New & Current Releases
Archives: A-Z By Title
Archives: A-Z By Author
Advanced Search

All-Time High Scores
Best Of 2006
Best Of 2005
Best Of 2004
How Metascores Are Calculated
Discuss Books In Our Forums

Stars indicate the most critically-acclaimed books.

No Country For Old Men
by Cormac McCarthy


7.8

based on 29 reviews
read critic reviews
how did we calculate this?

based on 41 votes
read user comments
rate this book

Compare prices at pricegrabber.com

Buy it at powells.com

Buy it at amazon.com

Buy it at amazon.co.uk

The Road

McCarthy's first novel in seven years concerns a man who finds himself in the middle of a drug war after he stumbles across (and pockets) $2 million in cash near the Texas-Mexico border.

Knopf, 320 pages
07/19/2005
$24.95

ISBN: 0375406778

Fiction
General Literature & Fiction

All reviews are classified as one of five grades: Outstanding (4 points), Favorable (3), Mixed (2), Unfavorable (1) and Terrible (0). To calculate the Metascore, we divide total points achieved by the total points possible (i.e., 4 x the number of reviews), with the resulting percentage (multiplied by 100) being the Metascore. Learn more...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Kirkus Reviews

Magnificent writing, nonetheless, makes the best case yet for putting McCarthy on a pedestal just below the one occupied by William Faulkner.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The Economist

This is a dark book, but its protagonists have soul.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Library Journal Edward B. St. John

McCarthy stumbles headlong into self-parody. [15 June 2005, p.59]

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.

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.

The average user rating for this book is 7.8 (out of 10) based on 41 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.

Will B gave it a10:
An incredible post-modern story with themes that touch each of us as we move through our society. Leaves one wondering, in today's world, if things like that don't happen in ones backyard when there is a bad dog on guard, who is on guard and how big is the backyard? Big Themes and Big Questions make this super-action packed thriller also an intelligent read.

milton o gave it a9:
A fabulous pace, terrific regional dialogue and rarely an error. The wind up was a little dnearly flawless.issapointing but that's the perogotive of the novelist. Just well written stuff- a little leaner, meaner prose than his other novels but

Lee H gave it a0:
Give this man a pulpit, so he can spout his tedious platitudes from there. In minute detail. He opened the refrigerator. He looked in. He took out the milk, drank some from the carton, sealed the carton, and put it back in the refrigerator. He closed the door.

James P gave it a5:
My first exposure to this author, I liked his gift for description, good ear for dialog and he got his guns right. (It is amazing how often authors do not do good research on firearms and just bluff it, knowing most folks won't pick it up. (Like Elmore Leonard several times writing that a character flipped off the safety on a Smith and Wesson revolver, when such a device does not exist on those guns) That said. I really liked it about three quarters through. The dialog heavy narration didn't bother me at first. I write screenplays which are all dialog and not much narration, but in the last quarter of the book, the author lost me. The thing about dialog, is it needs to be to the point and not deteriorate in to rambling repitition. The author seems to think the audience is not smart enough to get where he's going. The failing is, we can all see it coming a mile off as the point of the dialog takes it's time meandering up to us, lumbers on by at a snails pace and then just won't leave. It's an embarassment. He kills off someone the reader is heavily invested in about 75% in to the book, like he couldn't figure out what to do. That is when the endless and seemingly pointless dialog begins and simply grinds the reader into submission and ultimately boredom. The killer goes on, and on, and on, and on before shooting his victim. The sheriff goes on and on endlessly examining his life that also bores the readers. Weird how the story turned bad in the third act and the author just flew it into the mountain. In the end the reader, at least my wife and myself were disappointed, annoyed and wanted it to end to put us out of our misery. This is an apparently good talent who lost his way. I hope not permanently. Read an Elmore Leonard at the same time and by contrast, Leonards talky stories take you somewhere, you don't mind the dialog because it helps not hinders the story, and he has a way of getting to the point great skill.

Mark L gave it a9:
Ed Tom Bell is a well conceived and very well executed character, of a sort that one finds - in a man of a certain age - along the border. When that man disappears, we will be the poorer, but we will have McCarthy's story and the voice of Sherriff Bell as the chorus of this tragedy.

Alain M gave it a5:
Deeply disappointing considering McCarthy's quality as a writer. His best days sadly appear to be behind him and seems to admit as much through the character of Bell. I'm a huge CM fan; Blood Meridian is one of the greatest novels of the past fifty years but No Country For Old Men doesn't come close to it or even the less impressive Cities of the Plain. This is no more than a workmanlike crime thriller that could have been written by any of the genre writers. Far too dialogue heavy when his skill lies in his descriptions. If that's all you want then fair enough but it isn't what I look for from Cormac McCarthy. First time readers shouldn't think this is what the great author is capable of.

larry p gave it a9:
Outstanding. Could not stop reading. Clearly one of my favorites.

No Country For Old Men by Cormac McCarthy

No Country For Old Men
by Cormac McCarthy