The Crossing is the second novel in Cormac McCarthy's Border Trilogy following All the Pretty Horses, which brought this reclusive writer great popular acclaim when it was named the winner of both the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award and was even optioned for film. Post-Horses readers may not realize that McCarthy is not only someone who may possibly be America's greatest descriptive writer but is also an author uniquely obsessed with violence and evil. Sociopaths, serial killers, necrophiliacs, and murderers populate pages wherein mayhem, blood, and generally prevalent malevolence dominate his early works: The Orchard Keeper, Outer Dark, Child of God, Suttree, and Blood Meridian. Blood Meridian is a culmination of themes and skills, a genuine masterpiece with stunningly visualized landscapes and characters whose evil McCarthy presents as a natural process. This fictional realm is dramatically offset by the sympathetic protagonists in the Border Trilogy.

Like All the Pretty Horses, The Crossing is set in the southwestern United States and Mexico, featuring, as does the first novel, rites-of-passage adventures of adolescent boys riding horses into Mexico and finding themselves caring, losing, and learning what the dimensions of life mean. In The Crossing Billy Parham makes three trips to Mexico. First he goes to return a she-wolf to a mountain setting where it can survive, but he finds he can protect neither the animal nor his own feelings when Mexicans seize the wolf to fight dogs as entertainment. Next Billy goes back to Mexico with his younger brother Boyd after having returned home to New Mexico to face an existence that has been wiped out when his parents were murdered in his absence. For Billy this foray is to recapture stolen horses, but for fourteen-year-old Boyd the goal is to obtain justice. Billy's third journey into Mexico is to try to find his brother, who had run off with a young Mexican girl. Billy's search ends in a graveyard, where he digs up Boyd's remains to return them to New Mexico for burial.

The events leading up to and including the first Mexican crossing create a wonder of great writing. The story of how Billy comes to respect the wolf and to recognize and love the freedom of its natural state is beautiful and heart-rending:

He squatted over the wolf and touched her fur. He touched the cold and perfect teeth. The eye turned to the fire gave back no light and he closed it with his thumb and sat by her and put his hand upon her bloodied forehead and closed his own eyes that he could see her running in the mountains, running in the starlight where the grass was wet and the sun's coming as yet had not undone the rich matrix of creatures passed in the night before her.

The second trip, when Billy and Boyd go to Mexico together, is very much like All the Pretty Horses in both narrative and style. In the third part of the novel, often verbose and contrived commentaries substitute for action, dialogue, and reader response. Characters briefly encountered again and again present metaphysical views disguised as personal histories.

McCarthy's metaphysical assumptions are existential. Human consciousness of the past exists within each person in memories and contacts, held in an ongoing meaning by individuals as fragments, subject to loss as memory dims and subject to arbitrary changes without order or meaning. What underlies and transcends personal reality is the natural world, beautifully depicted in the wolf story at the beginning and throughout the book in descriptions of nature. Verbose "tales" told within the main story line are disjunctive; characters whom Billy meets in all sorts of places discourse with the same tones, saying the same things about time, loss, and man's place in the world. Sometimes indeed these characters speak in Spanish—far more often than in All the Pretty Horses—but much of the Spanish commentary is paraphrased in English for those many readers who see this work as a western story more than as a merging of realities metaphysical and cultural.

Cormac McCarthy is as good as a writer can be in his use of description, certainly better than any American now living and possibly even better than Faulkner or Melville. He uses this great talent to try to come to terms with the omnipresence of evil in man's nature, as he understands and presents it. Whereas the Border Trilogy has toned down evil incarnate in characters—so fully realized in Blood Meridian—these themes are much stronger in The Crossing than in All the Pretty Horses. McCarthy is obsessed with blood as a symbol of life—both for the living and, in violence, as part of dying. This shows up in repeated references throughout his work relating to the sun, light, shades, reflections, events, et cetera. In earlier works McCarthy was content simply to refer to blood; in The Crossing he is in the process of connecting that awareness to his sense of time and man's place in the world. Billy shoots a hawk in one scene and finds a droplet of blood; he then cuts his hand to let the blood drip. This focus on loss and survival as part of living is shifting in McCarthy's style, and readers will be truly interested to see what the final volume in this trilogy will be like.

For McCarthy, blood clearly symbolizes life as a mean end, and for him its connection is constantly threatened by the reality of evil portrayed in violence. The two Border Trilogy novels have shown characters who love and weep and seem to have much in common with that part of the human species not labeled as murderers and evildoers. Once McCarthy works out his own world view about how to narrate these elements, perhaps the excessive lectures that flaw much of the last section of his wonderful new book will not intrude either on his narrative or on readers' responses.