All the Pretty Horses
by Cormac McCarthy
Summary
San Angelo, Texas, 1949. John Grady Cole is sixteen when his grandfather dies and the family ranch, the only life he wants, is marked for sale by a mother bound for the stage. So he and his friend Lacey Rawlins saddle up and ride south, out of a Texas of oil leases and highways, across the river into Mexico, looking for a country where the horse still organises the world.
They find it at La Purísima, a vast hacienda in Coahuila, where John Grady's gift with horses, the real thing, rendered in breaking scenes of hypnotic precision, earns him a place, and where he commits the novel's central trespass: he falls in love with Alejandra, the owner's daughter, and she with him. Between the boys and ruin stands the memory of Jimmy Blevins, a murderous thirteen year old they briefly rode with, whose stolen horse and dead man surface at exactly the wrong moment. The hacienda's answer is silent and total: the boys wake to rifles, and the novel descends into a Mexican prison where knives settle questions, and where survival is purchased by Alejandra's formidable great aunt at a price the lovers must themselves pay.
What remains is the ride back: a wounded boy reclaiming horses at gunpoint from the men who took them, and a last crossing into a Texas that has no place for what he has become.
Around three hundred pages, in McCarthy's cadenced, comma scorning prose at its most accessible.
Best for readers who want the Western elevated to tragedy, and the door into McCarthy.
Historical Context & Significance
All the Pretty Horses won the National Book Award for Fiction in 1992 and the National Book Critics Circle Award besides, and it changed the shape of an American career: Cormac McCarthy had published five novels in near total obscurity, each selling a few thousand copies, guarded by a small cult that included Saul Bellow, who had helped him to a MacArthur. This one sold 190,000 hardcovers in six months. The recluse of Knoxville and El Paso became, without giving interviews, a major public writer.
It opens the Border Trilogy, with The Crossing and Cities of the Plain completing John Grady and Billy Parham's shared elegy for the horse cultures of the border, and its softened palette, after the biblical carnage of Blood Meridian, is deliberate: the same cosmos, with love allowed in.
Billy Bob Thornton's 2000 film with Matt Damon was recut over his objections and was widely panned; the book needed no rescue. No Country for Old Men and The Road later finished the ascent, but this is where the readership found him.