When “All the Pretty Horses,” Cormac McCarthy’s sixth book and the first volume in his Border Trilogy, was first published in 1992, it won both the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Award for Fiction. McCarthy’s career had reached a seeming apex following nearly 30 years of writing with grant money. In the years preceding this book’s publication, McCarthy was thought of as a recluse, someone who would attain popularity among writers and no one else. With the commercial and critical success of “Horses,” his public image changed.
Certainly, many readers dismiss McCarthy’s evocative prose as mere bestseller material: he lushly describes nature as a divine force that provides for and strips from his characters whatever they need. This motif has become something of a literary joke in recent years, seen as derivative of Faulkner (as McCarthy has always been) and all too reflective of the current American consciousness. Like many Americans, McCarthy’s characters are clueless amid the storms that approach and surround them. In “Horses,” however, McCarthy chisels a precise portrait of protagonist Grady Cole, working against his traditionally bleak landscapes with broad streaks of Romanticism.
The narrative of “All the Pretty Horses“ is divided into three sections. The first portion of the novel deals with Cole and his friend Lacey Rawlins as they make their way from Texas to Mexico, across a terrain that, like Cole’s personal life, is littered with loss. The two travelers soon meet a man named Jimmy Blevins, who may or may not be in possession of a stolen horse. The aggression and deception that the three men share drives the rest of the book, but the novel’s most truthful moments derive from their initial sparring. Much is made of the horse’s beauty as well as its identity, indicating Cole’s nearly romantic fixation with these majestic creatures. Soon Jimmy is lost and the two other men make their way into Mexico.
When John and Lacey find jobs as ranch hands under the wealthy landowner Don Hector, Cole tames a group of wild horses, figuring himself as a participator in a larger, natural good—the world of the horse. Unfortunately, Cole also falls for Hector’s daughter and their sparsely described romance makes little sense beyond furthering some notion McCarthy must have had concerning the untamable human heart.
The novel flounders after this point, its plot devices reaching such a pitch of operatic intensity that McCarthy’s once-believable characters are reduced to superficial epithets. The remainder of the novel revolves around false accusations, retribution and repayment — issues that, although easy to record, strip the reader of the few surprises the bleak tone provides. Ultimately, McCarthy’s talent for neglecting civilization is morose and indulgent. He wants his characters to suffer as a result of this organized world and, although they do, his refusal to depict the specificities of this reality dampens his conviction that another, contrasting existence is possible. Nothing lies beyond his characterization of a dry, wicked Walden.
There are, however, moments towards the end of the story when McCarthy attempts to regain the splendor of his novel’s first third. John Cole ends up reclaiming the contested horse—after much overwrought treatment of Cole’s failed romance as well as an overlong series of scenes in a jail cell—and the fervor with which he drags himself, the horse, and a Mexican policeman back to America seems almost filmic.
McCarthy’s eye is cinematic but his ability to weave a narrative is decisively not. Indeed, screenwriters wholly failed to conjure the luminosity and the darkness of this novel in the film adaptation starring Penélope Cruz and Matt Damon. The gravity with which McCarthy attempts to imbue each scene, using single sentence paragraphs and other syntactical manipulations, does not translate well to the screen; instead, the film features long takes that bore the audience in places where racing sentences would grip a reader. More likely, the film suffered for one of the many reasons the novel cannot be considered a masterpiece: McCarthy attempts to synthesize too many narrative forms, most notably the archetypal journey and a failed romance, but fails to weave them together.
The unhinged horses Cole tames on a Mexican ranch devolve into demons—policemen and women—that will haunt him for the rest of his life. It is as if Cole was not a full spiritual being until he moved, challenged himself in terms of his surroundings and attempted to overcome democracy’s attempt to champion his physical strength over the condition of his soul. Ultimately, though, the scenes that construct this novel are as disjointed as McCarthy’s earlier works. His skill lies in catalyzing his characters into action and then describing their responses as if morality didn’t exist. The imagined replaces the right and figures McCarthy as an advocate of an existential abyss. He exposes that which cannot speak for itself—the illiterate worker, his forbidden lover, the trees, a brook or even the dust in the wind—and in turn can take his diction to outlandishly hyperbolic places.
The weakness of “All the Pretty Horses” stems from McCarthy’s strength as a writer, his emphasis of existence as consisting of the natural world. His prose dances and scares like an untamed horse. It comes as no surprise, then, when an almost unyielding refusal to handle society pervades this novel (and continues to plague McCarthy’s writing). There are moments when “All the Pretty Horses“ could have taken a less satirical approach to Twain’s “Huck Finn” and succeeded. Unfortunately, plot and character prevent poetry and syntax from rearing their fully realized heads.
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