All the Pretty Horses [Paperback]

Cormac McCarthy (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 20, 2001

A stunning film tie-in edition of a classic American novel All the Pretty Horses - the first volume of the Border Trilogy - tells of young John Grady Cole, the last of a long line of Texas ranchers, almost the last American cowboy. Across the border Mexico beckons - beautiful and desolate, rugged and cruelly civilized. With two companions, he sets off on an idyllic, sometimes comic adventure, to a place where dreams are paid for in blood. The boys' story is a classic adventure from the lost heart of the American Wild West: an adventure that within months will leave one of them dead, and the other two aged beyond any normal reckoning. It is also a grand and epic love story, and a beautifully wise novel about the passing of childhood and the loss of innocence.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Part bildungsroman, part horse opera, part meditation on courage and loyalty, this beautifully crafted novel won the National Book Award in 1992. The plot is simple enough. John Grady Cole, a 16-year-old dispossessed Texan, crosses the Rio Grande into Mexico in 1949, accompanied by his pal Lacey Rawlins. The two precocious horsemen pick up a sidekick--a laughable but deadly marksman named Jimmy Blevins--encounter various adventures on their way south and finally arrive at a paradisiacal hacienda where Cole falls into an ill-fated romance. Readers familiar with McCarthy's Faulknerian prose will find the writing more restrained than in Suttree and Blood Meridian. Newcomers will be mesmerized by the tragic tale of John Grady Cole's coming of age. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Publishers Weekly

This is a novel so exuberant in its prose, so offbeat in its setting and so mordant and profound in its deliberations that one searches in vain for comparisons in American literature. None of McCarthy's previous works, not even the award-winning The Orchard Keeper (1965) or the much-admired Blood Meridian (1985), quite prepares the reader for the singular achievement of this first installment in the projected Border Trilogy. John Grady Cole is a 16-year-old boy who leaves his Texas home when his grandfather dies. With his parents already split up and his mother working in theater out of town, there is no longer reason for him to stay. He and his friend Lacey Rawlins ride their horses south into Mexico; they are joined by another boy, the mysterious Jimmy Blevins, a 14-year-old sharpshooter. Although the year is 1948, the landscape--at some moments parched and unforgiving, at others verdant and gentled by rain--seems out of time, somewhere before history or after it. These likable boys affect the cowboy's taciturnity--they roll cigarettes and say what they mean--and yet amongst themselves are given to terse, comic exchanges about life and death. In McCarthy's unblinking imagination the boys suffer truly harrowing encounters with corrupt Mexican officials, enigmatic bandits and a desert weather that roils like an angry god. Though some readers may grow impatient with the wild prairie rhythms of McCarthy's language, others will find his voice completely transporting. In what is perhaps the book's most spectacular feat, horses and men are joined in a philosophical union made manifest in the muscular pulse of the prose and the brute dignity of the characters. "What he loved in horses was what he loved in men, the blood and the heat of the blood that ran them," the narrator says of John Grady. As a bonus, Grady endures a tragic love affair with the daughter of a rich Spanish Hacendado , a romance, one hopes, to be resumed later in the trilogy.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 301 pages
• Publisher: Picador (April 20, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0330488430
• ISBN-13: 978-0330488433
• Product Dimensions: 7.6 x 5.2 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (347 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,722,678 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Cormac McCarthy was born in Rhode Island. He later went to Chicago, where he worked as an auto mechanic while writing his first novel, The Orchard Keeper. The Orchard Keeper was published by Random House in 1965; McCarthy's editor there was Albert Erskine, William Faulkner's long-time editor. Before publication, McCarthy received a traveling fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, which he used to travel to Ireland. In 1966 he also received the Rockefeller Foundation Grant, with which he continued to tour Europe, settling on the island of Ibiza. Here, McCarthy completed revisions of his next novel, Outer Dark. In 1967, McCarthy returned to the United States, moving to Tennessee. Outer Dark was published by Random House in 1968, and McCarthy received the Guggenheim Fellowship for Creative Writing in 1969. His next novel, Child of God, was published in 1973. From 1974 to 1975, McCarthy worked on the screenplay for a PBS film called The Gardener's Son, which premiered in 1977. A revised version of the screenplay was later published by Ecco Press. In the late 1970s, McCarthy moved to Texas, and in 1979 published his fourth novel, Suttree, a book that had occupied his writing life on and off for twenty years. He received a MacArthur Fellowship in 1981, and published his fifth novel, Blood Meridian, in 1985. All the Pretty Horses, the first volume of The Border Trilogy, was published by Knopf in 1992. It won both the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award and was later turned into a feature film. The Stonemason, a play that McCarthy had written in the mid-1970s and subsequently revised, was published by Ecco Press in 1994. Soon thereafter, Knopf released the second volume of The Border Trilogy, The Crossing; the third volume, Cities of the Plain, was published in 1998.McCarthy's next novel, No Country for Old Men was published in 2005. This was followed in 2006 by a novel in dramatic form, The Sunset Limited, originally performed by Steppenwolf Theatre Company of Chicago and published in paperback by Vintage Books. McCarthy's most recent novel, The Road, was published in 2006 and won the Pulitzer Prize.

Photo © Derek Shapton

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

119 of 129 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Ascent into Hell, November 19, 2005

By 

Gary Griffiths (Los Altos Hills, CA United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: All the Pretty Horses (The Border Trilogy, Book 1) (Paperback)

You read the first sentence of a Cormac McCarthy novel and you know that this is not Grisham or Connolly or Child or Crichton or King, certainly not Patterson, or anyone else writing fiction today. And before the first page is turned he has launched into one of his frenetic poetic riffs that lurches and rambles and stops and starts and doesn't care about punctuation and you can almost hear your high school English teacher scolding about grammar and run-on sentences but you know that she could never even hope to string words together like this even if she dared. And then you realize that maybe you've actually never really understood the English language at all because no one before has ever ripped it and bent it and twisted it as beautifully as McCarthy does while making it all look so easy.

So were it not for McCarthy's ferocious prose, "All the Pretty Horses" may have been just another coming of age story. But in McCarthy's special corner of hell, along with the obligatory introduction to "young love", passage to adulthood may include exile in a foreign country, being hunted on horseback across a barren desert, variously stabbed, shot, tortured, or imprisoned. John Grady Cole is a sixteen year-old son of a Texas rancher who, up until his grandfather's death, worked the ranch and developed an uncommon kinship with horses. With his grandfather gone, his father dying, and his mother flitting around the cultural scene in post-WWII San Antonio, John Grady sets out on horseback for Mexico with buddy Lacey Rawlings. What follows is an odyssey of restless youth across a rugged country, a bleak and sometimes bloody journey that is not without the humor and easy banter of young teenagers on their own; the "road trip" that turns nightmarish and accelerates the process of growing up into hyper drive.

John Grady is an endearing character; there are no Holden Caulfields in the Texas borderlands. A stoic young cowboy, he has had the youthful innocence to which he is entitled ripped out too early, replaced by a work-hardened cynicism and homespun wisdom of the Texas plains. The reader cares for John Grady in the way of the classic Greek heroes, watching helplessly as the protagonist stone-by-stone lays the foundation of his own downfall. This is Cormac McCarthy, and therefore not a fairy tale; the reader would be naïve to expect an ending with a smiling John Grady riding into the sunset with his girl's arms around his denim shirt. But since it is Cormac McCarthy, you can expect unparalleled prose that delivers its message with the power and subtlety of a cattle prod. An American classic - required reading.

40 of 46 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Grand Tale, Wonderfully Rendered, January 16, 2001

By 

Bruce Kendall "BEK" (Southern Pines, NC) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: All The Pretty Horses (The Border Trilogy) (Audio Cassette)

I didn't realize until I looked at the Amazon site that Frank Muller has narrated so many books. They have 84 Muller listings here, primarily for Stephen King, John Grisham and other best-selling authors. The only other Muller audio-book I was familiar with was his rendition of King's <The Green Mile>, which was excellent. Muller surpasses that here, however, as he renders McCarthy's prose faultlessly. He captures the accents, whether they be Texan or Mexican, faithfully and unaffectadly. This is a great acting-job, natural, unassuming, perfectly in-flow with the narrative. His shift from character to character is seemless. Muller is the latter-day role model for anyone wishing to narrate books. There is ample reason why he is so prolific.

The story itself lends itself to being told orally. It is a myth of the west, but I mean that in the greatest sense of the word. Mythic here does not mean unrealistic. Far from it. It is mythic because it represents higher truths, but tells a human story in as truthful a manner as possible. I hate to use a hackneyed term like "describing the human condition," but it does. There are other high-school terms I could use, such as "coming-of-age story," "piquaresque novel," "story of initiation," etc. , but they would all short-change McCarthy's accomplishment here. McCarthy represents what is increasiningly scarce in modern American letters. He is a truly original novelist. Yes, we can trace his roots, but he has acquired his unique voice by dint of much effort, trial, delving, maybe even bloodshed. He is one of those authors that after reading one of his works, we are left to ask "How did he come by that knowledge?" He doesn't just research a work. He must have, at least in part, lived it. For instance, in this work, I was left wondering how he could have aquired such an encyclopedic knowledge of all things having to do with horses. I worked on the backstretch of racetracks for five years and didn't know my nomenclature with anything like the authority he does.

It would appear that Muller, like McCarthy has thoroughly done his homework. Never once in the course of this unabridged audio does he stumble over a word, much less a passage. He speaks Spanish almost as fluently as English, which is important for this work. In fact I would suggest that if you do not comprehend Spanish readily, you refer to the text-form of the book and maybe a Spanish dictionary before listening to this tape, though you can still appreciate most of it.

My estimation of McCarthy, which was already high, as well as my opinion of Muller, were greatly enhanced by the experience of listening to these tapes.

(This review refers to the unabridged audio-tape version of <All the Pretty Horses>. I prefer printed versions of good books, but see nothing wrong with listening to books when we dont have our hands free. Cars, obviously. I know what you were thinking!)

27 of 30 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Wonderful, January 10, 2000

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"hari-amrit" - See all my reviews

This review is from: All the Pretty Horses (The Border Trilogy, Book 1) (Paperback)

I found this book on an empty, dusty bookself at the back of my high school library, it's cover and first few pages torn away and the corners burned round. I thought that either someone was very bored and destructive or frustrated by the difficulty of the first few chapters (this only after flipping it open to find out it's title, the side being illedgable). After reading it I realize it could even more easily have come from the frustration of wanting more! This book kept me reading from cover to cover and still awake enough to wish it were double it's size. While reading it I had no clue as to it's popularity or award, but I knew it deserved one. John Grady Cole is an amazingly believable hero. I found myself trusting him and not the author to carry the book, knowing that he would come through no matter what. Even as the dialogue turned increasingly to spanish I felt that there wasn't a need to understand every word, I knew Grady enough to know what he would say. After getting a friend to translate a bit I found that this was true. I can only hope the movie is even half as good! I'm going to buy my school a copy to replace the destroyed version that I found.