A literary critic (of whom I am not fond) by the name of Harold Bloom referred to Cormac McCarthy as one of the four living (and still working) American novelists who write "the Style of our age", saying they have composed canonical works. So with this ringing in my ears, and the film version still playing through my mind, I decided to read the book.
Cormac McCarthy writes about the west, but not the vaguely-homoerotic wild west that we all know and love. This is West Texas, where there's antelope and dust and drugs and a bunch of stuff that's been around forever and not a whole lot else. The men are tough and taciturn; they don't use apostrophes or quotation marks, they're slow to anger and quick to strike once roused. They love their wives with a slow, steady passion. Their wives, on the other hand, are strong, steely women who do well by their menfolk (of course they're called "menfolk".) They may carry weapons, but in the end they're not too important, mostly functioning as reasons for the men to do the things they do.
The book's central thesis (or, I suppose, one of them; books are relatively poor places for straightforward philosophy) is this: you make choices as you go through life. There are rules and other, smaller choices you make which propel you along. And then eventually there's an accounting.
In some ways, it's similar to the "alternative universe" trope beloved by science fiction writers, except here the "what if" part of the universe doesn't matter. Only what happened is actually relevant. People live their lives thinking every day is a fresh start, that they can somehow divorce themselves from their pasts, but in a certain sense the past is the only thing that exists. Your past defines you, just as the past of the country defines what America is today.
This is not, as it happens, a philosophy I particularly buy into. But that's neither here nor there.
What surprises me is how McCarthy drags us through nearly 300 pages looking over the shoulders of Llewelyn Moss, Sheriff Ed Tom Bell, and Anton Chigurh without ever really letting us into their lives. The way he uses and discards them makes it difficult to get attached, and none of them are especially likable (though I'll admit they each of them have their own particular charms). The plot, revolving around a drug deal gone bad and a big case of stolen money, is interesting but never really tied up - it's mostly a MacGuffin to keep the characters on the move, which is disappointing; you'd think that if you spent as long as CM must have writing a book this full of ideas, you'd have taken a few minutes to fix that.
The book was engrossing, true; I spent more than one lunch hour buried within its occasionally agrammatical pages. But though I liked it, I remain unconvinced that McCarthy is as good a writer as Bloom seems to think. The word I'm searching for, I believe, is "overrated". It's much like Bloom himself in that regard.
If you were curious, by the way, I kept a count: Chigurh kills at least 14 people ("on screen"; there's some implication that he kills others along the way).
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