hand away.

Heads, he said.

Let me have your rifle.

It aint fair, said Rawlins. You shot the last three.

Well go on then. You can owe me.

Well hold his horse. He might not be gunbroke.

You all are just funnin, said the boy.

Funnin, as is McCarthy. It is artistic fun to eschew the grammatical manners of printed English to shape a stripped dialogue to enhance the laconic voice of all McCarthy dialogue. It is also fun to escape America, to be sixteen again, to ride horses, to see country, and to meet poor Mexicans, some of whom treat the characters to that embracing hospitality so missing in their own families. And the cause of trouble to come is not malevolent destiny so much as hapless Jimmy Blevins, who loses his mount in that feared thunder, steals his horse back from the small towner who assumed possession, and ignorantly shoots a man. McCarthy says, look at the probable genesis of our mythical Billy the Kid and Jesse James. A boy just into puberty with a horse and gun riding round will sooner or later get in trouble which no juvenile services can prevent. This is where McCarthy wants his characters, as far as possible from institutions, riding over uninhabited country, until they find the dream ranch where they can work as horse tamers.

The ranch is “The Hacienda de Nuestra Senora de la Purisima Concepcion,” sitting alongside a nine-thousand-foot mountain range owned by the wealthy hacendado, who has a beautiful daughter with whom John Grady Cole falls in love. But before the love scenes, McCarthy is intent on his book’s subject, horses, and the rich interaction between men and horses and the equally savorable interaction between horsemen about horses. Taming horses puts a person closer to elemental life than he will come outside sex.

They smelled like what they were, wild animals. He held the horse’s face against his chest and he could feel along his inner thighs the blood pumping through the arteries and he could smell the fear and he cupped his hand over the horse’s eyes and stroked them and he did not stop talking to the horse at all, speaking in a low steady voice and telling it all that he intended to do and cupping the animal’s eyes and stroking the terror out.

This is John Grady Cole—at sixteen, recall—doing something in the real world to which the closest anyone living will come is by reading a book or watching a film. Cole is heroic, larger than life, and however doomed McCarthy’s trilogy might show him to be, he is someone to be jealous of, unlike McCarthy’s earlier personae. Poor Jimmy is a contrast, and Rawlins is an admiring observer.

For McCarthy there are more or less genuine human beings, just as there is genuine cowhide. And a reader will have to admit that there is genuine writing in this novel. By McCarthy’s code, if a novelist writes of horses he must know horses, and the knowledge will show in the words he chooses, down to the details of the ropes available for controlling the wild energy they embody: “Stacked on the ground outside the gate were coils of every kind of rope, cotton and manilla and plaited rawhide and maguey and ixtle down to lengths of old woven hair mecates and handplaited piecings of bindertwine.” Reading McCarthy is not following the fusions of a fictional dreamer. “Ixtle” is a plant ur-Aztecs knew, and “mecate” is summoned from a lacuna in Webster between “meaty” and “Mecca.” This is not cliché Western writing. We are in a Spanish context of cowboyhood. There are things you don’t know, McCarthy implies, factual things about the Mexican world, visceral and muscular things about the powerful animals Spaniards brought to this place. Pages later Rawlins says, “Them old hot maggie ropes have eat my hands about up,” and the reader beholds a coalescence of McCarthy’s gifts, maguey ropes turned idiomatic and familiar in genuine Texas dialect. So full of “the real” is this writing that few readers can be imagined to absorb it fully.

Cole is heroic, McCarthy’s attention to his world is heroic, and the woman the protagonist will love is worthy of a hero’s ardor, appearing to the accompaniment of her Arabian’s clip-clop.

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 slightly to better see what sort of horse he rode, just the slightest tilt of the broad black hat set level on her head, the slightest lifting of the long black hair. She passed and the horse changed gaits again and she sat the horse more than well, riding erect with her broad shoulders and trotting the horse up the road.

Those eyes alter John Grady Cole’s world “forever in the space of a heartbeat.” Alejandra is part of the pretty horses world, accessible, soon responsive to Cole’s caresses, but not one to be settled down with in years of married life. Their love gets Cole exiled to a Mexican prison, where he will face the old malignity at the heart of life. He is man enough for his world, killing a would-be assassin in a knife fight but losing enough blood to lie near death for days until reprieved obscurely by Alejandra’s aunt who had futilely warned him against his involvement with Alejandra. Arabians do not breed with mustangs, and Cole accepts this, though sorrowfully, and heads back to Texas.

To make the return trip more than a bus ride, Cole decides to recapture the horse of the now-dead Jimmy Blevins, a feat requiring Rambo-esque bravado and stubborn persistence in the world of black fate. This is Fredric Henry turning from the dead Catherine in A Farewell to Arms (1929), but with a vengeance. It is less satisfying to read. There is nothing more that can happen to the hero, nothing more he can do. He will try to find the horse’s owner. He will go back to Texas and ride down highways with cars and pickups and look for Blevins’ relations. He finds only a radio preacher named Blevins, no kin, who snores loudly after a big meal.

As Cole rides in the “bloodred sunset” on the last page of All the Pretty Horses, the reader wonders what awaits him in the remaining two installments of the projected Border Trilogy. Will he be background for a son living in the final American decadence? Or does “border” promise a continuation of struggle with the old world of horses and the new of gasoline. Nearly every line of All the Pretty Horses pledges allegiance to the old world. This is the archaic world, lit by no electric bulbs: “The candleflame caught in the pierglass twisted and righted when he entered the hall and again when he shut the door.” Archaic rooms are not flooded with artificial light. People are not right without animals in their hearts. “What he loved in horses was what he loved in men, the blood and the heat of the blood that ran in them.” This book is a flight into that world—male companionship based on respect for how you handle a horse, selection of a mate which is no selection or rational choice but a sudden overwhelming alteration based on eye contact. If McCarthy’s ardor for this ideal risks the charge of romanticism, he seems willing to take the risk. But it is consciousness of light, tangibilities of all kinds, and only a few escapes into assertions of metaphysical darkness that the book gives a reader. McCarthy fans can reasonably guess that the presence of light in the darkness is this author’s real perplexity. He is the artist after all, dispensing light. Anyone who attentively reads this book will testify to the miracle of a creative brain dispensing such light.

Sources for Further Study

Booklist. LXXXIX, April 1, 1992, p. 1412.

Chicago Tribune. May 10, 1992, XIV, p. 5.

The Christian Science Monitor. June 11, 1992, p. 13.

Commonweal. CXIX, September 25, 1992, p. 29.

Library Journal. CXVII, May 15, 1992, p. 120.

Los Angeles Times Book Review. May 17, 1992, p. 3.

The New York Times Book Review. XCVII, May 17, 1992, p. 9.

Newsweek. CXIX, May 18, 1992, p. 68.

Publishers Weekly. March 16, 1992, p. 64.

The Washington Post Book World. XXII, May 3, 1992, p. 1.

This acclaimed best seller features a more traditional plot and structure compared to most of McCarthy's works. Although the final paragraph, with its image of a bull rolling in the dust, might suggest an open-ended story, the novel actually uses some conventional storytelling techniques. The ending features John Grady Cole riding off into the sunset, a classic conclusion for a Western. The story also exhibits circularity, beginning and ending with funerals, both leading to feelings of dispossession and alienation. After his long journey, John Grady finds himself back in Texas, effectively where his story started. Additionally, the novel includes a love story as a key subplot. Besides the funeral, McCarthy adds another ceremony near the conclusion—a wedding, which typically signifies the end of a happy love story or comedy. However, fitting the novel's tone, this wedding is portrayed in a distinctly unromantic manner.

McCarthy uses humor to counterbalance his pessimistic worldview, a technique likely contributing to the novel's popularity. The humor includes slapstick elements, such as Jimmy Blevins's vividly depicted falls and the moment when John Grady is asked to drop his pants for an official. There's also a lot of gentle, teasing humor and some satire, evident when John Grady hears a radio evangelist snoring shortly after declaring, "I got to go to work. The Lord dont take no holidays."

The novel's readability is enhanced by its diverse range of styles. It alternates between the succinct dialogue of young, reserved cowboys and lush passages of beautiful description. The fifth paragraph of the opening section starts with three simple sentences averaging just eight words each, reminiscent of Hemingway's style. Then, influenced by Faulkner, the next sentence describing a train's passage is a rolling, expansive hundred-word sentence. McCarthy expertly matches style to mood, such as when he uses poetic repetition in scenes where romance develops between John Grady and Alejandra.

The central social themes in All the Pretty Horses revolve around marriage and the romantic relationship between John Grady Cole and Alejandra. John Grady's parents are separated because his father enjoys the rugged cowboy lifestyle on a ranch, while his mother aspires to be an actress and yearns for the culture and sophistication of city life. This male/female contrast is similarly reflected in Alejandra's family. Although her parents remain married, her father, Don Hector Rocha, spends much of his time at the ranch, while her mother stays in Mexico City.

Despite the passionate love between John Grady Cole and Alejandra, tensions arise that eventually cause their relationship to fall apart. There may be hidden agendas in their relationship. Alejandra might partly be trying to rebel against her father and her grandaunt, the Duena Alfonsa. On the other hand, John Grady might not only be interested in Alejandra but also in the vast, prosperous ranch her father owns. Owning or managing such a ranch is John Grady's dream and ultimate aspiration.

The primary barriers to the young lovers' marriage are social. They come from different countries, cultures, and economic backgrounds. When Alejandra admits to their premarital intimacy, her father loses respect for her and becomes furious with John Grady. Alejandra's guardians, who uphold traditional values, refuse to risk the reputation of the young aristocratic woman under their care and insist that she should make a more suitable marriage match.

All the Pretty Horses also weaves in historical details of the Mexican Revolution, offering a backdrop of national violence, betrayal, and rebellion. This historical narrative continues in The Crossing (1994).

This novel possesses all the essential elements of a captivating Western film and might eventually be adapted into one. In the vein of characters portrayed by John Wayne and Clint Eastwood, John Grady Cole is a resilient, reserved cowboy who finds himself entangled in difficulties with women. The story features exciting scenes of fighting, riding, and shooting. The only aspect Hollywood might critique is the absence of a joyful conclusion.

All the Pretty Horses once again demonstrates that American writers have mastered the bildungsroman genre. Similar to Huck Finn, John Grady Cole comes to favor a simpler, more untamed way of living, leading him to seek the frontier as his story concludes. Like Henry Fleming in The Red Badge of Courage, John Grady gains maturity through challenges that test both his physical and moral bravery.

Critics have highlighted the significance of myth in understanding this novel. One critic mentions that the Biblical myth of the Garden of Eden comes to mind, as the boys initially view parts of Mexico as an untouched paradise—and, much like the Genesis narrative, John Grady's tale is also about the loss of innocence. Another critic notes the striking similarities between this novel and the Orpheus myth. Much like Orpheus, John Grady ventures into a foreign underworld, attempting in vain to bring his beloved back to his own realm.

All the Pretty Horses marks the beginning of what publishers refer to as McCarthy's Border Trilogy. The trilogy's second book, The Crossing, introduces an entirely new set of characters but echoes many of the motifs and structures found in the first novel.

Blood Meridian (1985), the McCarthy novel that came just before this one, is also a Western featuring a young male protagonist who ventures into Mexico. However, the similarities largely stop there. The unyielding graphic violence and terrifying evil in Blood Meridian are relentless. The young protagonist, known simply as "the kid," becomes part of a gang of scalp hunters led by the fanatical Captain Glanton and the monstrous Judge Holden.

John Grady Cole finds a much closer literary counterpart in McCarthy's debut novel, The Orchard Keeper (1965). Even the protagonist's name, John Wesley Rattner, bears a resemblance. Though not a cowboy, John Wesley is portrayed as a frontiersman, a courageous savior of animals, and a defiant figure against corrupt authorities. Adaptations

All the Pretty Horses. Audio-book by Random House. New York, 1993. Abridged version. Narrated by Brad Pitt.