No Country for Old Men

I hadn’t read Cormac McCarthy before. I’ve never much been interested in westerns or male-dominated storylines, and shied away from those in which violence was prevalent.

However, after reading “No Country for Old Men” this month with my partner and his parents, I’ve found an appreciation for this genre and this author. We’d decided that after having really loved the movie (it’s one of my partner’s favorites), we should read the original story. And I’m glad we did.

“It feels like I’m reading the script,” said my partner’s father, a long-time Texan. We were comparing and contrasting the differences, if any, from the movie. I always wonder if watching the movie before reading the book sways your mind’s version of how you picture the story and the characters. I mean, it surely did for me in this instance, as I kept finding myself thinking, “that’s Josh Brolin’s character, right?” The men from the movie taking shape in the words on the page.

The writing provided something else –?a definite stye. McCarthy doesn’t use much punctuation and sometimes his sentences are long. But in other cases they’re short. The narrative is not ensconced in quotations, and the lack of commas have you intuiting pauses (and gasping for breath). But it’s also simple. Providing a framework for the story and giving you just enough so that the mind can build a picture, and so that you get lost in the Texas landscape that McCarthy’s creating.

I actually loved the colloquial nature of expression. The Southern drawl evident and the personality of the characters portrayed through their speech. The internal monologues of Sheriff Bell (Tommy Lee Jones) shed light on the dissonance he’s experiencing as the world around him—one he’s been responsible for since he was a young man—changes and hardens. They provide a glimpse of the inner dialogue he was having with himself and offered a break from the real-time action.

We'd been warned that the text would be difficult to read, and that keeping up with what was going on might be hard. And with that notion in my head from early on, I battled letting it inform my own experience of the novel.

I know it’s not the most inspiring connection, but writing this analysis, I find myself comparing it to LinkedIn. Where the stories that sound like their writer (or the character) tend to stick and resonate differently than the old business-centric subjects. And where what others say can potentially sway us from showing up how we want to. That "this platform is for professional content only."

But there will always be change. That’s something we know to be true, and cannot control. And embracing how we fit into the newest iteration of things allows us to change with them. The more we remain firm in the ways it’s always been done, the more likely we are to get left behind.

And while the book is concerned with more pressing and important things like crime and lawfulness, I think the message translates. Old men do not have to be phased out. But things will inevitably look different. Eventually, it won’t look or feel like it always did.

Have you read McCarthy?

Have you embraced the change on LinkedIn, or do you still believe it should be for professional credentials only?

One of my favorite quotes from the book:

“I think by the time you're grown you're as happy as you're goin to be. You'll have good times and bad times, but in the end you'll be about as happy as you was before. Or as unhappy. I've knowed people that just never did get the hang of it.”