All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy (1992), 302 pp. Winner, National Book Award for Fiction, 1992.
Cormac McCarthy’s National Book Award-winning All the Pretty Horses is a novel which,
frankly, deserves every bit of praise it’s received and possibly more. All the Pretty Horses tells the story of
John Grady Cole, a sixteen-year-old who, in the wake of his grandfather’s death
and parents’ divorce, leaves behind a crumbling life in San Angelo, Texas to
ride—on horseback, yes—into Mexico with a friend named Lacey Rawlins. My
younger brother, who recommended this book, put it to me roughly this way: “It
all starts when a guy hides naked under a horse in a big storm.” (And really,
who could resist a book with that synopsis?) The scene my brother described
does not occur for nearly 100 pages, but it’s true that the course of John
Grady and Rawlins’s trip does change significantly when they meet Blevins, a
young boy of probably fourteen riding a horse of remarkable stature and dubious
origins. And though I don’t think he’s completely naked, Blevins’s fear of
lightening and attempt to take shelter beneath his horse does have profound and
unforeseen consequences for the trio.
McCarthy is a novelist I’ve been both intrigued by and
squeamish about for a while, since I know of his work mostly as renown for being
extremely violent and/or depressing. The
Road, which I had to repeatedly stop my boyfriend from attempting to read
to me, strikes me as perhaps one of the most perfect marriages of content and
novelistic style—in every way it is a bleak, bleak book. All the Pretty Horses is not without violence; in fact, it is at
times a jarringly and unsettlingly brutal book. But on the whole, this novel
gives the reader so much more than it takes out of her: it is beautiful and
devastating and heartening and sometimes even funny all at once. McCarthy’s
language, which I had to acclimate to at first, is both simple and grand; it
has depth and lyricism and is somehow the type of language which in itself
lends significance to whatever it says; it feels elemental, even—as one critic
put it—mythic.
There is a film version of this book starring Matt Damon and
Penelope Cruz that I tried but could not find anywhere, possibly because it is
apparently not a very good film, as its TomatoMeter reading of 32% seems to
suggest (that’s on Rottentomatoes.com, for the uninitiated). The movie was
probably never going to measure up to the book, even if it had been well made,
but regardless of the fact that I haven’t watched it I can still say that I
object on principal to its casting. Not that I don’t like Matt Damon—in fact I
think he would have been a perfect John Grady Cole had he not been THIRTY
playing sixteen when the film came out. But it’s not just that the ages didn’t
match up that makes me protest; rather, I protest because the sense that
children are trying to act in a world which history has shaped and molded in
ways they cannot possibly understand—which forms one of the book’s central
tragedies—is lost if the characters are men instead of boys.
All the Pretty Horses
is the first volume in McCarthy’s Border Trilogy, which I fully intend to read
in its entirety, and—it should be clear by now—I would recommend it to pretty
much anyone. It is a novel that grips while you’re reading it and lingers
afterward, in that way only the best books can.
