All the Pretty Horses — the first book in The Border Trilogy — won the U.S. National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award.
The book is crafted with care, with awe-inspiring descriptive prose, authentic characters, and dialog that draws the reader into the story’s landscape. I first came across Cormac McCarthy’s writing in the novel The Road, which has a completely different mood, but a similar style.
All the Pretty Horses is written without conventional punctuation; there were many passages that reminded me of Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls, with ideas strung together with conjunctions (particularly and), which evokes a gentle cadence (the meditative rhythm of riding a horse through the prairies?) and possibly compensates for the lack of commas:
"When the truck finally pulled out and they saw him still standing they offered their bundles for him to sit on and he did so and he nodded and dozed to the hum of the tires on the blacktop and the rain stopped and the night cleared and the moon that was already risen raced among the high wires by the highway side like a single silver music note burning in the constant and lavish dark and the passing fields were rich from the rain with the smell of earth and grain and peppers and the sometime smell of horses." [Ch. IV, p. 219-220, The Border Trilogy, Everyman's Library edition]
I was curious, so I searched around and discovered a term for writing that uses several conjunctions in close succession: polysyndetic syntax. Further, The King James Version of the Bible uses similar syntax, and All the Pretty Horses is permeated with a biblical mood.
There are no quotation marks used, and I found that the dialog occasionally blended into the story, which had the effect of drawing me further into the novel. The dialog is sparse, but has a genuineness that enhances the mood and reveals layers naturally, where descriptive prose would sometimes falter.
The protagonist, John Grady Cole, is a fully realized character, and he is perhaps the coolest sixteen year-old I’ve come across in fiction. It is 1949, and John Grady’s world has been irrevocably altered: his grandfather died, his parents are divorced, his father is fading, his girlfriend has dumped him, and his mother is selling the family ranch (excellent material for a country song; some band should experiment with his words as lyrics). Rather than move into the city, John Grady decides to run away to Mexico with his best friend, Lacey Rawlins. John Grady has a special relationship with horses and the expanse of an open landscape. He expects Mexico to be more like the ‘old world’, before the advent of cars, high-rises, and the claustrophobic concept of subdivided land. John Grady and Rawlins have a few adventures before they find work on a ranch, and John Grady inevitably faces disillusionment, but endeavors to unearth the inherent beauty and quality in the world.
In Mexico, John Grady’s expertise with horses is appreciated by the ranch owner — the hacendado, Don Héctor— and he is promoted to a high level of responsibility. John Grady begins a dangerous liaison with Don Hector’s daughter, Alejandra, but I found the romance less convincing than the bromance between John Grady and Rawlins. Alejandra’s character, and the result of the affair, felt like a plot device, though a device that was worked into the story quite smoothly. John Grady’s conversations with Alejandra’s grand-aunt, señorita Alfonsa, were more poignant. But I’m quibbling…
All the Pretty Horses is not a long novel, but Cormac McCarthy is a marvelous writer, and he has infused the story with surprising depth. I’m looking forward to the other two books in The Border Trilogy (The Crossing and Cities of the Plain), but I have many books to read before I continue the journey (including Blood Meridian, by McCarthy) .
Highly recommended.
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db johnston
almost falling 