All the Pretty Horses
1992, Cormac McCarthy
What a gorgeous, dark, violent, beautiful book. My favorite thing I’ve read in a while. I described his first novel, The Orchard Keeper (1965) as the way Faulkner would have written if Faulkner was a disciple of Hemingway. Well, Hemingway is very much in ascendence here, which isn’t telling you anything you don’t already know about McCarthy. It’s not even the writing style, specifically, that has me thinking Hemingway. Rather it’s the eating and drinking in little cafes and stores and around campfires and in hotels, the occasional peaceful natural interlude, the gratitude for the goodness of strangers and proprietors, that takes me to Burguete and Pamplona - to The Sun Also Rises. Except, here in All the Pretty Horses, there’s a bloody possibility lurking behind any doorway, over any horizon. Instead of in Hemingway, matters of life and death seem to intrude upon the fiesta, whereas, on McCarthy’s Mexican holiday, they seem to have been there all along.
