Waste Books- "No Country for Old Men" by Cormac McCarthy

Join Cooper, Jordan, Phil, Dan, and Eric as they talk about No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy.

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Overview

The highway that is No Country for Old Men gets you lost even though the two-lane blacktop never deviates in direction. It’s just that that first wrong turn screwed everything up and turning back now is as impossible as turning back time itself.

For those who’ve seen the Coen Brothers film, the novel No Country for Old Men is just as blood-soaked and cerebral as the silver screen ever portrayed it. Only a novelist as commanding as Cormac McCarthy can juxtapose sobering meditations on determinism and entropic decay with brutal tableaus of grisly violence along with their lurid aftermath on the body and soul. Because McCarthy is such a deliberate writer, aiming for palpable precision over entertainment, the violence he depicts is rendered all the more visual, all the more real in its considerations to weighing each word in measurements of time and mass. Violence here is not the murders of a few men, it’s the medical examination of death with the reader bearing witness as if you were pumping gas across the street, the bitter taste of iron in your mouth.

Unlike the film, the novel underscores the loneliness of characters like the desperado Llewellyn Moss or the anachronous sheriff Bell ruefully looking back at his past as the future comes slamming at him. These existentialist undercurrents rise up like oceanic groundswells in the hushed moments of a firefight – a Kierkegaardian angst where a bullet between the eyes signifies more than just the end of one’s life. And then there’s the isolated terror of the film’s central antagonist, Chigurh: an entirely human force with an inhuman drive as inexorable as fate itself, whipping between the Texan counties as a sort of grim reaper hellbent on quashing man’s attempts to break away from a system of a demented (or natural) order of power, domination, and inevitability.

Perhaps the highlight of the work is McCarthy’s adroit handling of the prose. It’s as if the man is not writing a novel but crafting some sort of austere furnishing for a friend, planing and sanding the wood with a carpenter’s finesse. The words are active and direct, the sentences laid bare as sun-streaked bones, paragraphs with such a strong physical sense they feel as if one can lift them out of the page and place them on a table.

As dark as the mood and themes may be, everything is exposed and nothing is hidden, reminding one of what Stephen King once said about horror being a substitute for a far greater horror: the lack of meaning in the everyday. What’s truly frightening about NCFOM is how McCarthy redlines inhumanity not in Vietnam or Darfur but in the mid-afternoon sun of the American Heartland, the perfect setting for a case study in fate, violence, and meaning for our time.

-Jordan Finn

Further reading/listening

Partially Examined Life podcast

http://partiallyexaminedlife.com/2012/09/21/ep63-cormac-mccarthy/

New York Times review

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/24/books/review/no-country-for-old-men-texas-noir.html?_r=0 

Music for this episode comes from producer Piecemeal. The track is titled "Chartreuse."

Produced by Phillip Griffin.

To catch up on the rest of our episodes and delve into some more great books click here.

Waste Books- "Sabbath's Theater" by Philip Roth

In this episode of Waste Books Cooper, Jordan, Phil, and Eric discussed Philip Roth's novel Sabbath's Theater.

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Overview

“Sabbath did not care to make people suffer beyond the point that he wanted them to suffer; he certainly didn’t want to make them suffer any more than made him happy.” At 64 years old, the Mickey Sabbath of Philip Roth’s Sabbath’s Theater lusts for female flesh as if (and maybe it does) his life depends on it. The master puppeteer who once used his finger puppets as a dignified career is now riddled with the aches of osteoarthritis and finds old friends and a laundry list of lovers as his remaining fodder fora relentless and hilarious week of manipulation and shameless seduction.

A man with no credo, Sabbath finds his only purpose in life cheating on his wife with the voluptuous and equally prurient Drenka Balich, who at the novel’s beginning, succumbs unexpectedly from ovarian cancer leaving Sabbath with only memories of a sordid lifetime to parse. A man in bed with the days of youthful philandering in the merchant navy and ‘60s free love, Sabbath flees his unhappy New England home forNew York City and confronts the realization that at the end of the century nothing is left for him but a tête-à- tête with a haunted history of death and trauma.

Roth’s writing is that of a craftsmen, presenting characters and situations with a relaxed grace that embodies the loquacious confessions of a protagonist spilling his guts, but without even a paucity of contrition. He fleshes out Sabbath’s saga by providing rich flashbacks, initially overloading readers with a dense history of references to Sabbath’s terrible losses, but slowly unraveling who his disappeared Nikki is, how he lost his credibility with the off-off- Broadway crowd in the ‘70s, and why Drenka’s highway patrolmen of a son has it out for ol’ Mickey. The writing is informal but wise, tight but loose – like Mickey – the narrator delving into decades old anecdotes, ribald fantasies that are confused with reality, and a twenty-one- page footnote-cum- phone sex transcript. In other words, it’s an accessible yet serious novel and gets the blood flowing in all sorts of organs.

And yet, Sabbath isn’t merely a lecherous pervert nor a villain. Our anti-hero bears much more resemblance to a Falstaffian anti-hero, a doggedly resilient man who refuses to move on or grow up, a quality both redemptive and damning. The freedom he showcases is a guiltless one: a liberation driven by his guile, lust for life, and independence. And while his obdurate isolation may appear as a shortcoming, he understands that “it’s the best preparation I know of for death,” the central preoccupation of the novel. Touché Sabbath. We’ll see you in hell.

-Jordan Finn

To catch up on the rest of our episodes and delve into some more great books click here!

Show Notes

Music for this episode comes from wasteoids Idaho Green, featuring the track "Seouled Out."

Podcast Produced by Phillip Griffin.

Waste Books- "Jernigan" by David Gates

Introducing our monthly book club podcast, Waste Books! In our first episode Waste Division contributors Cooper, Jordan, Phil, and Eric read and discussed David Gates' novel, Jernigan.

Also on iTunes!

Reading Jernigan is like stepping into the mind of a middle-aged man fraught in a tunneling psychosis so abysmally dark, that even the most enthusiastic PTA members would start wishing the titular Jernigan would do more than entertain his self-destruction and snuff out his candle burning at both ends. The protagonist Jernigan fathers, drinks, lusts, maims, remembers, drinks, fucks, hates, forgets and drinks his days away, not so fond about the past or the future or – really anything at all. 

David Gates’ novel climbs into late Reagan era America and manhandles the reigns of the period, limning a mal de siècle vibe that adroitly fits accessible reading with the sort of lofty postmodern malaise you expect from the involuted phrasing of a Beckett or Burroughs. You’ll often get subtle nods to figures like Pound and Eliot, but the modernist canon is never a prerequisite for comprehension and serves as a bonus for discovering Jernigan’s attachment to the suffering that art invariably entails. Jernigan is a page-turner and while clocking in at 240 pages, the six-month time-span of the novel reads like the study of a Polaroid or a lost and crackly VHS tape, the one where you see your dad as the barely contained manic-depressant, only kept from a nervous breakdown thanks to an interminable supply of 7-Elven beer and belts of Canadian whisky.

The zeitgeist is not too far from our own and the deluge of motifs ranging from prescription drugs, alcohol, guns, infidelity, xenophobia, sexual abuse, and consumerism frames the American Dream as a mere chimera, its obtainment only made possible through rose-colored glasses or a detested safe and stable upbringing that would only make you another asshole in Jernigan’s eyes. Much of the story plays into our fate as not just people, but as Americans, as consumers, as the sons and daughters of our father and the mothers or fathers of our children. Jernigan seems to be looking for a way out of the karmic cycle, but it’s hard to say how hard and if there’s something to be valorized in his pure nihilism and dissatisfaction with living in the Greatest Country in the World.

Whether you can’t manage to get out of bed due to a quotidian micro-existential crisis, or find yourself so deeply addicted to something that functionality is impossible without it, Jernigan will intone a dark message of empathy. For the arty, the depressed, or the bored, the narrative takes readers into the dark heart of a plasticized culture unwilling to speak what it feels and opens the scar tissue of wounds we sometimes forget in order to survive but need exposed in order to live.

-Jordan Finn

Show Notes

This episode features music by Waste fam Bull Market. The track is called "Duct Tape."

Produced by Phillip Griffin.

Catch up on all of our other episodes by clicking here!