All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy

The national bestseller and the first volume in Cormac McCarthy's Border Trilogy, All the Pretty Horses is the tale of John Grady Cole, who at sixteen finds himself at the end of a long line of Texas ranchers, cut off from the only life he has ever imagined for himself. With two companions, he sets off for Mexico on a sometimes idyllic, sometimes comic journey to a place where dreams are paid for in blood. Winner of the National Book Award for Fiction.

Out of all the Cormac McCarthy I've read, All the Pretty Horses is likely my favorite. McCarthy can feel harsh at times—unyielding—but All the Pretty Horses caves to romanticism in a way that makes me connect with it more than any of his other characters and plotlines. You feel close to the main character, absorbing his worries, and he is concerned with doing the right thing, even if that translates to violence (per the moral code of his surroundings.)

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It's not a loss of innocence exactly, because John Grady didn't start out naïve. Perhaps the book's more so about this loss of purity of the self, but he's acting in necessity when he kills in prison. You feel the relief of doing what needs to be done, and then reconciling with yourself after.

Atmosphere Is King

The Road was atmospheric, but this is even more so—which is usually the single greatest indicator that I'll relish a book. You could feel the chapped lips, biting wind, textured leather, thunder of horses, etc,. I realize all of that sounds cliché, but it does embody the ranch cultural aesthetic that may appeal to fans of Yellowstone (TV) or even The Scorpio Races by Maggie Stiefvater (for my fellow young adult readers.) The isolation of everyone's roles actually reminded me of Small Damages by Beth Kephart which is a very different (but significant, emotional, thematic in a similar way) book. Westworld (TV) is also in my film hall of fame/favorites list, so I recognized an adjacent balance of brutality and awareness versus innocence and purity.

Mmm, Masculinity.

Recently, I've been thinking about how we have a tendency to associate bluntness = violent = true and right. Not to digress, but it's similar to how we have certain lines between emotions we associate with masculinity or femininity, and we assess their rationality differently (and unfairly.) In reality, we are all much less rational than we expect.)

An argument I've had with some friends is that I think anger (often associated with traditional masculinity) is equally emotional to teariness/being upset (more associated with traditional femininity) but only the latter is viewed as weak or somehow illogical. I think sometimes, guys tend to think that being harsh means they're being cool-headed, when in reality, sometimes choosing softness or vulnerability is a stronger choice because it means being comfortable accepting the risk of being hurt or screwed over. That sounds much, much sappier than the point I'm trying to make, but long story short—I could see the threads of that curiosity woven throughout the book in a way that appealed to my recent meditations on the subject. Is John Grady automatically stronger because he killed? You can peel back a lot of layers. (Also, I love the name John Grady for some reason; the Southerner in me loves a musical double name.)

Admittedly, I struggled to get my bearings in the beginning of the story. It felt disjointed while getting started. That's sort of a hallmark for Cormac McCarthy (in my interpretation) at this point. And the man LOVES a run-on sentence.

In the book, John Grady and his best friend Lacey travel to Mexico on horseback once John Grady's grandfather dies and the family ranch is sold. They encounter a younger boy, Jimmy Blevins, who has a bit of an unpredictable streak. You never quite trust his judgment. You want someone to protect him, but you pick up on an undercurrent consequence—this edginess that doing the right thing may be punished versus doing the safe thing. Maybe this is the first of McCarthy's fierce emphasis on independence; you can't fully trust anyone in the desert.

The Craving to Explore, and the Impossibility of Wildness

All the Pretty Horses hits its stride in the journey to Mexico. Personally, I find such a strange, nostalgic solace in reading narratives about travels before borders—craving this sense that the world went on forever. (That same desire also extends to journey-based fantasies and mythologies like Eragon or The Odyssey.) As long as you can feed and protect yourself, you are beholden to no one, subject to the whims of nature.

In one poem, I actually call this feeling "tangled senses of wild" and also associate the sensation with really crowded, clustered, dizzying stars. I definitely long for it, and it probably taps into something primal—an idea of discovery so universal that it's in plenty of movies for kiddos. (See: "How Far I'll Go" and "Go the Distance." Somehow didn't think I would be discussing Moana in a Cormac McCarthy book review, but thus is the beauty of the new WLS format.)

What Is the Right Thing?

All the Pretty Horses kicks off with some uneven justice. When a severe thunderstorm hits. Jimmy's terrified because his family has a history of being struck by lightning. In the chaos, his horse runs off and he loses his pistol. The main conflict of the book revolves around the men finding the horse and pistol—in the possession of others—and stealing them back. Right maybe, but also consequential.

The circularity of the thunderstorm premonition is also so interesting. Blevins felt he would die in a storm, and ended up sealing his fate by trying to outrun it. How circular. You could argue whether it was his destiny, or whether his faulty judgment in reaction (self-fulfilling prophecy?) led to the events unfolding the way they did.

The others eventually make their way to the ranch, relishing its rhythms and routines. John Grady falls in love with a girl there in a blur of moonlit midnight swims and romantic trysts. And then one day, the two boys are finally arrested.

Enter the second half of the novel. Mexican jail is an unforgiving place. The men harden there. They witness, defend against, and dole out death—a turning point. Out of all McCarthy's books, I'd call this one most profoundly a coming-of-age. It's not so much a loss of innocence as a shedding of the skin—like molting. Or perhaps, considering the themes of masculinity and responsibility peppered throughout the narrative: the formation of callouses.

Overall Thoughts

Overall, I loved All the Pretty Horses. The imagery was stunning and spectacular, with enduring thematic layers that tapped into my longing for unexplored pockets and a stern sense of self-possession. John Grady's struggles with authenticity and hardness were salient and relatable, even though I tend to land on the romantic side of things.

Of course, McCarthy intends for the symbolism of the horses and journey to be mostly related to men, but I still identify with the exhilaration and responsibility. It's my favorite of his works, and I may read the rest of the trilogy—but first have to tackle Blood Meridian!

Lines & Moments I Loved

“Scars have the strange power to remind us that our past is real.”

“The world is quite ruthless in selecting between the dream and reality, even where we will not. Between the wish and the thing the world lies waiting.”

“Long before morning I knew that what I was seeking to discover was a thing I'd always known. That all courage was a form of constancy. That it is always himself that the coward abandoned first. After this all other betrayals come easily.”

“He remembered Alejandra and the sadness he'd first seen in the slope of her shoulders which he'd presumed to understand and of which he knew nothing and he felt a loneliness he'd 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 it's 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.”

“In history there are no control groups. There is no one to tell us what might have been. We weep over the might have been, but there is no might have been. There never was.”

I've been thinking about this concept, especially lately. I've said this on the blog a few times—but there's what happens and then there's the story you tell yourself about it. And you can have your ideal or reality, but everything happens the way it happens, and there's no alternative sequence of events—which means that you have a lot of power to change anything and make it what you want, but also not very much at all.

“Ever dumb thing I ever done in my life there was a decision I made before that got me into it. It was never the dumb thing. It was always some choice I'd made before it.”

“A goodlookin horse is like a goodlookin woman, he said. They're always more trouble than what they're worth. What a man needs is just one that will get the job done.”

“Because the question for me was always whether that shape we see in our lives was there from the beginning or whether these random events are only called a pattern after the fact. Because otherwise we are nothing.”

“For a moment he held out his hands as if to steady himself or as if to bless the ground there or perhaps as if to slow the world that was rushing away and seemed to care nothing for the old or the young or rich or poor or dark or pale or he or she. Nothing for their struggles, nothing for their names. Nothing for the living or the dead.”

“The fire had burned to coals and he lay looking up at the stars in their places and the hot belt of matter that ran the chord of the dark vault overhead and he put his hands on the ground at either side of him and pressed them against the earth and in that coldly burning canopy of black he slowly turned dead center to the world, all of it taut and trembling and moving enormous and alive under his hands.”

“He lay in the dark thinking of all the things he did not know about his father and he realized that the father he knew was all the father he would ever know.”

“It is not my experience that life's difficulties make people more charitable.”

“The bloodred dust blew down out of the sun. He touched the horse with his heels and rode on. He rode with the sun coppering his face and the red wind blowing out of the west across the evening land and the small desert birds flew chittering among the dry bracken and horse and rider and horse passed on and their long shadows passed in tandem like the shadow of a single being. Passed and paled into the darkening land, the world to come.”

“I knew that courage came with less struggle for some than for others but I believed that anyone who desired it could have it.”

There were a lot of lines I loved.

For fans of:

Yellowstone (TV); Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy; Wind, Sand and Stars by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry; Small Damages by Beth Kephart; The Scorpio Races by Maggie Stiefvater; Jodi Lynn Anderson.