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Topic: McCarthy's Western Novels
Thread: First Impressions of NCFOM, III

Total messages for all days: 25

First Impressions of NCFOM, III	Greg Hyduke	7/29/2005

First Impressions of NCFOM, III	Greg Hyduke	7/29/2005

First Impressions of NCFOM, III	Candy Minx	7/29/2005

First Impressions of NCFOM, III	David N. Cremean	7/30/2005
Going back to II: yes, the new Bowden book, _A Shadow in the City_, is amazing in its characterization and style. It's also unique, at least in the range of my reading, in how it combines so many novelistic skills with a work of nonfiction (I'm grasping some here, because that sounds trite--I know others have done that in general, but am unaware of anyone who has done it _the same_). Add to that the unusual and as far as I know original way Bowden approaches fictionalization to protect people, the psychological portraits, writings from the people, and so much more, and I think we have a highly original work/form here. And there's always the distinctive Bowden style, all of the ways he has of looking at things sideways, from different angles and points of view than just about anyone else. One has to read it and experience it. Bowden is another one of those National Literary Treasures.

First Impressions of NCFOM, III	Robtarmstrong	8/1/2005
I’m enjoying reading NCFOM again. Such clean writing. Here’s a paragraph from p. 45: “He stood there looking out across the desert. So quiet. Low hum of wind in the wires. High bloodweeds along the road. Wiregrass and sacahuista. Beyond in the stone arroyos the tracks of dragons. The raw rock mountains shadowed in the late sun and to the east the shimmering abscissa of the desert plains under a sky where raincurtains hung dark as soot all along the quadrant. That god lives in silence who has scoured the following land with salt and ash. He walked back to the cruiser and got in and pulled away.” Someone mentioned that if he didn’t have McCarthy’s name on this novel then he wouldn’t have recognized that it was CM who wrote it. I would. The prose is pared down, there’s a stylistic shift, but it reads as McCarthy to me. I’m a Jersey boy who has visited Texas but not enough to know the botanical references. Bloodweeds, wiregrass and sacahuista. If I grew up with these plants the words would unleash images and associations. These codes await my exploration and I can trust they will be the accurate flora. Right now they work as poetic sounds. Tracks of dragons I take to be dinasaur track fossils, which sets the action in the context of vast time. But the use of dragon expands the action in a mythic direction as well. Abscissa: a metaphoric use of a mathematical term. The meaning of it in the sentence hovers in my mind as in a poem. Raincurtain is the signature conflated word with the space edited away; more paring down. Like the way he omits the apostrophe in dont, and eschews quotation marks. Grammatical defiance. Economy. And then the flight of fancy: “That god lives in silence who has scoured the following land with salt and ash.” Mythic. Biblical. Again hovering just beyond my understanding. Then he takes it right back to his simple declarative sentence as a reality anchor. Pure McCarthy. Robt

First Impressions of NCFOM, III	bobwhitson	8/1/2005
Robt Thanks for your beautiful post. In reading this book, I have the fantastic advantage of having been raised in West Texas. My family moved to Ft. Stockton when I was six. We have a ranch located between Ft. Stockton and Balmorhea. My beloved grandmother lived in Balmorhea and taught school there—she told of Apache raids during her childhood where children were taken away. My mother “danced on bar tables” in Balmorhea has a young girl. I say all this because of your comment: “I’m a Jersey boy who has visited Texas but not enough to know the botanical references. Bloodweeds, wiregrass and sacahuista. If I grew up with these plants the words would unleash images and associations. These codes await my exploration and I can trust they will be the accurate flora. Right now they work as poetic sounds.” It is indeed accurate flora and their names do definitely “unleash images and associations.” The entire experience of the book is accurate and true. I picked wiregrass out of my socks every time we went to the ranch. Here is another example of the understated spirit of the book: CM uses the phrase, “climb out or climb in the pickup.” No one in West Texas “gets out” of a pickup. They all “climb out.” In East Texas folks “get down” from a pickup. Robert

First Impressions of NCFOM, III	Candy Minx	8/1/2005

First Impressions of NCFOM, III	KJ	8/1/2005
"Bell says, he thinks her daughter will be able to have an abortion and have her put to sleep." Bell should move to Florida, get to know Jeb.

First Impressions of NCFOM, III	Lane	8/1/2005
I’m new to the forum here, but I figured I’d throw out a few thoughts. Candy, I enjoyed your last post, and my first impressions are quite similar. I figured Moss didn’t shoot Chigurh because he wanted to get out of this situation without any blood on his hands. He’d "sort of" promised his wife, and perhaps as Candy suggests, he thought “he could do this thing in a new way,” without killing. Maybe he waited around to see what he was up against, or to see if he could kill Chigurh or if he needed to. As to this being far-fetched and believable, this is a fiction, and it demands a suspension of disbelief...just as Moss doesn’t go hunting with any water, Moss cannot kill the bad guy, Chigurh travels across the state and kills at will without any police threat. These might be stretches of the imagination, but hey, it’s fiction. Stretch it. And doesn’t the book begin with what is being referred to as a mistake? The gas chamber in Huntsville statement? That’s a mistake in a documentary or a piece of non-fiction. But in a piece of fiction, please correct me if I’m way off here, doesn’t an author put together pieces of the real world, or pieces of his own world, to create something else? And isn’t it our task as readers is to try and see what that “something else” is? It is difficult when a work is set in the real world and that created world doesn’t match up to the real real world. But once the work is in print for us to read, do we regard these as mistakes or choices? I like to respect the work first, regard them as choices, and see where they bring me. I only read this book once, and pretty quickly at that, so they haven’t brought me anywhere yet. But I’m not giving up. We’ve got a hunter hunting without water, a gas chamber where one does not exist, a man engaged in a war wherein he is unable to kill the bad guy, a bad guy that roams at kills at will using a tool used to kill cattle, cars are called Ramchargers and Barracudas (which though they do exist in our “real world,” they are evocative of something more), and there exist many more "unbelievable" instances which are being referred to as plot holes. Is NCFOM a mirror of some supposed reality, or is it a reality unto itself? How should we treat it?

First Impressions of NCFOM, III	DougD	8/1/2005
The more I think about this the more I think the whole novel may have been originally written with the express intention of being made into a movie. Perhaps the novel itself is really just an adaptation of a screenplay. That would explain away almost everything. Plot holes, suspension of disbelief, killers walking about conducting business at will with no fear of detection, an exotic weapon carried by the bad guy, Mexican gangsters, shootouts in street, muscle cars, pickups with big tires and loud exhausts....it's almost cliche if you put it all in the context of a movie. If Quentin Tarantino directs this, it might look like a cross between "From Dusk Til Dawn" and "The Getaway." Personally, I hope Christopher McQuarrie directs it. He wrote the screenplay for the movie, "The Ususal Suspects." He also directed "The Way of the Gun," which is a great post-modern, noir, gunfighting thing which concerns....3 million dollars in a bag, muscle cars, guns, criminal gangsters, gunfights in the street, etc.

First Impressions of NCFOM, III	Robtarmstrong	8/2/2005
Robert, Thanks for you comments. It's reassuring and not surprising that the flora is accurate. As was mentioned on another thread, the coin toss scene between Chigurh and the gas station proprietor is a stand out. The menace in Chigurh’s lines (lines, as in a screenplay) is palpable. Unyielding as a metal rod (Richard L’s metalic theme) and single-minded (why is it that to write singleminded feels uncomfortably derivative?) as the metalic robot assassin in TERMINATOR 2. The reference to Chigurh’s oddly erect posture I take to mean that he was hooked up to his metalic cattle-killer. The coin is metal. But the dialogue is the outstanding element of this scene we are destined to see on the big screen. I am reminded of the dialogue between the indian, Billy and Boyd at the beginning of THE CROSSING which is so full of menace and threat. Chigurh’s perspective is unyielding, hard as steel. He has no insight that he has a perspective; it’s just fact: the proprietor married into his livelihood. Chigurh doesn’t just see it that way, it IS that way, with the implication that the proprietor doesn’t deserve it and doesn’t even deserve to live, parasite that he is. One can only imagine the justification that is going on behind those cold blue eyes. When the proprietor is left bend over his counter after Chigurh leaves, he knows he has just stared death in the eyes. There are a number of sections that begin with mystifying pronouns: he did this, he did that. Since it is a new scene (again, I’m using screenplay terms) not yet directly related to the scene that preceeeds it, the reader doesn’t know who the character is until clues come later on. I am reminded of William Faulkner’s AS I LAY DYING, which has a similar inexplicability at the beginning of many segments, leaving the reader temporarily in the dark on the first reading. I’m not sure why they do this. It makes the reader have to work harder. Perhaps it’s to create a sense of confusion, mystery, partial understanding, the way we become aware of a story in real life. Robt

First Impressions of NCFOM, III	mike zechel	8/2/2005
Thanks Greg. Early on I joked with Rick that the blurb made it sound like an Elmore Leonard novel. Not even close. But one thing (among many) that I do love about the book is that it demonstrates how genre and literature need not be mutually exclusive. However, even the genre writers I respect the most for their literary qualities have never come close to CM's level of accomplishment. I find the fact that it is also immediately ready for script translation and film production, further testament that genre fiction, film, and literature can intersect. If Shakespeare were writing today, the same type of feat would've been a piece of cake for him; over and over and over.

First Impressions of NCFOM, III	Robtarmstrong	8/6/2005
Just as BLOOD MERIDIAN was a reaction to the Ronald Reagan white-hatted America of 1985—-the Roy Rogers-with-fringe national goodness gleaming smile moral leader of the world image fixation which BM shot to sh*t—-so NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN is conversant with the national mood of 2005 which has to do with national deterioration and a lot of divisive finger-pointing as to who is responsible for that deterioration resulting in a tug of war to establish a national perspective and identity that morphs radically between so many sub-sectors as to blur into confusion. Ed Tom Bell asks the current national question: what went wrong with our country? Chigurh is terrorism told in a taut tale. Bell is America, the Liberty Bell with a big crack in it. The threat is so great Bell can’t deal with it. Can we? What is our aggressive response to 9/11? The official answer is Iraq. But I don’t see that as the actual response. The actual American response to 9/11 is more akin to Bell’s response which is: let somebody else handle it, I’m going to spend more time with my family. Robt

First Impressions of NCFOM, III	Greg Hyduke	8/6/2005

First Impressions of NCFOM, III	Greg Hyduke	8/6/2005

First Impressions of NCFOM, III	Robtarmstrong	8/6/2005
Greg, I also think: “that the book is concerned more with social issues in a generalized sense than the global war on terror.” I see Anton Chigurh as a symbol of today’s terrorism, a seemingly invincible omni-threat, a foreshadowing. My Iraq comment was far too abbreviated to carry my intended communication, which in no way is meant to undermine the contribution and sacrifice of Americans involved in Iraq. The US involvement in Iraq is our official response to 9/11, but I don’t think that it effectively addresses the threat of terrorism that we face. So our involvment in Iraq creates the appearance that the threat of terrorism is being reduced when it is not. For all its hype, the “war on terror” essentially doesn’t exist. Just a war in Iraq exists. Creating safety for American citizens is an initiative yet to be mobilized. It may take another tragedy on American soil before we truly address the issue. What that approach may be is an extended discussion. This is pertinent to NCFOM in that the central lament of the novel is an allegory of the current state of America. The situation feels overwhelming. It feels suicidal. Ed Tom Bell is at least one step ahead of the national consciousness. He says: I’m not going after Chigurh (symbolic for terrorism); I’m spending time with my wife. America is not so honest. By and large we think we are going after terrorism; we reassure ourselves that we are doing all we can (by God, it costs enough!) and then go about our business as if the threat of terrorism is diminishing instead of mounting. If Bell bothers us, then maybe we should reexamine ourselves because Bell symbolizes what America is doing. Which is dropping the ball. At least Bell knows what he is doing. Do we? Robt

First Impressions of NCFOM, III	Greg Hyduke	8/6/2005

First Impressions of NCFOM, III	Robtarmstrong	8/6/2005
Where I see NCFOM as of-the-moment is in it’s attitude, its perspective, its focus, its feeling. The disorienting feeling of a borderlands sheriff being faced with this alien druglord bloodfest in 1980, the feeling that this is new and altogether unwelcomed, this feeling of: how the hell am I going to beat this?, has been amplified to a national scale in 2005 with terrorism. The threat is there. It might be dormant right at the moment, I may be able to hang out with my family this weekend, but it is not the same America that it was. It’s an exponential progression into weirdness. Bell remembers the time when he had to deal with barroom brawls, now he takes cover from automatic weapons. We remember a nation who went overseas to engage in combat, now the threat of random, anybody-as-target violence has come to us. We hear distant rumblings with last month’s attacks on London’s mass transit system. Anybody who things things are under control because of our offensive in Iraq is in denial. This sheriff on the Texas/Mexico border in 1980 has entered into a disturbing, unrecognizable Twilight Zone, and so has America in 2005. Robt

First Impressions of NCFOM, III	Greg Hyduke	8/6/2005

First Impressions of NCFOM, III	mlow	8/6/2005
Conclusion: "we" are "barbarians" as well as "the others" - wherever that bring us. At present: confusion and instability - opportunities for robber barons and druglords.

First Impressions of NCFOM, III	JackaLoupe	8/6/2005
Robert, Not to mention how the schools have changed--whether that infamous study that's bantied (as in banter, or is it 'bandied') about on the net is urban legend or not. Back then we'd bring our knives to school for MumblyPeg (might as well spell it that way), and our little vices like gum chewing and talking in clase are "cured" by poppin' a pill--which speaks reams itself. And the old cliques have morphed thru cliches--Jocks, Goths, Geeks, Pachucos (mostly LA) etc.--to Gangs. Bad Jacky

First Impressions of NCFOM, III	hedleythompson	8/7/2005
So my brother gave me the book as a birthday present and I read it late at night and too quickly. But I confess that I tried to read the italicized Bell musings quickly, so I could get back to the action. Next time I'll slow down. But Bell is an old man and is characterized by being completely ineffective. I mean, he just gives up from the getgo trying to figure Chigurh. But we are left to figure him out. He is a whole lot less fun than the Judge, less well read, and too much of a loner. I dont understand the analogies to terrorism. Ok, you can see them. But to analogize to America [Bell and Moss] and terrorism [Chigurh] don't you have to ask yourself: isnt there something you like about Chigurh? We love violence: Chigurh has some style, sometimes acting within his code, sometimes just killing for fun, and sometimes [the first coin toss] not killing just for fun. Bell has a code but Moss' code is less developed. It approaches Bell's mostly in the way they understand their relationship with their women. But Moss takes the money, pretending that the money has chosen him, that it is fate. And later he regards Chigurh's offer to spare his wife as trickery, believing then that the fate of his wife was sealed regardless of Chigurh's offer, and ignoring the choice open to him. Of course we feel bad about Moss, he is one of us, but we feel worse about his woman. Hands up, those who thought she had any chance with her coin toss? And how did you feel about Moss at that point. Evil may always be there, but character is fate, and you face evil a whole lot better with some character. hedlar

First Impressions of NCFOM, III	Glass	12/30/2008
Chigurh's habit of using the cattlegun to blow out the lock cylinders on door locks, and his ingenious homemade silencer (99), certainly have the whiff of Al Qaeda and terrorism. The lock cylinder tumbling into the enclosed space of a room puts me in mind of the sad images of a tank or Humvees becoming death traps as shrapnel pings around inside the vehicle (they are of course better armored than when the war started). Crude, stealthy, deadly. The silencer that is made of brass mapp-gass burners fitted into a hairspray bottle screams IED, fire, shrapnel. I realize there is no mapp gas inside the cylinders, but the device can give this effect by the nature of its components. Combustibles, exploding drug stores during daylight hours ("He seemed oddly untroubled. As if this were part of his day...Something about him faintly exotic.") The ingenuity of using these common items that can be purchased at most hardware store and then turning them into instruments of death has always put me in mind of terrorism and how crafty they can be in figuring out ways to kill people. Better living (or dying) through chemistry. ADDED: On second thought, maybe not so stealthy given the sheer size of Chigurh's cannon-like weapons. Maybe it's a reprise of sorts of the judge with the Howitzer at the Yuma Crossing. "We got a loose cannon here." (Wells) For a few interesting images of mapp gas burners and a report on some scientific tests regarding their safety: http://www.hse.gov.uk/research/hsl_pdf/2006/hsl06121.pdf Peter

First Impressions of NCFOM, III	Glass	12/31/2008
"It was the investigator of the accident. Roger Catron." (NCFOM 287) "I think that, from the beginning, we all knew how it would end. He had always been so quiet and conventional, although by nature an impulsive man;" (Opening of "Roger Catron's Friend" by Bret Harte) I believe McCarthy is making a literary allusion here to Bret Harte's short story "Roger Catron's Friend." There's some great stuff in that story, nicely resonant with NCFOM. The husband Roger Catron who has made some bad choices and is on the lam and being hunted; the pretty wife he has left behind who becomes his "widow"; Roger Catron's "friend" Captain Dick who pays the "widow" a visit after Catron's demise in order to extort $250 from her; and on and on. Great stuff. A few tidbits from the Bret Harte story: "Save ye! From which?" asked Captain Dick, as quietly and unobtrusively dropping the Derringer in a flour sack. "From everything," gasped Catron, "from the men that are hounding me, from my family, from my friends, but most of all--from, from--myself!" He had, in turn, grasped Captain Dick, and forced him frenziedly against the wall. The captain released himself, and, taking the hands of his excited visitor, said slowly,-- "Ye wan some blue mass--suthin' to unload your liver. I'll get it up for ye." "But, Captain Dick, I'm an outcast, shamed, disgraced--" ..................... "But, Captain, they are pursuing me! If they should track me here?" ..................... Captain White pays Mrs. Catron a visit: "May I venture to ask what your business is with me?" interrupted Mrs. Catron, sharply. ......"Perhaps the woman he fled with can tell you," she said savagely. "Thet," said the captain, slowly, "is a good, a reasonable idee. But it ain't true; from all I can gather SHE lent HIM money. It didn't go THAR." "Roger Catron left me penniless," said Mrs. Catron, hotly. "Thet's jist what gets me. You oughter have $250 somewhar lying round." Link to "Roger Catron's Friend" by Bret Harte: http://www.readbookonline.net/readOnLine/10069/ Peter

First Impressions of NCFOM, III	Glass	3/30/2009
"What we thought was that when the next generation came along and they don't want to raise their children neither then who is going to do it? Their own parents will be the only grandparents around they wouldn't even raise them. We didn't have a answer about that." (NCFOM 159) From the March 29, 2009 Omaha World-Herald: "Gary Staton has no regrets. Most of the time. As soon as he left nine of his 10 children at Creighton University Medical Center in September , a huge weight lifted from his shoulders." ........................................ The State of Nebraska has since amended its "Safe Haven" law since the time when Staton legally relinquished custody of the children and there was no age limit. After 27 parents and guardians used the law to drop off kids, the Legislature limited it to newborns. I don't want to get into all of my feelings about this law and Staton's actions, but I would note that the young man was understandably overwhelmed by the task of raising 10 children on his own for a year and a half after his wife died. Ed Tom Bells speaks of parent's "not wanting to raise their children" and I don't think that is the case in the Staton story, but his situation did remind me of that line from No Country. Peter

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