ABSTRACT
As with all his previous novels critical reception was decidedly mixed. A number of his admirers privately expressed disappointment; others responded with enthusiasm to what they saw as a further addition to McCarthy’s already impressive literary accomplishments. Literary magazines and newspapers were as divided as always in their responses: writing in the Times Literary Supplement, Michael Gorra saw the novel as lacking the stature of his earlier work, drawing a parallel with Graham Greene’s distinction “between his novels and his entertainments” and suggesting that “Only those who expect more will be disappointed.”³ Joyce Carol Oates is one of several reviewers who suggest that the sheriff in No Country for Old Men, in expressing conservative views (in the current US sense) “speaks for McCarthy,” a view which seems to misread both the character of the sheriff and the thrust
of McCarthy’s work in general.⁴ It should be clear that my reading of the author’s work as a mythoclastic assault on America’s exceptionalist vision of itself categorises him as anything but “conservative” in the current political sense, although his vision of humanity as irredeemably “fallen” is, of course, conservative in an older sense of that much contested word. William Deresiewicz, writing in The Nation, compares No Country for Old Men to McCarthy’s previous work and finds it “superficial and perfunctory.”⁵ J.M.White is altogether more admiring, claiming that McCarthy’s “nine tomes . . . will stand, . . . as ‘monuments of unageing intellect.’ ”⁶ Roger D. Hodge pens the most positive remarks of all: in so doing he takes to task the novel’s detractors: “. . . there is something about the rough treatment this novel has received that is symptomatic of the shallowness and haste that characterizes so much of our literary culture. It’s hard to miss the malice that creeps into these essays but not so easy to explain it.”⁷ Various “easy” explanations do suggest themselves but Hodge is too prudent to mention any of them. My own view is that many find McCarthy impossible to categorise; his pessimistic essentialism regarding “human nature” together with his evident heroic literary seriousness place him outside the category that provides so much of the current language of literary criticism and that we call “postmodern.” us McCarthy’s fiction leads reviewers into territory whose maps they have ceased to trust or have never possessed-reflecting, ironically, McCarthy’s own distrust of “maps” of all kinds.
