For the first twenty or thirty years of his career Cormac McCarthy was a little known but critically acclaimed cult author.  Hailed as the heir to Faulkner, his books were Southern gothic--drenched in violence, incest, necrophilia,  etc.  But with the publication of Blood Meridian in 1985, McCarthy began to turn his attention to the American West and in 1992, All the Pretty Horses, the first book in what ended up being his Border Trilogy, established him as a Western author and, not coincidentally, won him the audience and mainstream awards that had previously eluded him.  (The novel won the 1992 National Book Award for fiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction in 1993.)  It also lead to the inevitable sniping by his adherents; many said he had sold out, others claimed that the mass audience misunderstood the book and that it was much darker than they understood.  The confusion deepened as those of us who had newly discovered him, returned to his earlier work.  I couldn't have been fifty pages into Suttree when someone was having sex in a watermelon patch, with a freakin' watermelon!  I, for one, disliked the Southern books, but love the Westerns.

All the Pretty Horses tells the story of 16 year old John Grady Cole.  The dissolution of his parents' marriage has left him the first of his line in many decades without a family ranch to work, so he sets out on horseback for Mexico to find work. He is accompanied by 17 year old Lacey Rawlins and along the way they meet up with Jimmy Blevins who may be as young as 13.  By turns comic (Blevins is deathly afraid of lightning and ends up losing his clothes and his horse in a storm) and tragic (the boys eventually end up in jail), the book is centered around the relationship between men and horses and cattle and the passing of a way of life that was based on that bond.

McCarthy's prose retains traces of his Faulknerian heritage in the minimal use of punctuation (including the absence of quotation marks in dialogue), the coining of many compound words and the general sense of gloom that pervades much of the story.  But the mythic qualities inherent in the American Western overwhelm any intent he may have had to write an anti-western or to puncture the myths and the novel ends up being in many ways a traditional cowboy tale, merely refracted through a modern lens.

What finally sets it apart and makes it extraordinary is McCarthy's use of language, which manages to be both spare and poetic.  Here is his description of Cole breaking wild horses on a Mexican ranch:

    By the time they had three of the horses sidelined in the trap blowing and glaring about there were
    several vaqueros at the gate drinking coffee in a leisurely fashion and watching  the proceedings.
    By midmorning eight of the horses stood tied and the other eight were wilder than deer, scattering
    along the fence and bunching and running in a rising sea of dust as the day warmed, coming to
    reckon slowly with the remorselessness of this rendering of their fluid and collective selves into that
    condition of separate and helpless paralysis which seemed to be among them like a creeping plague.
    The entire complement of vaqueros had come from the bunkhouse to watch and by noon all sixteen
    of the mestenos were standing about in the portrero sidehobbled to their own hackamores and faced
    about in every direction and all communion among them broken.  They looked like animals trussed
    up by children for fun and they stood waiting for they knew not what with the voice of the breaker
    still running in their brains like the voice of some god come to inhabit them.

Partisans of his early works can scream all they want about how the book is supposed to be standing the conventions of the Western on their head, but the passage above is very much of a piece with our traditional views of cowboys and the West and thanks to McCarthy's lyricism, it rises to the level of mythopoetics.

I believe that this book will one day be numbered among the American classics, with books like Moby Dick and Huckleberry Finn and All the King's Men; it's that good.

(Reviewed:)

Grade: (A+)