No Country For Old Men - Literary Significance and Criticism

Literary Significance and Criticism

William J. Cobb, in a review published in the Houston Chronicle (July 15, 2005), characterizes McCarthy as "our greatest living writer" and describes the book as "a heated story that brands the reader's mind as if seared by a knife heated upon campfire flames." On the other hand, in the July 24, 2005, issue of The New York Times Book Review, the critic and fiction writer Walter Kirn suggests that the novel's plot is "sinister high hokum," but writes admiringly of the prose, describing the author as "a whiz with the joystick, a master-level gamer who changes screens and situations every few pages."

The novel has received a significant amount of critical attention, including Lynnea Chapman King, Rick Wallach and Jim Welsh's edited collection No Country for Old Men: From Novel to Film and Raymond Malewitz's "'Anything Can Be an Instrument': Misuse Value and Rugged Consumerism in Cormac McCarthy's No Country for Old Men."

In contrast, literary critic Harold Bloom does not count himself among the admirers of No Country For Old Men, stating that it lacked the quality of McCarthy's best works, particularly Blood Meridian, and compared it to William Faulkner's A Fable, stating that the "apocalyptic moral judgments" made in No Country For Old Men represented "a sort of falling away on McCarthy’s part".