All the Pretty Horses (Paperback)

by Cormac McCarthy (Author) "THE CANDLEFLAME and the image of the candleflame caught in the pierglass twisted and righted when he entered the hall and again when he shut..." (more)
Key Phrases: Jimmy Blevins, San Angelo, United States (more...)

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: 320 pages
• Publisher: Vintage (June 29, 1993)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0679744398
• ISBN-13: 978-0679744399
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5.1 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars See all reviews (311 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #3,063 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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  #5 in	Books > Literature & Fiction > Authors, A-Z > ( M ) > McCarthy, Cormac
  #8 in	Books > Literature & Fiction > Genre Fiction > Westerns
  #12 in	Books > Literature & Fiction > Genre Fiction > Movie Tie-Ins

• This is item 1 in The Border Trilogy Series.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

32 of 35 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 (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

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.

30 of 34 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 (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)    (COMMUNITY FORUM 04)

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!)

39 of 46 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars All the Pretty Horses, May 15, 2000

By	Ginger (Arlington, Texas) - See all my reviews

This review is from: All the Pretty Horses (Volume One, The Border Trilogy) (Hardcover)

Since the early 1900's, America has greatly progressed industrially and technologically, thus causing the early 1990's publication of the western novel, All the Pretty Horses, to seem out of place. This untimliness, however, is no indication to the quality of the book. Cormac McCarthy demonstrates all the characteristics of a traditional Western: adventure, love, damsels, murder, horses, and a hero, while still maintaining the elegant language and style of writing he has created. Set along the Texas-Mexican border in the late 1940's, All the Pretty Horses relates young John Grady Cole's discoveries about religion, love, and life as he runs away from home and becomes a man. The idealistic Cole embodies the desires of all young adults, freedom and understanding, and sets out to satisfy them. Through several experiences that an average teenager would not have encountered, he realizes that reality can be cruel but maintains his amazing determination to live his life without the burdens of society.

McCarthy's magnificent wording and motifs demonstrate the many themes of hospitality, religion, freedom, and the quest for knowledge. The language appears to be deterring because of the author's choice to delete the majority of punctuation marks, however, if he had left the words in proper English format, the novel would have lost its realism and power. Unlike Charles Dickens, who is infamous for his lengthy, soporific descriptions, McCarthy utilizes his language to depict the Mexican landscape in a way that appeals to the reader. Not everything in the novel is pretty; as an adventure story, the book still enbodies the basic blood, guts, and gore; it simply describes them more completely than an average fiction novel. This quest for realism can become overused at times (i.e. entire dialogues written Spanish where occasionally a character may offer some form of explanation but usually leave the reader wondering). McCarthy's realism also extends to his multiple color motifs. Almost every pigment in the color wheel represents a quality in the novel, and because the author describes everything accurately, at least one of these recurring motifs appears on every other page. This does make analysis of the the novel fairly simple, but the overwhelming amount of color can become repetitive. McCarthy has mastered a wonderful command of language and exemplifies creativity well, but by stating the themes outright, he removes the opportunity for the reader to demonstrate his own ability to understand.

All the Pretty Horses embodies all the requirements of an interesting, adventurous novel that anyone could appreciate for its exciting plot and insightful discoveries of human nature. Whether searching for a wonderful book to read purely for entertainment or attempting to discover a piece of literature that is relatively simple to analyze, one should seriously consider All the Pretty Horses as an appropriate choice.