Stone cold McCarthy’s latest existential thriller BY JONATHAN DIXON
	NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN CORMAC McCARTHY| ALFRED A. KNOPF | 319 PAGES | $24.95

No Country for Old Men, Cormac McCarthy’s latest novel, and his first in seven years, will add to the cachet he earned with 1992’s National Book Award–winning All the Pretty Horses. The dialogue sings, the plot is a page turner, his evocation of landscape as an ever-present character remains unparalleled, and Sam Peckinpah is his only rival when it comes to depicting violence.

That said, the book has its problems. Pretty Horses made his name, but it’s the gore-clotted, neo-biblical Western Blood Meridian (1985) that sets the standard for his work. No Country is no Blood Meridian. McCarthy doesn’t render the same primordial depths or conjure Meridian’s war-and-blood-worshipping grotesques. Instead he takes a calmer, more sedate walk over the same topography.

The book, which draws its title from Yeats’s "Sailing to Byzantium," follows the path of three men: Llewellyn Moss, Anton Chigurh, and Sheriff Bell. While hunting antelope, Moss happens on the aftermath of a drug deal gone bad, with everyone dead or near to it, and walks away with a satchel containing $2 million. He’s pursued through the Southwest by Chigurh, a clinical psychopath who goes well beyond nihilistic, since nihilism requires rejection of some value system. The spilled blood and high body Chigurh leaves in his wake come under the jurisdiction of Sheriff Bell, who provides periodic monologues on the nature of crime, death, and a society spiraling down fast.

Sound familiar? It should, since No Country shares themes, characterizations, and situations with Robert Stone’s 1975 novel Dog Soldiers. Stone set his characters loose against a Vietnam-damaged California landscape shivering with venality and fever, where the Tune In/Turn On promise of the counterculture had already decayed well past the netherland of Charlie Manson’s Spahn Ranch, and the winds of the era eroded Stone’s characters until they were nothing but the sum of their vices and sins. McCarthy sets No Country a decade later, in the thick of the Reagan/Bush years; his characters are reminiscent of American Psycho’s Patrick Bateman or Oliver Stone’s Gordon Gekko — time-hardened, empty analogues to Stone’s all-too-human anti-heroes.

Moss and Chigurh are two blooms on the same weed, flourishing during a period where every child gets left behind. Moss has no plan for the money; he isn’t so much lacking morals as he is unsure what the word means. Chigurh, who could be Meridian’s Judge Holden as drafted by Don DeLillo, undertakes his cold-blooded murders because someone else has something he wants. These characters are as chilly and inflexible as steel; there’s no depiction of psychological vicissitudes or crumblings.

Then there’s moral center Sheriff Bell, who drops homespun wisdoms like "I wake up sometimes way in the night and know as certain as death that there aint nothin short of the second comin of Christ that can slow this train"} and "Somewhere out there is a true and living prophet of destruction and I don’t want to confront him. I know he’s real. I have seen his work. I walked in front of those eyes once. I wont do it again." — ramblings that may try your patience. But even if this take on the evils that men do isn’t McCarthy’s best work, his skills are such that No Country for Old Men may be a good country for you.