All the Pretty Horses

Cormac McCarthy writes likes he doesn't care if you ever read one of his books. Many authors, even the good ones at times, are guilty of pandering to an audience or trying a bit too hard to please others outside of themselves. From the very first page of All the Pretty Horses - or from any McCarthy book really - it is clear that McCarthy is writing for no one but himself. And surprisingly, this is a good thing.

Using no quotation marks, rarely bothering to even break up descriptive prose from spoken words, frequently using untranslated Spanish, and putting his characters through hell and back again, it's safe to say that McCarthy isn't out to make any friends with his dazzling and emphatically artistic Western. The book tells the story of John Grady Cole, a 16 year old and the last in a long line of ranchers and cowboys. He sets off with a long time pal of his, Sonny Rawlins, across the border to Mexico after the death of his father. It if often unclear what they are searching for, but the journey itself is never less than enthralling. Whether they are running like criminals from the Mexicans or merely sitting under the stars at night, McCarthy infuses their adventures with a sense of poetical lyricism so strong, so beautiful in its execution that it's near impossible not to get caught up in it.

There are other elements to his tale to be sure - a romance, a family drama, murders, deaths, and plenty of horses - but underneath it all, as its unifying pull, lies the simple but overwhelming prose of a man who has read and fully absorbed William Faulkner's work without falling prey to cheaply ripping off a master. McCarthy's voice is at once his own and many others, an American voice above the mediocre writers forcing their fiction on us in the recent years. All the Pretty Horses is a book you're glad to be reading all the way through, a book that catches you up in the spirit of a West you most likely never knew, and a book that leaves you wishing you had it to read all over again for the very first time.