For some reason, I haven’t read Cormac McCarthy in years. And if I’d known what I was going to be reading about in No Country For Old Men, McCarthy’s latest novel, I might have left it on the Border’s shelf. I’m no fan of psychopathy and mayhem. But even if I had known about the dead bodies, the coin-flipping psychopath, the flies and the stench, I still would have bought the book. All it took was reading the first few lines and I was hooked. By the voice, the tempo, the substance, the promise. I couldn’t put No Country For Old Men down, and I wanted it to never end.

The title is taken from William Butler Yeats’ poem “Sailing To Byzantium”:

That is no country for old men. The young
In one another’s arms, birds in the trees
 - Those dying generations - at their song,…

The poem is a lament for the passing of youth. The recognition of the pity of old age.

An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,

Unless. Unless there is a soul to transmute deterioration into rebirth. Though Yeats, who wrote this poem at the age of 61, thirteen years before his death, chooses, in the final stanza, not rebirth, but inanimation…to be a form of decoration, a form of seeming frivolity.

There is little frivolity in McCarthy’s No Country For Old Men. But the depths are so great, the mystery of the human mind so wondered at, the chaos of life so plumbed, I couldn’t stop thinking about the characters in the story long after I’d finished it, and couldn’t stop thinking about the character of the man who’d created them.

Finally I went to my book shelf and found five books by McCarthy sitting there. I went out and bought two more. Here is an author whose first book, The Orchard Keeper, was published in 1965. Who’s published steadily over the past forty years…two or three books a decade, including two screenplays and a play in the ‘90s. And he’s still going. There’s no diminution of craft or mindfulness. No departure from the unique style and lack of traditional format that requires a little extra from the reader. Though there is a honing, a subtle shift of a more mature perception, a tuned efficiency, a minimalism that’s so sharp it cuts. McCarthy’s experience is a particular generation’s experience, but because of his unique discernment, it is all experience, and it is acutely heightened.

McCarthy’s All The Pretty Horses was published in 1992. It’s a beautiful, gripping novel with compelling characters and precise, evocative description. There’s a fine mind at work here, one that gets as close to the pulse of experience and discovery as any I’ve encountered.

Suttree, published in 1979, is an amazing journey, a twinning of high language and low life that is so intricately and tightly spun, it’s impossible to imagine the whole of it until after you’ve digested every page…like a tapestry that is so rich in detail, its entirely can only be viewed from a distance.

Here’s a list of his other novels: Cities of the Plain, The Crossing, Blood Meridian, Child of God, Outer Dark.

The Coen Brothers may be in negotiation to film No Country For Old Men. Read the book first. In fact, read all of Cormac McCarthy’s books. At least twice.