No Country for Old Men

What a shame that such a truly fantastic antagonist was buried under so much conservative circlejerking.

So our first main character, Moss, happens upon a whole bunch of money that doesn't belong to him, takes it, and thinks he can either outsmart or outrun the people who are looking for it, thereby creating a whole bunch of problems for everyone around him but hey, pobody's nerfect! We soon find out he's being pursued by a man named Chigurh, who honestly comes across more like a force of nature than an individual character, and always had my full attention when he was in a scene. He's not in many scenes though.

Unfortunately, there is also a sheriff who get's the lion's share of the narrative, including rambling, "this country's going to hell" monologues at the front end of each chapter that as far as I can tell take place outside of the events of the plot. Sheriff Bell is always three steps behind any of the interesting stuff that's happening and does not appear to have any real agency, which I suppose is the point, to make the reader feel as frustrated as he must be in not being able to make sense of the string of crimes that follow the inciting incident. But then after an off-screen climax, we're stuck with the sheriff for the last quarter of the book where nothing of consequence really happens.

The prose is inaccessible and (at least in the printing I read) there's not a quotation mark to be found, which is an interesting choice for a book where there is so much dialogue. The salt-of-the-earth townies that populate most of the scenes have thick Texan accents that are written out phonetically, misspellings and all. Also the word "Yessir" appears about five thousand times.

I wish I could rescue Chigurh from this author and let him be his memorable, monstrous, violent self in a different story, but I can't. So I guess we got this instead.