He spend a while with Lacy rotting in a Mexican jail, having to fight for their lives every night, but once he gets out, like any young man in love, he's not going to let a little thing like a rich landowner who can sic the Mexican police on him get in the way of true love. They become horse wranglers, Cole falls in love (of course) with a beautiful Senorita who is (of course) the daughter of his rich employer, and this (of course) brings him only trouble. He and his friend Lacy become unwilling companions of an ill-fated youngster who seems born under a bad moon. It's the 1940s, and the era of cowboys riding off on horses is coming to an end, but John Grady Cole still manages to get into enough trouble for a Western epic. With no further attachment to his parents, he rides off to the Mexican badlands.
I've loved two, hated one, and been lukewarm about Suttree and now this one.Īll the Pretty Horses is a coming-of-age story about a young man of sixteen whose father dies, and his mother decides to sell the ranch he wanted to make his livelihood.
This is the fifth McCarthy novel I've read. In spite of its hard realities and spare telling, All the Pretty Horses is a lyrical and richly romantic story, chronicling - along with the erosion of the frontier - the loss of an era.Ĭormac McCarthy's prose is like black coffee - you can appreciate when it's well-made, but it doesn't always go down smoothly and you might wish there was something to sweeten it.
Rootless and increasingly restive, Cole leaves Texas, accompanied by his friend Lacey Rawlins, and begins a journey across the vaquero frontier into the badlands of northern Mexico. Set in the late 1940s, it features the travels and toils of a 16-year-old East Texan named John Grady Cole, caught in the agonizing purgatory between adolescence and adulthood.Īt the start of the novel, Cole's grandfather has just died, his parents have permanently separated, and the family ranch, upon which he had placed so many boyish hopes, has been sold. All the Pretty Horses, McCarthy's sixth novel, is a cowboy odyssey for modern times. Cormac McCarthy is a quiet, unassuming presence in American fiction today, but like the slow, measured voices of many of his characters, he speaks with an authority and conviction that demands an audience.
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