one big literary puzzle

I thought my first Cormac McCarthy book would probably be The Road, considering the length of time it's been hanging out on my "to be read" list and its shorter length. But No Country for Old Men has come first, and I sense I now have a pretty good taste and feel for the rest of McCarthy's uniquely told narratives. My short review for this book is as follows: "this book was like a puzzle with all the pieces scattered and labeled in plain sight. but i still wrote 'what?' 'who?' and 'wow.' all over every page." I'm really rocking with this idea of a puzzle because McCarthy's writing style requires readers to do some moderately heavy lifting to keep track of everything that's going on. From a flippant use of pronouns, to sections within chapters acting as if they're completely separate from other sections in content and focus, to time jumps that imply things that happened in between without them ever being explicitly stated, it's, in one word, thrilling. Another word could be "frustrating," which I'd be lying if I said I didn't resonate with more than once. But I have to admire McCarthy's ability to create and sustain a story that stays manages to stay afloat without explaining everything to the reader. I had plenty of moments where I felt the satisfaction of being a "smart reader" for putting a few of the puzzle pieces together. And, in terms of the plot itself, I feel like I became the most invested in the overlapping storylines that focused on Chigurh chasing Moss and Bell chasing them both. Bell strikes me as the most fascinating character. He's aware that he's getting old and past his prime in the police force (hint hint, title significance!), but still invested enough in his perception of what it means to fight against evil to try to find and get Chigurh back in handcuffs. Precisely because he fails, with Chigurh roaming free and Moss dead (which was a major turning event that happened earlier in the story than I expected it to, wow), is where true emotion lies: the state of America is plummeting toward an evil that past generations can't "defeat" and future generations must learn to live with. The book's female characters make me equal parts fascinated and uncomfortable with McCarthy after the recent publishing of the very timely Vanity Fair article about his long-time, underage lover. That's a wild sentence. But yeah---Moss' wife and the hitchhiker Moss picks up on the road and ends up getting killed are the only two female characters of note. And guess what---they both end up dead. Larger commentary on how they relate to the women (or more like "woman") in McCarthy's own life has to be acknowledged here, that no one is safe from the evil Chigurh embodies, save for those he doesn't see as being a threat, like Bell. People like Bell would be dead if they and their power in law enforcement were actually a threat to someone like Chigurh and his connections. There's a lot more I could say, but I'm still processing most of it and feel like the Vanity Fair article is clouding most of my opinion of this novel's author right now.



Some of my favorite quotes from No Country for Old Men:

"How does a man decide in what order to abandon his life?"

"It takes very little to govern good people. Very little. And bad people cant be governed at all. Or if they could I never heard of it."

"If there's one thing on this planet you don't look like it's a bunch of good luck walkin around."

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