John’s Blog

Terrific, terrific book. Well written, fast-paced, thought-provoking. But not for the faint-hearted. It’s a very hard-edged story (think of the movie “Unforgiven”) about a series of crimes in West Texas (think of the movie “Lone Star”). But not a book for people who want things that are neat, or have clear moral lessons, or are even just a little on the positive side.

While on the surface this is a crime novel about a drug deal gone bad on the border between Texas & Mexico, that’s really just a device — what McCarthy does in this book is to take a few of his characters’ lives and strip everything away — home, family, work — all their context, really — and uses that technique to really look into what makes up a person’s life. What defines each of us? Is it what we’re willing to give up? Is it the things that we did yesterday?

Anyway, I’ve been thinking a lot about this book over the past few days — I could write a lot more but don’t want to ruin it for anyone. Would love to talk about it sometime with someone else who’s read it.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 2nd, 2006 at 1:34 pm and is filed under Books. You can follow any comments to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.