|
Outstanding
|
Publishers Weekly
While the action of the novel thrills, it's the sensitivity and wisdom of Sheriff Bell that makes the book a profound meditation on the battle between good and evil and the roles choice and chance play in the shaping of a life.
|
|
Outstanding
|
Houston Chronicle William J. Cobb
In No Country for Old Men he [McCarhty] has conjured up a heated story that brands the reader's mind as if seared by a knife heated upon campfire flames. He is nothing less than our greatest living writer, and this is a novel that must be read and remembered, a jeremiad against the depravity that lurks on the horizon, the anguish that burns the borderland of the Americas.
|
|
Outstanding
|
The Spectator Robert Edric
McCarthy’s prose is never less than knowingly and superbly tailored, honed and polished to its very specific and powerful purpose, combining here the simple-seeming language and savage grace of Jim Thompson with the lyrical and evocative toughness of William Faulkner.
|
|
Favorable
|
The New York Times Book Review Walter Kirn
Such sinister high hokum might be ridiculous if McCarthy didn't keep it moving faster than the reader can pause to think about it. He's a whiz with the joystick, a master-level gamer who changes screens and situations every few pages.
|
|
Favorable
|
The Onion A.V. Club Keith Phipps
It's a strange bait-and-switch of a novel, a first-class airport read that turns into a lyrical, cranky elegy for a vanished America. One aspect should outweigh the other, but McCarthy somehow finds a balance and holds it to the bitter end.
|
|
Favorable
|
The Guardian Annie Proulx
The dialogue is perfect. No one has McCarthy's ear for regional talk, nor eye for details of place. The writing transforms a standard western good-guy-bad-guy plot into serious literature.
|
|
Favorable
|
The Independent Clive Sinclair
All I can advise is that both protagonist and reader be prepared for the unexpected. Deaths may be determined, but they are not necessarily as expected. Likewise, McCarthy's books are never prescriptive. His prose has become more spare, but he still knows how to create and destroy with a fiat.
|
|
Favorable
|
The Observer Adam Mars-Jones
As a prose stylist, Cormac McCarthy is like a man who spends hours in front of the mirror getting his hair to sit just right but will break your jaw if you tell him he's beautiful.
|
|
Favorable
|
Daily Telegraph Patrick Ness
Told in harsh, tough and colloquial prose that wilfully misspells and leaves out punctuation, No Country for Old Men is an intelligent, highly literary thriller that comes to a brilliant end on page 249.
|
|
Favorable
|
Los Angeles Times Eric Miles Williamson
Whereas "Blood Meridian" is set in the lawless West of the 19th century, No Country for Old Men is set in modern times, in 1980. One would like to think we have become more civilized over the course of 130 years. According to McCarthy, we have not. In fact, we have gotten worse.
|
|
Favorable
|
Boston Globe Gail Caldwell
McCarthy's prose is so thunderous and bare at once that it can occasionally venture toward affected nonsense: ''That god lives in silence who has scoured the following land with salt and ash." But at its best, No Country for Old Men is a simple, heartsore story.
|
|
Favorable
|
Chicago Sun-Times Henry Kisor
Flaws and all, minor as it is in McCarthy's distinguished body of work, No Country for Old Men is worth reading.
|
|
Favorable
|
Chicago Tribune Alan Cheuse
This novel introduces a new breadth and depth in the McCarthy canon. And given the terrible violence verging on nihilism that has marked so many of his previous novels, it offers an unexpected and enormously powerful testament of deep human feeling and hope in the face of hopelessness.
|
|
Favorable
|
Kirkus Reviews
Magnificent writing, nonetheless, makes the best case yet for putting McCarthy on a pedestal just below the one occupied by William Faulkner.
|
|
Favorable
|
The Globe And Mail [Toronto] Rick Moody
What you have here, see, is sort of a caper. A story of law and order. With this in mind, it's hard not to remark that there is little vestige in this novel of the word-intoxicated grandeur of some of the author's earlier efforts.
|
|
Favorable
|
Village Voice James Browning
The master of Southwestern gothic has written his first indoor book, breaking his own prose the way John Grady Cole broke colts in "All the Pretty Horses" (1992), the broken prose and colts still lovely shadows of their former selves.
|
|
Favorable
|
Wall Street Journal John Freeman
Mr. McCarthy has twisted the Western into a shape that mirrors its sociopathic hero. The wisteria-vine prose of his early novels required effort to hack through. This book is entirely the opposite -- the only demand it places upon us is to keep reading.
|
|
Favorable
|
Washington Post Jeffrey Lent
In short, No Country for Old Men is a page-turner. Readers who have been unwilling to wade through McCarthy's more complicated fables will be swept along for the ride. Many long-term readers will do the same.
|
|
Favorable
|
The Economist
This is a dark book, but its protagonists have soul.
|
|
Favorable
|
Salon Ira Boudway
For all his hard-earned reputation as a throwback, McCarthy is a thoroughly cinematic novelist, and never more so than in No Country for Old Men. Here he sheds the bombast that weighs down some earlier works and leaves intact the precise description of movement and action for which he is justly famous.
|
|
Mixed
|
The New York Times Michiko Kakutani
No Country for Old Men would easily translate to the big screen so long as Bell's tedious, long-winded monologues were left on the cutting room floor -- a move that would also have made this a considerably more persuasive novel.
|
|
Mixed
|
Christian Science Monitor Yvonne Zipp
There's less of McCarthy's descriptive powers in this outing, but this time it may be a deliberate effort to strip down the writing to match the bleakness of the tale.
|
|
Mixed
|
Entertainment Weekly Jennifer Reese
With his stripped-down Marlboro Man prose, Cormac McCarthy knows how to write a bang-up Western thriller. But when he strives for grand mythic effect in the second half of No Country for Old Men, his taut, suspenseful story quickly heads south.
|
|
Mixed
|
New York Observer Adam Begley
I thought No Country for Old Men was a good high-end thriller -- until the shooting stopped and Significance took over.
|
|
Mixed
|
New York Review Of Books Joyce Carol Oates
Not horses or wolves but firearms and their effect upon human flesh is the object of desire in the novel No Country for Old Men, which reads like a prose film by Quentin Tarantino.
|
|
Mixed
|
The New Yorker James Wood
It is just not possible to exploit for entertainment the weightless codes of thriller-writing as ruthlessly as McCarthy does here, and then hope to come down at the end with a tilt of the ethical scales.
|
|
Unfavorable
|
Library Journal Edward B. St. John
McCarthy stumbles headlong into self-parody. [15 June 2005, p.59]
|
|
Unfavorable
|
The Nation William Deresiewicz
In ways that aren't true of his previous works, no matter how bloody, No Country for Old Men seems designed as a calculated assault on the reader.
|
|
Terrible
|
San Francisco Chronicle David Hellman
An unholy mess of a novel, which one could speculate will be a bitter disappointment to many of those eager fans.
|
