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August 2005 Befuddled & obsolete by Max Watman A review of No Country for Old Men, by Cormac McCarthy.
I’ve discovered an alarming trend. Call it the emergence of the PseudoFuddyDuddyalists—a new breed of old men, pretending to be shocked by the small ways in which they no longer understand the world, writing as if they had been cloistered for decades. Pale, they wander out in their antique wigs and robes, their small eyes blinking in the sun, and ask what brave new world is this, that has such haircuts?
It is a strange feeling to realize that I waited seven years anticipating the next Cormac McCarthy book, and when it hit my desk I learned that in No Country for Old Men McCarthy had thrown his lot in with the befuddled and obsolete. There are two characters in the book with whom the reader builds sympathy. Llewelyn Moss is classic McCarthy. Antelope hunting in the Texas desert, hiking along the ridges, he walks by rocks etched with pictographs “perhaps a thousand years old. The men who drew them we ... This article is available to subscribers and for individual purchaseSubscribe to TNC (Print and Online editions) Subscribe to TNC (Online only) This article originally appeared in The New Criterion, Volume 23 August 2005, on page 0 Copyright © 2012 The New Criterion | www.newcriterion.com http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/befuddled-obsolete-1350
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by Max Watman Reviews of "The View from Castle Rock: Stories," by Alice Munro; "Talk Talk," by T.C. Boyle; and "Special Topics in Calamity Physics," by Marisha Pessl. On Marina Goldovskaya’s film about the real gulag, The Solovky Power: Evidence and Documents. by James Bowman On the “first article of faith” of “those whose political starting point is the need to change the world.”
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