On Reading Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses

I have now read Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses, remarkable in its stark, yet lyrical beauty reminiscent of Hemingway and Faulkner, intense in its palpable confrontation of goodness with evil; an elegy for a lost way of life; a saga of idealism’s betrayal; of mythic passage from innocence into knowledge offering no redemption, apart from the grace of endurance and a refusal to forfeit honor.

The traditional rancher spreads of west Texas have fallen on hard times, threatening a way of life. The novel opens appropriately with the death of central protagonist John Grady Cole’s grandfather, a former baron among ranch owners. The ranch, grown to 18,000 acres in 1871, has been sold, an inheritance lost. Working with horses is the only life Grady knows:

The Grady name was buried with that old man the day the norther blew the lawnchairs over the dead cemetery grass. The boy’s name was Cole. John Grady Cole.

The first of a three novels known as the Border Trilogy, All the Pretty Horses underscores the death of the Western frontier, once ripe with promise of plenitude—fortunes to be made and dreams fulfilled.

Foregrounded in historical fact, a pastoral, unfenced way of life has fallen prey to change—the dividing of holdings among family, increased taxation, a drift of young people to the cities, mechanization, the invasion of industry, government’s encroachment, relentless droughts—above all, the railroad’s ubiquity, all of which McCarthy turns into metaphor for an agrarian culture bound by hard labor and a code of honor irretrievably lost. Metaphor becomes elegy.

All the Pretty Horses  narrates the journey of cowboys John Grady and his friend Lacey Rawlins from West Texas into Mexico, joined later by a mysterious youth, Jimmy Blevins, who owns a gun and rides an elegant bay mare, foreshadowing trouble ahead.

The novel abounds in resounding passages, poetic in resonance, like this one of stellar vastness, a cosmos indifferent to Man and of a fusion with nature and of a connection now severed:

He lay on his back in his blankets and looked out where the quartermoon lay cocked over the heel of the mountains. In that false blue dawn the Pleiades seemed to be rising up into the darkness above the world and dragging all the stars away, the great diamond of Orion and Cepella and the signature of Cassiopeia all rising up through the phosphorous dark like a sea-net. He lay a long time listening to the others breathing in their sleep while he contemplated the wildness about him, the wildness within.

Acquaintance with archetype helps readers tap more easily into the novel’s multiple levels of meaning—the hero archetype of initiation, trial, and return; the paradisiacal garden of northern Mexico’s La Purisima with its grassland abundance, grazing cattle of upwards of a thousand head, and 400 horses, attended by valeros, finding fulfillment in their labor; a siren temptress, Alejandra, the forbidden fruit, daughter of wealthy hacendado Don Héctor:

She passed five feet away and turned her fineboned face and looked full at him. She had blue eyes and she nodded or perhaps she only lowered her head.

The hero’s mentor appears, Dueña Alfonsa, great aunt of Alejandra, delivering stern warning from experience, that fate often annuls human wish and that economic and social determinism govern universally. Unlike traditional mentors, she’s unhelpful, even sinister, serving as forewarner and enforcer of social codes.

Not unexpectantly, trespass —Grady and Alejandra have become lovers—makes inevitable Grady’s expulsion from paradise, commencing an ordeal with uncertain outcome in a world where idealism is often judged as weakness and evil corrupts honor with impunity.

Unjustly imprisoned, Grady and Rawlins undergo brutal imprisonment for a crime they never committed. Blevins has  been executed earlier by a rogue officer. We have reached the novel’s nadir, a replay of mythic hell. A Mexican prison, governed by bribery and savagery, tests their courage and capacity to endure.

Dueña Alfonso buys their freedom, under condition he not return to La Purisima, only to have Grady resist and encounter Alejandra’s rejection.  Rawlings has returned to Texas.

Throughout, the novel remains faithful to its hero archetype—the hero, wiser now, returns to exact justice, wounded not only by a rifle’s bullets, but a pervasive knowledge of human capacity for caprice and injustice. Grady’s loss of his horses is inextricably linked to his identity. He returns to reclaim them, necessitating violence.

Restoration of wrong occurs, but not without a tarnished innocence and a sadness that knowledge brings.

Symbolism abounds, particularly through the horses of the narrative that give rise to the novel’s title. Virtual characters, they symbolize a dying way of life and nature’s nobility.

Grady’s affinity with horses affirms a vestige of traditional human communion with nature, once vibrant, but now vulnerable to a modern world in disconnect.

I have only one criticism, and that concerns its last fifty pages in which the prose splendor slackens and we arrive at a conclusion seemingly hurried and simplistic, anticlimactic in contrast to the mesmerizing narrative of its preceding pages that sustain a reader’s interest.

But make no mistake. McCarthy succeeds in writing an extraordinary novel, and I am embarrassed to have not caught-up with him sooner.

He passed from us in 2023 at age 89, having written twelve novels, several plays and short stories. Several of his books became movies.

He was his own person, disdaining celebrity status, living much of his life in poverty. Like Grady, he persevered. Recognition came late, beginning with All the Pretty Horses, which won the National Book Award, our nation’s highest literary award. He was 59 and now famous.

I intend to continue with his trilogy, then on to Blood Meridian, which many critics regard as his opus magnum.

Transcending time and geography, McCarthy rivals Faulkner as our greatest American author.

–rj