“No Country for Old Men”

I finished Cormac McCarthy’s next-to-last late last night as I struggled to put myself to sleep with a painful couple earaches and a nagging cough.  The second half of this book is tremendous.  I plodded through the first half, often feeling like McCarthy, in a grab at a “wider audience,”  was unintentionally parodying the style of his earlier work, the Border Trilogy in particular (a la the Owen Wilson character in The Royal Tenenbaums).  The novel is set closest to the present day of any of his books, and McCarthy’s gnostic, mystical use of diction, punctuation, sentence and paragraph structure faired poorly when used to describe the present-day, the mundane.  In the second half of the book, though, when it started twisting and reflecting on itself, politically, philosophically, morally, in surprising ways, I even went so far as to wonder whether or not the self-parody was intentional, self-critical, and/or ironic.  Ultimately, No Country for Old Men turned out to be a far more political book than I ever would have imagined when I picked it up, and a resolutely contemporary one as well, in the sense of dealing directly with contemporary issues, attempting to intervene in contemporary debates.  It’s no wonder the Coen brothers have been attracted to this material.  It has the same sort of stoic, pessimistic outlook on human nature and the significance of human life as their best work, Blood Simple, Miller’s Crossing, and Barton Fink come immediately to mind, and to a lesser extent (although it is probably my favorite of their movies for other reasons) The Big Lebowski.  (Come to think of it, most of their movies fit in this category.  I guess I thought of these few first, though, because of their crime plot, noir, hardboiled elements.) Can’t wait for the movie to come out (link to the trailer below).  Next on my reading list either DeLillo’s Falling Man, more McCarthy, The Road, or I may finish Nick Tosches’s Country.

Cormac and Oprah

I have nothing against Oprah’s Book Club.  I don’t necessarily support it, but I don’ t think that it in some way “ruins” literature.  To think so is just basically pretentious and dumb about not only “literature” but art and commerce and the relationship between the two, in general.  I fear that many of the huddled masses that read Oprah’s selections probably don’t “get them,” but another few million probably do.  They learn something, they gain a greater appreciation for life, or whatever.  Conversely, I don’t “get” Harry Potter (because I don’t “get” adults reading children’s literature), so I guess we’re even.   It’s not a matter of stupidity, it’s just a matter of acculturation.

So when Oprah chooses Cormac McCarthy’s The Road for her club, and then proceeds to conduct the first ever television interview with McCarthy (this link will only get you started, you actually need to enroll with Oprah to watch the interview, but it’s worth it if you’re a McCarthy fan.  Trust me.), it doesn’t somehow offend my sense of literary propriety.  It just strikes me as downright weird (like many of her other selections).  McCarthy sitting down with Oprah doesn’t make him more commercial and less interesting, and Oprah interviewing McCarthy doesn’t make her more intelligent, incisive, or culturally “with it.” Instead, as the interview plainly shows, these two giants of their respective media meeting is simply a strange clash of two worlds that I never expected to see.  Neither relates to the other.  The viewer can understand why Oprah chose McCarthy’s book.  She sincerely seems to like it.  Why did McCarthy do the interview? Who knows.  He seems game, but he reveals little.  I imagine money.  Exposure? He says he doesn’t care about either of those things.  Maybe he’s medicated? A dare? Maybe he’s an Oprah fan? Honestly, I’m glad he did it.  I would have preferred a more penetrating interviewer, but maybe this is the level of discourse with which McCarthy was comfortable.  I’m going to go home and finish No Country for Old Men.

And, as a bonus, here’s the trailer to the Coen brothers’ film adaptation of that book, which is coming out soon.  It looks pretty damned good, although I find the trailer music really annoying.  Is it just me?