Book Review: All the Pretty Horses

A Tale of Horse and Life
All the Pretty Horses
by Cormac McCarthy
Vintage Books, 1992

Reviewed by Leslie S. March, Ph.D.

With Peter, Paul, and Mary’s ballad "All the Pretty Little Horses" ringing in my head and the fear that All the Pretty Horses would be: a) a spaghetti western, b) grim like Walter Van Tilberg Clark’s The Ox-Bow Incident, or c) a boys’ coming of age tale, I began the novel with some resistance. While it starts in an arresting manner, describing "the image of a candleflame [sic] caught in the pierglass twisted and righted," the book required at least 50 pages to engage me. From that point on, however, it was mesmerizing. At times reminiscent of Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony, of Charles Dickens’s descriptions of the essence of prison, All the Pretty Horses owes much to Ernest Hemingway’s Nick Adams stories. In the details of killing and preparing game, and establishing camp, All the Pretty Horses evokes the Upper Peninsula of Michigan; in capturing the enduring and sustaining power of friendship, however, the novel echoes The Sun Also Rises, and yet Cormac McCarthy’s voice is vitally individual and far from derivative. While it is true that Hemingway’s iceberg theory, that 7/8ths of all narrative is hidden, more subtext than text, and that its stoicism clearly demonstrates the grace under pressure espoused by Hemingway, McCormack’s style re-interprets minimalism: "A long rolling crack of thunder went pealing down the sky to the north. The ground shuddered. Blevins put his arm over his head and John Grady turned the horse and rode back up the arroyo. Great pellets of rain were cratering the wet sand underfoot. He looked back once at Blevins. Blevins sat as before. A thing all but inexplicable in that landscape." Confronted with this evocative passage, readers, sensing that Blevins is about to be tortured for suspected horse thievery, also confront their own response to loss.

The plot is purposely simple: Sixteen-year-old, self-reliant John Grady Cole and his friend Lacey Rawlins leave Texas, a land where children are "pledged in blood and redeemable in blood only," for Mexico. The novel becomes more textured when they meet Jimmy Blevins, an even younger desperado. While neither characters nor readers are ever sure of Blevins’s ancestry or reasons for escaping on a fine, blooded stallion, we realize that Jimmy will never give up the horse, which he claims is his, or his pistol. In the only picaresque section of the novel, the three are attacked, and Jimmy loses all but his dingy underwear. They ride on two horses in this fashion — or lack thereof — for several days. Rawlins despairs of anyone’s escaping with his life as long as Blevins is part of the entourage, but John Grady stubbornly and wordlessly refuses to abandon him, until Jimmy is captured. Even then, when the three are reunited in prison because of Blevins’s "confession," John Grady remains stolidly loyal. It is Lacey Rawlins, however, whose face is blurred with tears when Blevins is shamelessly killed.

Fearful that women would be present only as stereotypes, and only in the background, I was surprised that female influence figures prominently. John Grady is approached by the sensually-brazen Alejandra Rocha. Hungrily guarded by her father, the owner of the hacienda where John Grady and Lacey work breaking horses, and her godmother/grandaunt, Alejandra nevertheless leads John Grady to the mountains night after night. In precise, exquisitely-etched prose, John Grady details her presence in the moonlit water: "She was so pale in the lake she seemed to be burning. Like foxfire in a darkened wood … Her black hair floating on the water around her, falling and floating on the water. She put her other arm about his shoulder and looked toward the moon in the west do not speak to her do not call and then she turned her face up to him. Sweeter for the larceny of time and flesh, sweeter for the betrayal." Risking his life for her, John Grady never speaks his love except in the most eloquent descriptions. After she repudiates him, in obedience to family demands, he still gains sustenance from the reflection: "He remembered Alejandra and the sadness he’d first seen in the slope of her shoulders which he presumed to understand and of which he knew nothing and felt a loneliness he had not known since he was a child and he felt wholly alien to the world although he loved it still. He thought that in the beauty of the world were hid a secret. 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 expected for the vision of a single flower."

The lack of "proper" punctuation and syntax, characterizing stream of consciousness, infuses All the Pretty Horses with ineffable loveliness. McCarthy stabs the reader’s heart. We rejoice as John Grady transcends from being a "supplicant to the darkness" on the first page to one who blesses the ground at the end of this novel. Nature’s abiding life fuels its greatness but the characters — in what they speak, will not speak, and cannot speak — perpetuate its greatness.