Purple State of John

2007-11-26 20:02:30

Filed under: Books, Cormac McCarthy, Movies, No Country For Old Men
Posted by: John

suttree

My first Cormac McCarthy novel wasn’t a western. That came later. My first was more of an eastern, a book called Suttree, set among the homeless population of Knoxville, Tennessee. It took me a while to get through Suttree, and there were times when I wanted to throw it across the room. The prose had a faux Faulknerian overlay that transcended itself sometimes and attained an original music, but at other times sank beneath waves of purplish pastiche.

Still, I waded through the primeval shoreline muck. I recall one scene where a wall of clam shells collapsed on a riverbank and cut a woman to ribbons. This moment was unforgettable and almost unreadable. And yet, by the end of the book, whatever my reservations, McCarthy had won me over. The final pages brought me to tears. Suttree is a novel about one man’s slow surrender to death, but we don’t know it until we arrive at the point of no return, which happens to coincide with the end of the novel.

Since then, McCarthy has turned into a great writer, maybe the great American stylist of our era. I read Blood Meridian a few years ago, and that novel put an end to all my thoughts of writing the great Nietzschean cowboy epic. He’d done it. Blood Meridian is a cruel and gorgeous book, written in a fully realized, original English. McCarthy had shed Faulkner. He’d also moved his setting to the American West, which had a definite impact on the prose style. The southern Gothic swampiness must have been unsustainable in the harsher clime.

Two years ago, ready for another bout, I read No Country For Old Men, and it felt to me like a return to the theme of Suttree, yet rendered in an English so spare and quiet that it hardly seemed to come from the author of the previous book. Its central character, Ed Tom Bell, unlike the protagonist of Suttree, has no self-delusions of grandeur, and he hasn’t led a life of romantic escape from the world. He is an embodiment of the desire to conform to the world by serving the law.

And yet the end of this later novel comes so close in spirit to the end of the earlier one that I can’t help but see the kinship. Both men come to a final understanding of their fate in the form of an image out of the deep past, an image tied to violence and yet not confined to it—a horse and rider, riding through a landscape.The rider is a hunter.

Joel and Ethan Coen have captured precisely that quality in their cinematic version of No Country for Old Men. They have made a movie about the hunter, choosing images that correspond exactly to the prose. Normally, slavish devotion to the text is a mistake in the movies.

But this one works, and I don’t know why, unless it’s that McCarthy wrote a book with a movie in mind, and the Coens had in their mind a movie exactly like the novel. What I’m trying to suggest is a cosmic rightness in this success. It isn’t quite normal. it’s almost paranormal, the degree to which the performances, the landscape, the dialogue, the pace, the editing conform to the feeling evoked by the book but without ever seeming stiff or stillborn on the screen.

I would say one other thing about the movie. For years, the critics have identified the Coens as film makers who care about nothing more than style. They are superb masters of their own tics, and what they give us are tenderly or ferociously imagined worlds that ultimately contain neither meaning nor content. It’s a mistaken impression, but understandable. The Coens have made so many different kinds of movies that they seem indifferent to the question of meaning.

But I’m beginning to think that their movies do actually mean something. I can’t say yet what that might be. But I can remember seeing Barton Fink years ago and feeling that it wasn’t a visual joke, as some thought. It was a movie about the inability of an intellectual to break outside the frame of his own perception. And later, watching The Big Lebowski, I caught the same whiff, except this time it was about an entire generation’s inability to see beyond the tip of the Thai stick, except now it was an acknowledgment of the virtues of blindness.

This new movie strikes the same note, very distantly, but it does. What will we allow ourselves to see in order to survive? What will we refuse to see, also in order to survive?

I wouldn’t have seen this idea in McCarthy. I don’t honestly know if it’s there. But he wrote a book containing enough of that stuff for the Coens to make a visual mirror. Three artists, five if you count Tommy Lee Jones and Javier Bardem, have crossed tracks in the empty stretches of west Texas and come up with an American masterpiece.

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