Where are the great American writers? No, I don’t mean the shit, entertaining as it is, written by James Patterson, Michael Connelly, Dean R. Koontz, and a biblical legion of others, not even Stephen King, who is pornographically underrated as a decent writer of fiction. No, I want to know where are the Fitzgeralds, the Hemingways, the Faulkners, the O’Connors; hell, even the Percys and Weltys.
Yale blow-hard Harold Bloom shines a bit of his dim light on a select group of American writers that includes Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, and Philip Roth (oddly ignoring John Updike, who is certainly deserving of the Nobel Prize for Literature). Bloom does include in his rarified group Cormac McCarthy (b. 1933), Irish-American, Roman Catholic, Rhode Island cum Tennessee cum Texas cum Arizona native, who despite coming late to the game has produced and impressive body of work.
As a novelist, McCarthy has accumulated all of the accolades that accompany fame in at least academic circles: a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1969, a MacArthur Fellowship in 1981, a National Book Award and National Book Critics Circle Award for All the Pretty Horses in 1992, and finally a Pulitzer Prize in 2007 for The Road. But you know, for the majority of the American reading public, pedestrian in their taste at best, it took Cormac McCarthy making his first ever television interview on The Oprah Winfrey Show on June 5, 2007 to give him the traction for mainstream popularity.
The Road is a very excellent book. I would direct the reader to the fine review by Gordon Hauptfleisch Gordon Hauptfleisch in this electronic magazine. But it is McCarthy’s previous book, No Country for Old Men (2005) ISBN 0-375-40677-8, that was chosen to be made into a movie by director/producers Joel and Ethan Cohen (Blood Simple, Miller’s Crossing, O Brother, Where Art Thou?) a pair well known for crashing together genre like cymbals in an orchestra and regularly creating masterpieces. And if there were ever a story written screaming to be made into a movie by the Cohen Brothers, it’s No Country for Old Men.
The present review addresses the unabridged compact disc audio presentation of the work, narrated by Tom Stechschulte, who also narrates McCarthy’s subsequent The Road. Audio books offer that additional layer of artistic expression that involves the sheer act of story-telling as an art of improvisation. Stechschulte captures perfectly the Texas border twang: half American, half Mexican, half Black, and half German, hammered on a linguistic blacksmith’s iron and quenched in the water of the Rio Grande. The voices Stechschulte effects are full of grit and life fatigue of almost having seen it all. Stechschulte’s voice proves malleable moving from male to female, ignorant to educated effortlessly.
No Country for Old Men panoramically presents an intensely disturbing and sharply refined story that mixes and confuses the divine with what is most base in the human spirit. While the plot is not demanding in the whole, McCarthy presents his characters and scenes in a Faulknarian piecemeal fashion, challenging the reader to recognize, then internalize the important plot elements while discarding the chattel of which there is very little given McCarthy’s taunt writing style, similar to that of Hemingway while being less astringent.
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