-be hero against the vast drug underworld that merely sees him as a blip, it also forces the book’s final quarter to focus on Ed Tom, who at stretches of this length is a dull character. McCarthy’s attempts at filing out Ed Tom’s past are only partly successful, and overall this final section feels ungainly. Notably, the few brief scenes in which Chigurh does reappear toward the end make it clear that McCarthy has chosen to focus on the wrong character.

With McCarthy’s failure to make Ed Tom a convincing (or even memorable) character, it is surprising then to see him follow up that book with two of the most believable, interesting characters of his entire career . . .

¹ One of the superiorities of the Coens’ film is that they build into it an ongoing framework of suggestive images and confrontations that points to why the protagonist chooses to bring the water. McCarthy’s book lacks such an investigation, and though it is possible to imagine reasons why the man would make such a risky and largely pointless choice, the book is diminished by its failure to make something more of this potent question.

Published in Issue 16

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