Cormac McCarthy published this book recently but I'd like to know when he wrote it. I accept that people were saying "fedex" by 1980, when it's set, but I'm glad no one used that abbreviation as a verb. Someone offers to go to an ATM, and while ATMs existed in 1973, it doesn't seem likely that west Texas was awash in them seven years later. An Amazon reviewer points out that Texas didn't have a gas chamber, and that's a bad mistake, one that McCarthy as a Texan shouldn't've made. Merely as an Usan adult from before 1980 to now, he has no excuse that I can think of to put a mobile phone in a regular Joe's shirt pocket.
I'm glad I listened to this: It wasn't good enough a book to navigate without punctuation or dialog markers but it was an enjoyable listen, well-performed, and "dont" and "I knowed it" don't hurt my brain as much to hear as to read.
RDC asked if I thought it was a reactionary book, and that's an interesting question because I'm not sure how much to separate Sheriff Bell and Cormac McCarthy. The book has to be set in 1980 and not much later because Bell has to have served in WWII with enough time to have passed for him to be old but not yet decrepit. From Moss's being a Vietnam vet, in contrast, we are to know that while Bell is Good, Moss is Flawed.
Oh, that's another mistake. Moss ascribes to himself only one brother's worth of family, but Bell eventually speaks to what seemed like Moss's parents.
Yeah, the book's reactionary, or McCarthy is: if Bell had his ideas--that society went to hell when people stopped saying "sir"--in the third person narration of the bulk of the novel, I'd say that McCarthy wrote Bell. But Bell'sfirst-person interludes look to me a lot like Lightly Disguised Author.