After reading Cormac McCarthy's stellar
The Road, I immediately felt pressed to pick up the older and more popular
All the Pretty Horses. Some might label the author's non-grammatical method as pretentious, but ignoring all that, it is undoubtedly poignant. He has the power to paint vivid portraits of characters and settings which involve the reader through every sentence.
All the Pretty Horses isn't as moving as
The Road, but all of McCarthy's core strengths are certainly found here. It's very easy to become melodramatic or cliche'd when writing a Western, but McCarthy eschews all that rubbish and clings to human beings' key nature. In movies like
It's a Wonderful Life, people might choose family over a career or prestige, but McCarthy knows that mankind's tendencies usually decide otherwise.
All the Pretty Horses' protagonist is John Grady Cole, a sixteen-year-old cowboy who heads down to Mexico in 1948 to find work (with his friend Rawlins). (spoiler!) Later in the novel, there is scene where John Grady is forced to kill a man. McCarthy could heroize John Grady and have him appear as some husky, brave Schwarzenegger-type, but toward the end McCarthy makes the protagonist reconsider his action and wonder whether his attacker was just some good kid doing his job. (end spoiler!)
We also want the novel's romance to succeed. In Mexico, John Grady meets Alejandra. Alejandra's sagacious aunt takes notice and warns him about a woman's honor and its importance (in Mexico), but the story wouldn't be worth telling if Grady was deterred. Alejandra is an admirable, skilled woman with personality, and her entrance immediately captures our interest:
There was a road on the other side of the fence and in the road were the tracks of tires and the tracks of horses from the recent rains and a young girl came riding down the road and passed them and they ceased talking. She wore english riding boots and jodhpurs and a blue twill hacking jacket and she carried a ridingcrop and the horse she rode was a black Arabian saddlehorse. She'd been riding the horse in the river or in the cienagas because the horse was wet to its belly and the leather fenders of the saddles were dark at their lower edge and her boots as well. She wore a flatcrowned hat of black felt with a wide brim and her black hair was loose under it and fell halfway to her waist and as she rode past she turned and smiled and touched the brim of the hat with her crop and the vaqueros touched their hatbrims one by one down to the last of those who'd pretend not even to see her as she passed.
One skill that McCarthy possesses, which other authors do not, is making lengthy, tedious passages seem worthwhile. In the novel's third act, Alejandra's aunt tells an interminable story about her family. Right when we start to feel bored, McCarthy hits us with a disturbing part about her loved one's death. It's a terrible moment and impacts the reader deeply.
If there's any gripe to be had with
All the Pretty Horses, it's that McCarthy's style is, for someone of his apparent talent, easy. He could write anything poorly and excuse it with, "It's part of the prose, man!" Sometimes the style can become redundant as well-----you might even find this in the above passage. But despite its occasional dubiousness,
All the Pretty Horses is still a mostly engaging tale which forces the reader to care about the characters and the conclusion.
Rating: B
Barnes and Noble
