All the Pretty Horses
by Cormac McCarthy
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Book Summary Information
Author: Cormac McCarthyEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published)
Published: 1993-06-29
ISBN: 0679744398
Number of pages: 320
Publisher: Vintage
Book Reviews of All the Pretty Horses
Book Review: Strange but Recommended
Summary: 4 Stars
Open ALL THE PRETTY HORSES to a random page and you're likely encounter an epic cowboy sensibility. This emanates from McCarthy's hero, John Grady Cole, as well as from Cole's interaction with his friend Rawlins. To simplify somewhat, McCarthy captures these characters as men, competent in their responsibilities, sound in judgment, and experienced with guns and horses. As a bonus, they have laconic cowboy-style conversations--Yep.... Nope--that are often funny and surprisingly profound. All this works... provided the reader forgets that Cole is 16 and Rawlins is 17.
Remember the movie Rio Bravo? Well, in HORSES, McCarthy has placed the sensibility of the Sheriff John T. Chance (John Wayne) into the body of Colorado Ryan (Ricky Nelson). This makes for a slightly weird book, with its often beautiful realism shadowed by Cole's impossible maturity.
Of course, it's unfair to criticize an author for the book he didn't write. Still, I don't see why McCarthy had to make his hero and sidekick so young. McCarthy could have explored the same rich mine of themes--the search for the ideal of the American West, the power of individual integrity, the resourcefulness of certain men, the complex interfacing of cultures, and institutional violence--just as well with Cole and Rawlins, and their errant buddy Jimmy Blevins, at a credible 40. Yes, there's a young-love subplot in HORSES. But with adjustments (add a hot older woman), McCarthy could have managed this successfully. So, I wonder: Was McCarthy thinking ahead as he wrote HORSES, seeing the need to keep Cole young to write his The Border Trilogy: All the Pretty Horses, the Crossing, Cities of the Plain (Everyman's Library)? Or, does he just work best when a major character is young?
This is my third Cormac McCarthy novel. IMHO, Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West (Modern Library) is a masterpiece, with McCarthy telling the story of the Glanton Gang so that its violence has epic and profound reach. Similarly, The Road told a story of survival--maybe, after a nuclear apocalypse--in which the most basic achievements have deep reverberations. For depth in HORSES, McCarthy relies, in part, on an amazing monologue by the character Alfonsa, who tells stories of her Mexico, where unjustified and terrible violence lurks beneath a polished and civil veneer. Definitely, Alfonsa's Mexican interpretation is a valid and profound overview of Cole's story. Even so, McCarthy finally shows Cole to be American, who decides (SPOLIER ALERT!) that the best resolution of his Mexican experience is to return to Texas with his property.
ALL THE PRETTY HORSES is definitely a worthwhile read and features plenty of McCarthy's usual elegance and eloquence. A slightly strange novel but recommended.
Summary of All the Pretty Horses
The national bestseller and the first volume in Cormac McCarthy's Border Trilogy, All the Pretty Horses is the tale of John Grady Cole, who at sixteen finds himself at the end of a long line of Texas ranchers, cut off from the only life he has ever imagined for himself. With two companions, he sets off for Mexico on a sometimes idyllic, sometimes comic journey to a place where dreams are paid for in blood. Winner of the National Book Award for Fiction.Part bildungsroman, part horse opera, part meditation on courage and loyalty, this beautifully crafted novel won the National Book Award in 1992. The plot is simple enough. John Grady Cole, a 16-year-old dispossessed Texan, crosses the Rio Grande into Mexico in 1949, accompanied by his pal Lacey Rawlins. The two precocious horsemen pick up a sidekick--a laughable but deadly marksman named Jimmy Blevins--encounter various adventures on their way south and finally arrive at a paradisiacal hacienda where Cole falls into an ill-fated romance. Readers familiar with McCarthy's Faulknerian prose will find the writing more restrained than in Suttree and Blood Meridian. Newcomers will be mesmerized by the tragic tale of John Grady Cole's coming of age.
McCarthy, Cormac Books
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