All the Pretty Horses

For more than three decades, since it won the National Book Award for Fiction, this classic has been sitting unread on my shelf – out a woefully-misconstrued fear that I would find it abstruse, even “precious.”

How abysmally, embarassingly wrong I have been – and how thrilled I am to commend this elegaic, landscape-driven prose poem to everyone who loves an impeccably-constructed masterpiece, its violence transcendant, its young protagonist, John Grady Cole, stoic and enduring, its spirit of place on the Southwest frontier tipping into Mexico replete with beauty and tragedy. 

The dialogue and immersion into Southwestern culture is so immediate and authentic, one might as well have signed up for a secret journey into the heart of the borderlands.

Every paragraph reads like a masterpiece of literature, and taken together they comprise the kind of story that the reader wants never to end. McCarthy has the rare ability to entertain and edify at the same time. 

Inimitable, devastating, audacious, irreducibly strange, unexpectedly compassionate, charged with memorable writing, irreplaceable. McCarthy’s book is a literary event, like Elena Ferrante’s Naples Quartet. To be placed in a time capsule to show what great writing is. McCarthy has also created the memorable character of John Grady Cole in these pages.

What can you say about Cormac McCarthy that has not been said before, the poetry in his prose, his fearlessness to go to the human extreme of emotional tension and violence, the elegance of creating a world so real that one does not want to leave, yet cannot stay? The writer in me wants to write just like him, but... I cannot, I will not, for there is only one Cormac McCarthy, and the world could not stand another.

All the Pretty Horses was my introduction to Cormac McCarthy. In case you don’t know, the man does not use quotation marks in his dialogue, and I confess, at first I found this so annoying that it actually made me mad. I thought it was pretentious. “I’m Cormac McCarthy, rules of punctuation are beneath me.” But by twenty pages in, I decided the man could be as pretentious as he wanted to be. He backed it up with an amazing, beautifully written story. The book is nostalgic, romantic, and sometimes bleak to the point of being haunting, but there were… show more.

This book explores honor, principles, ethics, religion, and more, is a powerhouse (in fact, the whole trilogy could be on this list as well). I was drawn to the old-school “cowboy” ethic (idealized to be sure, but in many ways the modern world is moving further and further away from principled action/standing up for what is right regardless of the outcome).