Educated by L'Amour, reading McCarthy

Here's another of my genre book reviews! I must note that I loved this book. If my analysis of ALL THE PRETTY HORSES suggests to you that I think the book failed, then I'm sorry. All I'm saying is that the book failed as a western; it succeeds most admirably as a wonderfully readable novel (and I'm way too excited about the movie. . .)


After years -- decades, even -- of reading Westerns, I had an idea of what to expect from what Newsweek calls, “A modern-day Western full of horses and gunplay and romance.” I have looked forward to reading ALL THE PRETTY HORSES since I first heard of McCarthy, and I’ve had this particular copy on my to-read shelf for eighteen months. I felt comfortable sliding into a narrative filled with the dearth of western memorabilia present in even the first few pages of the novel.

The the few things mentioned which moved me out of 1896 and into 1946 were not so much challenges to my ideas about the Western as they were humorous moments in this particular narrative. I cared little for fences -- the lamentation of barbed wire has been a staple of Westerns for my entire reading life -- but cars were funny in that they were so unexpected. Still, during the first hundred pages or so, I saw nothing in any of the characters to suggest that McCarthy was, as Newsweek suggests, “transcending the bounds of [his] genre.”

The Western as a genre has come far from the days of Indian fighting and bandits found in the old Zane Grey paperbacks to the purity of essence found in the writings of Larry McMurtry (sp) and Louis L’Amour, and I would assume that any comparison with genre would take this into account. I feel comfortable calling BENDIGO SHAFTER, L’Amour’s finest Western, my touchstone for the genre. It includes not only L’Amour’s trademark discussion of personal responsibility, the works of Blackstone, the Federalists, and the Bible, but also the saving of people from the elements, a super-human calmness learned by the title character, gunplay, and romance to challenge any Harlequin.

L’Amour’s prose is extremely clear and readable, even when he is writing of “high-falutin” ideas like political responsibility, the death of the West, the loss of American Indian culture and even older cultures, or love. In addition, Bendigo is a teenage boy who grows into a man by doing manly things like driving cattle and surviving the elements before he ever takes on the responsibility to stand up for the rights of his townspeople or to fight for those rights with guns.

McCarthy’s John Grady Cole embodies many of the same youthful attributes found in Bendigo: he has an uncanny, unexplained ability with horses, he is deliberate and successful, and he is extremely level-headed. The Western reader knows that the hero must learn to master his impulses in order to deserve the love of a woman. Also, he must kill a man who deserves to be killed, but who he will not wish to kill and who he will wish he had not killed. After killing this man, the hero will be forced to apply for the hand of the woman he loves, the woman who loves him. As you see, John Grady a typical Western hero. And he remains typical even when the story moves away from typicality.

At some point, rather than employ a non-typical hero, McCarthy moves his narrative away from the bounds of the genre. First comes the drastic shift in tension and movement beyond the Western that comes with the Midnight Express prison section. Ironically, here in this non-Western setting is where John Grady has to prove his manhood and kill another man; however, McCarthy keeps the death itself ugly and awful, not something either the hero or the reader desires to see happen, and certainly not something John Grady is proud of having done.

On the other hand, all of the narrative structure surrounding the killing is extremely anti-Western: though there may be adobe jails, there are no prisons in a Western, and though there may be mysteriously powerful men, there are none the likes of Pérez. So even though the narrative goes right back into the track of the Western after John Grady leaves the prison, its anti-genre taste hangs over the remainder of the narrative.

Later John Grady serves revenge on Blevins’ killer, recaptures his own and his friends’ horses, and escapes from the harshness of gunfights and the brutality of the desert like any hero in any Western. Upon returning home he is judged for his crimes by the standards of a respectable community, and he is found to be a man, he perfect Western hero. But he doesn’t get the girl. It may be sad to admit, but this one single detail allows the book to remain outside the bounds of genre for me.

As a reader of Westerns, I am not bothered by airplanes or automobiles; they are only alternatives to trains and other signals of the death of the West I have learned to expect from a Western. I am bothered, however, by the underlying wrongness of a narrative structure that punishes its hero like John Grady was punished without providing him with the love he deserves in the end. Luckily the narrative isn’t finished: there are two sequels. John Grady returns in book three of the series. I wonder what happens then...