BOOK - Good People and Bad People: "Gilead" and "No Country for Old Men"

Gilead, a remarkably restrained novel by Marilynne Robinson, doesn’t care much for narrative thrust. Neither do I: life isn’t really filled with huge and cataclysmic events, nor does coincidence often resolve itself into moralistic episodes that are succinctly capped with feel-good (or feel-bad) conclusions. Where Robinson goes right: eloquent anecdotes and memories, bits and pieces of a larger, unseen thread of her protagonist’s life. Where she goes wrong: deviating from those simple and honest reflections—rambling memoir, really—to fill her novel with too-impeccably and polished dialogue (for what is supposed to be a memoir) and a likewise-polished obfuscation on the nature of good. Good as those comments may be, the story should stick with the Reverend John Ames's attempt to record his final days so that his oh-so-young son will someday remember and understand him. The attempt, instead, to absolve himself of an imaginary sin pertaining to his namesake, John Ames Boughton, his best friend’s ne’er-do-well son, doesn't seem to fit.

This lengthly deviation also wastes much of Robinson's brilliant world-building; what happens to his righteously kleptomaniac grandfather or his gentle father? I would rather be lost in contemplation of this rich past than dragged forward through a meandering (and repulsively saccharine) attempt to convey a mediocre present. At one point, Rev. Ames, remembering baseball as a youth, compares the game to a solar system. It's so simple and joyous, so suddenly obvious, and it's brilliant conveyed by Robinson's neat straightforward prose. “This is obvious,” acknowledges Ames, “but the realization pleased me.” It pleased me, too.

When I read this—“I can’t tell you what that day in the rain has meant to me”—and found no explanation, I was convinced that Robinson would stick to with the first half of her perfectly meaningless epic and continue to withhold plot. After all, her narrative structure was the perfect device for justifying an endless retreat into memory, into soul, and into character. But no, even great authors are convinced they have to plod forward, and plod forward Gilead does.


While Gilead is a story where not much happens and everybody acts morally decent, Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men is a fast-paced read where everything happens, almost at once, and nobody is a good man, except maybe the sheriff, and he, being a good guy, bored me. He writes in lots of tight, short bursts of sentences; clean, crisp, freshly-laundered paintings of southern country...oh, and blood. It’s as if McCarthy wrote a travel guide and then allowed his inner Pollock to splatter crime fiction atop it. It’s quite impressive: the writing legitimizes the over-the-top action scenes and the over-the-top action legitimizes what otherwise would be pretty dry scenery. Throw in some delightfully (though perhaps stereotypically) droll dialogue and McCarthy’s world is a pretty, fun place to read about.

The plot, standard summer blockbuster nonsense, has to do with the typical anti-hero hunting in the middle of the desert when he chances upon some abandoned cars from a drug trade gone bad. Being an expert tracker (or at least far better than me), he hunts down the sole survivor and his bag full of blood millions, takes it, and runs off. Predictably, people with guns come looking for him, all of them anti-heroes, except for the standout character, Chigurh, who may be the first fully-realized anti-villain. This man kills so often, and without any explanation, that you can’t call him a villain, so much as someone for whom killing is normal. And because McCarthy doesn’t give two shits about justifying the violence, we never find out anything about him or any other character. Instead, everything is exposed in the most visceral way: from the gut, gushing out all at once or never at all. As a wise man once said, "What's not to love?"

So far as entertaining goes, No Country for Old Men squeezes page after compelling page, and there’s plenty of subtle philosophizing being done, hidden by the coarse language or the constant sound of buckshot. But it’s Gilead, or at least the first half of Gilead, that’s more rewarding, with page after re-readable page.