Tale of the New West

...Bell's survey of the corrosions and crudities of American life finds constant affirmation in the events of the novel itself, and yet the sheriff keeps after the greater good...

...In his latest novel, the moral dimension is more emphatically on offer, if accompanied by the predictable overload of carnage (the most creative of which is done with an air-powered stun gun designed for cattle slaughter...

...His particular interest in saving Moss from Chigurh involves a desire to redeem a selfish act from his past by sacrificing himself for this fellow man...

...But Moss's misplaced self-reliance, and Chigurh's brutal efficiency, deny him the chance...

...Exposed to so much human ugliness and moral indifference, Bell remains committed to the eternal verities of right and wrong, and so can know and care when injustice has won out...

...She confides to him: "I dont like the way this country is headed...

...Yeah...

...The novel's protagonist, Llewelyn Moss, is a hardscrabble ex-soldier prone to tough-guy poetics: "By the time he got up he knew that he was probably going to have to kill somebody...

...Moss gets away, at least here, but the novel's picaresque and pictorial violence never exhausts itself...

...McCarthy's finest creation is the novel's third major character, Sheriff Bell...

...Two men had come from the car and were crossing the street on foot at a run...

...For a Mexican dopedealer...

...Bell is left with a bitter feeling, though this is gladdening for the reader to encounter: "It was defeat...

...He just didnt know who it was...

...Reading even a minor novel from a great writer willing to bring such moral intelligence to bear upon contemporary America, awash in its blood and irony, is no mean pleasure...

...Yet McCarthy avoids any stiff moralizing by issuing his charges against America's contemporary cultural devolution through the folksy meditations of an aging smalltown sheriff...

...Stubbly caritas sets up poetic justice, McCarthy-style: Not only is the man dead upon Moss's reaching him, not only does Moss then get discovered by parties who come after him with unstinting vengeance, but after an initial escape that leaves him breathless and bruised under the hot Texas sun, he realizes that he himself "hadnt even taken a drink...

...Seemingly in the clear upon returning to his young wife and their trailer, he is compelled to go back...

...McCarthy provides Moss with on-the-run reflections that never really open unto any depth suggested by his Vietnam past...

...A passing dismissal from another character proves to be only too accurate: "He's a psychopathic killer but so what...

...Well...

...killer on the loose in the late 20th-century Texas badlands of scrub desert and interstate, cheap motels and trailer parks, Vietnam veterans and Mexican drug-runners...

...And so Moss fills up a jug...

...On a hunting trip, Moss happens on a drug deal gone murderously bad...

...In his equally violent past fiction, McCarthy revealed vast interior spaces in men otherwise taken for cardboard cutouts: cattle rustlers and frontiersmen and all manner of desperadoes from the Old West...

...This produces many folk-wise, bitterly funny, and incisive reflections, as evidenced (for example) by Bell's encounter with an enlightened secular-ite...

...But again, the composition is overly familiar, both in the context of his far more capacious predecessor and in terms of his contemporariness...

...Which pretty much ended the conversation...

...The ensuing manhunt ranges across Texas and down into Mexico and involves rival bands of mercenaries, a one-man killing machine named Chig-urh, and a host of square-jawed lawmen confronted by a mounting body count and opaque leads...

...The engine had died and the driver was trying to start it...

...He comes away with $2 million stuffed in a briefcase...

...The result is an altogether readable novel that intertwines fated-ness with a desire for redemption, amid much greed and gore...

...The shootouts, chases, and stoic dialogue give the novel something of a pulpy texture at times, and the prose can be so intensely visual and heavy with action that it reads cinematically: He turned up Adams Street and the car skidded sideways through the intersection in a cloud of rub-bersmoke and stopped...

...Like O'Connor, McCarthy populates his world with homicidal moralists and hayseed philosophers, fills it with absurdity and brutality, and delivers what grace there is with the velvet touch of a sledgehammer...

...The difficulty with McCarthy, more than O'Connor, is that his virtuoso imaginings of American life in its primal viciousness tend to overwhelm many readers to the point where they miss the deeply moral criticism at work amid the viscera...

...BY RANDY BOYAGODA "No pleasure but I meanness," Flan-I nery O'Connor's wickedest line, could easily stand as the credo for Cor-mac McCarthy's fiction...

...There was one man left alive in the desert, barely, who kept begging for agua while Moss inspected the rotting corpses, bags of heroin, and array of materiel...

...Everybody is somethin...

...This character tries—and fails, with a measure of honor—to bring to justice "some new kind" of Randy Boyagoda is a fellow at the Erasmus Institute at Notre Dame...

...In a series of italicized prologues to each chapter, Bell considers his life as a servant of justice in a country that has lost its sense of the concept...

...One of them opened fire with a small caliber machinegun and he fired at them with the shotgun and then loped on with the warm blood seeping into his crotch...

...While McCarthy has long been in a symphonic conversation with that testosterone quartet of American writers— Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Herman Melville, and James Fenimore Coop-er—his work may resonate most against that demure little Georgia lady's stories...

...I want my granddaughter to be able to have an abortion," to which he responds, consolingly, "The way I see it goin . . . not only will she be able to have an abortion, she'll be able to have you put to sleep...

...Meanwhile, Chigurh, with his stun-gun stalking and coin-flipping nihilism, seems to be an update on the apocalyptically evil Judge from Blood Meridian...

...There's plenty of them around...

...It was being beaten...

...He attempts likewise with a New West cast this time, but the result is not as piercing...

...Instead, the character comes off, too programmatically, as a mixture of kindhearted toughness and existential bitterness trying to make good in spite of it all...