by Cormac McCarthy
Alfred A. Knopf, 1992, 302 pages

Few modern American writers are able to encapsulate the continent’s rugged southwestern landscapes—and the human emotions imbued in those landscapes—like Cormac McCarthy. McCarthy’s writing seems to rise from the country’s pores like so much desert vegetation, stark and solitary against the horizon, its canted shadows stretching over vast surfaces, its network of roots groping for the core of things. His simple prose illustrates the divinity of earth, horse and man, how each is endowed with equal measures of beauty and pain, and how that beauty and pain is inextricably linked.

The first volume of McCarthy’s “Border Trilogy,” “All the Pretty Horses” follows 16-year-old Texan John Grady Cole (who returns as the main protagonist of “Cities of the Plains” in the third volume). Grady’s grandfather has just died, and his stage actress mother plans to sell the Texas ranch his family has long operated. Grady cannot convince his mother to let him take over the ranch, and his ailing father, long since separated from his wife, offers little help.

His girlfriend having left him for an older boy, Grady feels alienated in his own country, and an irrepressible urge to travel overtakes him. He and his friend Lacey Rawlins mount their horses one night and leave the town behind, headed for Mexico. Along the way, they pick up another companion, mysterious 14-year-old sharpshooter Jimmy Blevins. But soon after they cross the river onto Mexican soil, trouble finds them.

Grady and Rawlins get separated from Blevins but find work farther south on a large ranch. They work as cattle hands and horse breakers, and Grady quickly impresses the estate’s owner with his preternatural knowledge of horses. But his budding romance with the hacendado’s alluring daughter threatens to derail all their plans.

The first half of the book is an adventurous journey filled with humor and high spirited hope. Only in the latter half does McCarthy’s penchant for lurid violence and suffering emerge. Grady and Rawlins endure a miserable stint in a Mexican prison, where they must literally fight for their lives every day and sacrifice blood and bones to survive. Their hardship continues as Grady weighs his life against his love and opts for the latter.

Throughout the novel, McCarthy’s breathtaking descriptions of the Mexican countryside—sometimes bleak and barren, sometimes lush and verdant—seem to mirror the characters’ fluctuating mental states.

An effective characteristic of McCarthy’s writing is his use of alternating sentence lengths. There are short, Hemingway-esque phrases (one of his favorites: “They ate.”); brusque patches of dialogue with no quotation marks; and long, flourishing sentences, usually devoid of punctuation and seeking to express complex universal truths.

“He thought the world’s heart beat at some terrible cost and that the world’s pain and its beauty moved in a relationship of diverging equity and that in this headlong deficit the blood of multitudes might ultimately be exacted for the vision of a single flower.”

Grady’s passion for horses reaches mystical levels, and the author’s fluid imagery surrounding the majestic animals provokes philosophical meditations on the nature of man and beast. That relationship is especially drawn out as Grady and Rawlins attempt to tame an unruly group of recently captured wild horses. 

“Before the colt could struggle up John Grady had squatted on its neck and pulled its head up and to one side and was holding the horse by the muzzle with the long bony head pressed against his chest and the hot sweet breath of it flooding up from the dark wells of its nostrils over his face and neck like news from another world.”

By the time the book ends, John Grady Cole has grown wise far beyond his years, but still only possesses an inkling of the painful trials bestowed by love, friendship and the pursuit of one’s country. The reader, too, is wiser, having soaked up McCarthy’s stunning vision of Mexico, of horses, and of the blistering beauty of life.