At least once, Hollywood managed to bottle the power of Cormac McCarthy's work. 'No Country For Old Men' already reads like a movie, and Joel and Ethan Coen, the filmmakers tasked with officially making it into one, treat the words like a blueprint.
earlier this week has been met with an expected wildfire of melancholy. McCarthy, at 89, was one of few living authors with a standing claim to the title of the Great American Novelist, both for how widely beloved his writing was and for how frequently he threw a spotlight, at once mythic and unflattering, on the essential character of the Southwest. His sudden absence leaves a crater of Grand Canyon proportions on the literary landscape.
In his work, McCarthy was almost never sentimental about death. He acknowledged it as a constantly looming reality, indiscriminate in aim, often brutal in realization, inescapable. You could say his death on Tuesday fulfilled the promise and invisible dramatic arc of his bibliography: Like Emily Dickinson, another American writer of morbid preoccupations, he seemed to be preparing for it his whole career.
The Coens, in truth, inject a little more suspense into the moment, or maybe just a different kind: Instead of surveying the crime scene hours later—with McCarthy strategically withholding the information of who’s dead for a few pages—Sheriff Ed Tom Bell shows up right at the tail end of the gun fight, but not soon enough to see our hero breathe his last breath.
That, too, is part of the cruelty of how things play out: Moss’ unseen, unexpected death denies the audience the rousing climax we’ve been taught to expect. It’s not just that the cowboy doesn’t win—that happens sometimes in Westerns. It’s that he loses without fanfare, without a death scene, without a legendary Butch and Sundance freeze frame. Not heroically. Not at the end. To the extent that he goes down shooting, we don’t see it. He dies alone in the dark nothingness between scenes.
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Cormac McCarthy, Author of ‘No Country for Old Men,’ Dies at 89Cormac McCarthy, a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist who endured decades of obscurity and poverty before film versions of “All the Pretty Horses,” “No Country for Old Men” and “The Road” brought him a wide readership and financial security, has died at 89.
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Cormac McCarthy, Author of ‘No Country for Old Men,’ Dies at 89He won a Pulitzer for 'The Road,' had his first best-seller with 'All the Pretty Horses' and wrote the screenplay for Ridley Scott's 'The Counselor.'
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Cormac McCarthy, Pulitzer-winning novelist known for apocalyptic Westerns, dies at 89In language that ranged from brutally austere to dizzyingly complex, McCarthy told tales of the dark side of humanity set against the vivid backdrop of the American West.
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