No Country for Old Men takes place there, and in the small border towns nearby. McCarthy penned his most popular work, All the Pretty Horses, in El Paso. But No Country for Old Men is a whole other state entirely.Ĭormac McCarthy, whose 2005 novel the movie adapts, could own the sort of bumper sticker you buy at the Flying J on I-10 east to Houston: “I wasn’t born in Texas, but I got here as fast as I could.” That could be him in the accompanying caricature, cackling from his cab with a blonde in the camping trailer behind him.

Joel and Ethan Coen made their first film in Austin ( Blood Simple) and cast Lubbock musician Jimmie Dale Gilmore as Smokey in The Big Lebowski (“Mark it eight, Dude”). Texas has always been a popular myth for directors, from the Texas-in-Utah of John Ford’s The Searchers to the Texas-in-Canada of Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven. It is great unequivocally, but Lone Star pride is a rare opportunity in Hollywood. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.No Country for Old Men is a great Texas film. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at for further information. ROBERT SIEGEL (Host): This is NPR, National Public Radio.Ĭopyright © 2005 NPR. Our reviewer, Alan Cheuse, teaches writing at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. NORRIS: The book is 'No Country for Old Men' by Cormac McCarthy. `Hell is other people,' Jean-Paul Sartre had a character announce in his play 'No Exit.' When you hear Sheriff Bell meditate on his own life, you realize that heaven is other people, too. With this new book he's broadened his vision. McCarthy in his previous blood-steeped books seemed himself to follow no rule but tell a good story, making beautiful prose however violent and terrifying. In the days, weeks and months that follow, murder leads to murder, the innocent pulled in along with the more than guilty and many in between. Within a page, Chigurh runs loose in the world once again. Looming large in the first scene is a murderous sociopath named Anton Chigurh, a killer for hire without a conscience, who's turned himself in to a sheriff's department just to see if he can make his escape. Like the novels in the border trilogy, this story straddles the Texas-Mexico line and its still extraordinary, beautiful desert as one of McCarthy's characters, a meditative sheriff named Bell, sees it: `The raw rock mountain, shadowed in the late sun, and to the east the shimmering abscissa of the desert plains under a sky where rain curtains hung dark as soot all along the quadrant.'īut the meditative opening sequence from the point of view of Sheriff Bell hints more at hopelessness than hope. Alan Cheuse has a review of 'No Country for Old Men.' Writer Cormac McCarthy has a new book out, the first since the completion of his border trilogy.

No country for old men book review