The Try-Works

No Country for Old Men starts November 9th, in select theaters. This is one of my favorite Cormac McCarthy books. Running pretty much contrary to all opinion on Cormac McCarthy, I enjoyed the book as thoroughly as anything since Blood Meridian. I’ve been convinced, and have become more so since re-reading the Border Trilogy over the summer, that Mr. McCarthy’s later work has to be viewed through the filter of the Santa Fe Institute — where Cormac McCarthy serves as some kind of mascot — and their work in complexity theory. Now, granted, I barely know what complexity theory means, but I do understand the fictional necessity of lives gone wrong, and the fictional and real inability to trace the pivotal decision that sent said lives out of control. And, of course, that trying to trace them is as useless as trying to herd cats.

It’s a theme I think McCarthy stripped down to its bare essentials in The Road, with the protagonist’s attempt to follow a nonsensical straight path (the road, that is) to safety; a path that kills him and damn near kills the only thing he’s trying to save.

Anyway, I’d post YouTube trailers, but the best ones are on the movie’s official website. Just click on the Video tag at the bottom.

And, since Mr. McCarthy seems to have abandoned his world-disdaining ways altogether, following is a wholly weird conversation between him and the Coen brothers, appearing in the current issue of Time.

It’s puff, and it’s horseshit. And the last thing I needed was an image of Cormac McCarthy chatting up Richard Gere. Call me an elitist, but one rather pines for the days when Mr. McCarthy sold at most 5,000 copies of his latest effort, and entirely shunned the press. To paraphrase Matisse (I think), artists should have their tongues cut out.

If you were going to play the parlor game of arranging the most interesting, improbable, imaginary conversation among American entertainers, you could do worse than the one that took place in midtown Manhattan earlier this month. The participants were the filmmakers Joel and Ethan Coen, known for smart, stylish and slightly silly movies like Fargo and O Brother, Where Art Thou?, and the novelist Cormac McCarthy, who won the National Book Award for All the Pretty Horses and the Pulitzer Prize for The Road. If it were a reality show it would be called Eccentric Genius Island.

McCarthy and the Coen brothers have just collaborated on a movie version of McCarthy’s novel No Country for Old Men, a thriller about a serial killer and a busted drug deal. It’s a searing, shocking movie that plays like a eulogy for the great American West. It also features the best scene ever filmed of a dog chasing a guy in a river.

McCarthy is famous for two things: his omnivorous curiosity and his extreme reclusiveness. In his 74 years, he’s given a total of three interviews. But here he chats freely with the Coen brothers, who have a tendency to finish each other’s sentences. Time’s Lev Grossman was invited to observe. The conversation took place in a fancy hotel room with stunning views of Central Park in early autumn. Nobody glanced out the window even once.

CORMAC MCCARTHY What would you guys like to do that’s just too outrageous, and you don’t think you’ll ever get to do it?

JOEL COEN Well, I don’t know about outrageous, but there was a movie we tried to make that was another adaptation. It was a novel that James Dickey wrote called To the White Sea, and it was about a tail gunner in a B-29 shot down over Tokyo.

C.M. That was the last thing he wrote.

J.C. Last thing he wrote. So this guy’s in Tokyo during the firebombing, but the story isn’t really about that. He walks from Honshu to Hokkaido, because he grew up in Alaska and he’s trying to get to a cold climate, where he figures he can survive, and he speaks no Japanese, so after the first five or 10 minutes of the movie, there’s no dialogue at all.

C.M. Yeah. That’d be tough.

J.C. It was interesting. We tried to make that, but no one was interested in financing this expensive movie about the firebombing of Tokyo in which there’s no dialogue.

ETHAN COEN And it’s a survival story, and the guy dies at the end.

C.M. Everybody dies. It’s like Hamlet.

E.C. Brad Pitt wanted to do it, and he has this sort of remorse or regret about it. But he’s too old now.

J.C. But you know, there’s something about it–there were echoes of it in No Country for Old Men that were quite interesting for us, because it was the idea of the physical work that somebody does that helps reveal who they are and is part of the fiber of the story. Because you only saw this person in this movie making things and doing things in order to survive and to make this journey, and the fact that you were thrown back on that, as opposed to any dialogue, was interesting to us.

C.M. David Mamet has a collection of essays called Writing in Cafés, or something like that. He says that the ideal venue for a playwright is to write radio plays, because then you have nothing, just–this is what somebody said. That’s it. You have nothing to fall back on. That’s quite interesting. Plays are hard, and I suspect that a lot of people who write plays don’t really know how it’s going to play. I mean, how do you know? Like some years ago, my wife and I went to see Ralph Fiennes do Hamlet. And I’d seen movies of Hamlet, I’d seen kind of amateurish productions, and I’d read the play. But we walked out of that theater, and we stood there, and we went, “Holy s—.” Now how did Will know that was going to happen? [Everybody laughs.] So my question is, At what point do you have some sense of whether a film is going to work or not, as you’re working on it?

J.C. I can almost set my watch by how I’m going to feel at different stages of the process. It’s always identical, whether the movie ends up working or not. I think when you watch the dailies, the film that you shoot every day, you’re very excited by it and very optimistic about how it’s going to work. And when you see it the first time you put the film together, the roughest cut, is when you want to go home and open up your veins and get in a warm tub and just go away. And then it gradually, maybe, works its way back, somewhere toward that spot you were at before.

C.M. See, I don’t see how you could feel that. I would think that when you see the damn frames go by for the 45th time, it just doesn’t mean anything anymore. Obviously that can’t be true, but …

E.C. Well, you’re problem-solving at that point. You’re working on it. It’s only painful when the movie’s done.

C.M. So tell me about this horrible dog. Was Josh [Brolin, who plays Moss] just terrified of this animal? You pushed a button, and it leapt for your jugular?

J.C. It was a scary dog. It wasn’t a movie dog.

C.M. It was basically trained to kill people.

J.C. It was basically trained to kill people.

E.C. The trainer had this little neon-orange toy that he would show to the dog, and the dog would start slavering and get unbelievably agitated and would do anything to get the toy. So the dog would be restrained, and Josh, before each take, would show the dog that he had the toy, he’d put it in his pants and jump into the river …

J.C. … without having any idea of how fast this dog could swim. So the dog was then coming after him …

E.C. … so Josh came out of the river sopping wet and pulled the thing out of his crotch and said–he was talking to himself–he said, “What do you do?” “Oh, I’m an actor.” [Everybody laughs.]

C.M. There are a lot of good American movies, you know. I’m not that big a fan of exotic foreign films. I think Five Easy Pieces is just a really good movie.

J.C. It’s fantastic.

C.M. Days of Heaven is an awfully good movie.

J.C. Yeah. Well, he is great, Terry Malick. Really interesting.

C.M. It’s so strange; I never knew what happened to him. I saw Richard Gere in New Orleans one time, and I said, “What ever happened to Terry Malick?” And he said, “Everybody asks me that.” He said, “I have no idea.” But later on I met Terry. And he just–he just decided that he didn’t want to live that life. Or so he told me. He just didn’t want to live the life. It wasn’t that he didn’t like the films. It’s just, if you could do it without living in Hollywood …

J.C. One of the great American moviemakers.

C.M. But Miller’s Crossing is in that category. I don’t want to embarrass you, but that’s just a very, very fine movie.

J.C. Eh, it’s just a damn rip-off.

C.M. No, I didn’t say it wasn’t a rip-off. I understand it’s a rip-off. I’m just saying it’s good. [Everybody laughs.]

E.C. Do you ever get, in terms of novel writing, stuff that’s too outrageous? One wouldn’t guess that you reject stuff as being too outrageous.

C.M. I don’t know, you’re somewhat constrained in writing a novel, I think. Like, I’m not a fan of some of the Latin American writers, magical realism. You know, it’s hard enough to get people to believe what you’re telling them without making it impossible. It has to be vaguely plausible.

E.C. So it’s not an impulse that you even have.

C.M. No, not really. Because I think that’s misdirected. In films you can do outrageous stuff, because hey, you can’t argue with it; there it is. But I don’t know. There’s lots of stuff that you would like to do, you know. As your future gets shorter, you have to …

J.C. Prioritize?

C.M. Yeah. Somewhat. A friend of mine, who’s slightly older than me, told me, “I don’t even buy green bananas anymore.” [He laughs.] I’m not quite there yet, but I understood what he was saying.

Cormac McCarthy has won the Pulitzer Prize for The Road.

He’s also agreed to be part of the Oprah Bookclub experience. Which I’m ambivalent about, to put it mildly.

On one hand, the thought of millions of yuppies pouring over the symbolism of babies roasting on spits and wandering bands of enslaved catamites cracks me up to no end. I’m a fan of books that take you up by the hair and slam your face into that point where the highbrow meets the unibrow. I’m not the gently ironic type, and I like books that rattle my cage. I’m not sure exactly how to define that kind of book, but I will say this: it ain’t never appeared on Oprah before, and it doesn’t usually sell more copies than you can count on your fingers and toes. As such, it’s hard to be too against anything that broadens the cloyingly mawkish landscape where mainstream American literature lives.

On the other, I liked that McCarthy shunned the marketplace as much as possible. I liked his not-so-gentle fuck you to the publishing world, his disdain for popular culture. And I don’t like the idea of any writer letting a corporate entity — and that’s what Oprah is, nothing less, nothing more — slap a sticker of approval on their work. Given the PoMo bent of most English departments, I understand that’s a stance that’s about as popular as throat cancer, but there it is.

To be honest, it makes me want to think less of The Road. Luckily, I guess, I’m on record, so I can’t change my tune too much.

Anyway, some fairly funny responses from around the internet.

From The Stranger:

The most recent Oprah’s Book Club selection is Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. Never mind the fact that McCarthy has only given a handful of interviews in his entire career—the best was published in the New York Times Magazine. In 1992. Never mind that McCarthy doesn’t do book tours or, really, any sort of publicity. If Oprah tried hard enough, she could probably get Thomas Pynchon on her show, albeit in silhouette and with his voice distorted.

No, the real eye-opener is that The Road is the most depressing book that McCarthy has ever written, which is saying an awful lot. It’s about a father and his son wandering across America after an unspecified apocalypse. It’s fabulously well written—a friend of mine said, “It’s like someone asked Shakespeare to write a whole book about the color gray.” Ash falls from the sky and covers everything. People are dead or dying on almost every page. One of its most colorful scenes involves a baby being roasted on a spit, for Christ’s sake. And, thanks to Ms. Winfrey, it’s probably going to be the best-selling and most widely read novel of the year.

One has to wonder how Oprah’s book club will take this selection—will soccer moms across the country slit their wrists after being exposed to McCarthy’s Mad Max–meets–The Sorrows of Young Werther magnum opus? Even the book club questions on Oprah’s website are depressing: “How is McCarthy able to make the postapocalyptic world of The Road seem so real and utterly terrifying? Which descriptive passages are especially vivid and visceral in their depiction of this blasted landscape? What do you find to be the most horrifying features of this world and the survivors who inhabit it?”*

Never fear. According to the Oprah message boards, it looks like the American reading public is gonna be just fine, thanks to their uncanny ability to make any reading experience wholly and utterly about themselves. One woman offers this critique: “My initial thought was, I love how the book is blocked into short paragraphs. This makes it easy to read in the bathroom, during commercials, between innings in baseball games… I am only on page 40 and I already feel more appreciative of the view out my window.” Another woman decides that The Road must lead to Jesus Christ: “I kept thinking while reading… this would suck, but God would be with you and whatever the outcome, it would be God’s. Being able to trust in God makes any trouble easier to get through and if I were ever in such a situation, I think it would be comforting to know that you are nestled in the hand of God no matter how bad the view.”

Keep reading.

And from Edward Champion’s The Return of the Reluctant: Cormac McCarthy Orders a Venti Latte.

The logo and the image of the logo caught in the storefront glass twisted and righted and played feral games with my mind when I entered the Starbucks and again when I shut the door. Her hands thrown in the air and her wavy ringlets of hair caught in a circular haze screaming Cormac. Inside the Starbucks it was dark and green and brown and seemed too sunny for this corner of the world. The sun sat blood red under the dying dusk of this hour and the hot breaths of customers fogging windows like time and the passing of time and the need to stay awake shared and exchanged and encouraged by paper cups and low chants and that damned green logo and the image of the damned green logo a nightmare clutching my soul.

Cold it wasnt and I tapped three times on my skull and I became miserable. Not a time to laugh but a time to cry and a a time to order a latte.

The barista said, What size?

I said, large.

The barista said, You mean venti.

I turned and I looked for the horses and I hoped I could find a sign of what made men who they are and what this argot might mean. What others called large in that Starbucks had been carried across a chasm. The chasm real men knew. Twenty years ago I had walked into this selfsame cafe and there was no logo nor image of logo. Only a smiling girl long since gone who called it large and who hurt me many years ago when she gave me too much cream.

The barista called me sir. She took my order and told the other barista it was a venti. She told him to make the latte, venti large or just latte.

I watched them and said good afternoon.

They didnt answer.

The line was cold and clear and getting longer. Cold faces standing behind me and the whirs of percolating pain from behind the counter and the logo and the face on the logo. The Starbucks was cold and getting darker as the red sun started to set. I put my hand on the counter to see if it was a counter and a paper cup came and the pain of ordering tumbled my heart.

I set down my change and I picked up the paper cup. I stood sipping it and told a boy standing behind me that there was no longer any hope for the future. And then I realized I read Faulkner too much because I want to be like Faulkner. But Oprah said I was good so its okay.

But my personal favorite reaction comes from Lee Driver on the Cormac McCarthy Society message boards:

She must not a heard about Lester.

I ain’t sure I entirely agree with Michael Chabon’s take on The Road (you can read mine here), but he makes a hell of an argument.

Horror fiction proceeds, in general, by extending metaphors, by figuring human fears of mortality, corruption, and the loss of self. The haunted house (or planet), the case of demonic possession, the nightmare journey to or through a charnel house, the transubstantiation of human flesh into something awful and foul, the exposed wolfishness of men, the ineradicable ancestral curse of homicidal depravity —all of them tropes to be encountered, in one form or another, in McCarthy’s work—trade on these deep-seated fears, these fundamental sources of panic, and seek to flay them, to lay them open, to drag them into the light.

What emerges most powerfully as one reads The Road is not a prognosticatory or satirical warning about the future, or a timeless parable of a father’s devotion to his son, or yet another McCarthyesque examination of the violent underpinnings of all social intercourse and the indifference of the cosmic jaw to the bloody morsel of humanity. The Road is not a record of fatherly fidelity; it is a testament to the abyss of a parent’s greatest fears. The fear of leaving your child alone, of dying before your child has reached adulthood and learned to work the mechanisms and face the dangers of the world, or found a new partner to face them with. The fear of one day being obliged for your child’s own good, for his peace and comfort, to do violence to him or even end his life. And, above all, the fear of knowing— as every parent fears—that you have left your children a world more damaged, more poisoned, more base and violent and cheerless and toxic, more doomed, than the one you inherited. It is in the audacity and single-mindedness with which The Road extends the metaphor of a father’s guilt and heartbreak over abandoning his son to shift for himself in a ruined, friendless world that The Road finds its great power to move and horrify the reader.

Keep reading.