“I think if you were Satan and you were settin around tryin to think up somethin that would just bring the human race to its knees what you would probably come up with is narcotics.”
“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.”
I was ten years younger than I am now the first time I’d read No Country for Old Men. I loved The Road and I loved the film adaptation of No Country—in fact, I hadn’t immediately known upon watching the film that it was from the same author of The Road, but when I did I made sure I read the book. I don’t know what I was smoking, but I didn’t really like it. Which makes me think, upon reflection, that I was too young to understand it. I hadn’t lived enough life.
The Road has always been in my top five novels—I think it’s his most accessible, since the novel can pretty much take place anywhere in the world, and the prose is less complex than some of his earlier works—but No Country for Old Men . . . No Country might be his most . . . American novel. What I mean is that he captures—with honesty and wisdom-derived precision—the zeitgeist of the United States. The good, the bad, and the ugly. It captures an entire country’s spirit so much poetic flair and clarity that it almost seems a supernatural feat. Yes, it’s a crime-thriller on its surface, but it’s so much more that. It’s a book about post-Vietnam, the war of drugs, the corruptive nature of money, the degradation of culture and its effects on society. It’s a love story. It’s about God and the Devil. It’s about finding faith and losing faith and finding faith. It’s about life. It’s about death. It’s smart, profound, exhilarating, refined, and prophetic. It’s one of the greatest novels I’ve ever read. It should be required reading for high school.
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