All the Pretty Horses

All the Pretty Horses establishes more powerfully than ever before Cormac McCarthy's prominence in contemporary fiction, and indeed his place in American literature. As Michael Herr has written, "McCarthy can only be compared with our greatest writers, with Melville and Faulkner."

Set in 1949, this is the story of John Grady Cole, who at the age of sixteen finds himself at the losing end of long generations of ranchers: his grandfather has just died; his father, who came back from the war somehow changed, is living in town; and his mother wants nothing so much as to clear out of west Texas forever. Too young to be given charge of the ranch, John Grady is cut off from the only life he has ever imagined wanting.

Over the border into Mexico seems the one way out of a society moving in all the wrong directions, so with his friend Lacey Rawlins he rides into a land both beautiful and barren, rugged and cruelly civilized. Soon enough, by happenstance, they acquire a hapless younger companion. But this idyllic, sometimes comic adventure leads, in fact, to a place where dreams are paid for in blood. Within months one of these boys is dead, and the other two aged beyond any normal reckoning.

In the end, in seeking a life that in midcentury America no longer exists, John Grady Cole becomes steeped in the sort of wisdom that comes only of belief and loss and excruciating pain. Though Indian bands and horses and cattle are still scattered across the plains, the country itself is bisected by highways and an inevitable future in which all he holds sacred will fade into air.

A novel about childhood passing, along with innocence and an American age, this is a grand love story and an education in responsibility and revenge and survival. Magnificent in the variety of its achievements, All the Pretty Horses (the first volume of The Border Trilogy) is indisputably a masterpiece.