All The Pretty Horses
By Cormac McCarthy
Completed June 8, 2012
When I start a Cormac McCarthy novel, I need to be in the right mindset. His stories are dark and foreboding – but always rich and compelling. It’s a journey through the Southern Gothic, and when I’m ready for the ride, I’m always pleased. That’s certainly the case with my latest McCarthy book, All The Pretty Horses.
Told from the perspective of young John Grady Cole, All The Pretty Horses is a coming of age tale for John Grady and his best friend, Lacey Rawlins, who decide to leave their homes in San Angelo, Texas, and travel south to Mexico. As they prepare to cross into Mexico, they meet another boy who calls himself Jimmy Blevins, and immediately, Rawlins is suspicious of him. John Grady, though aloof about Blevins too, feels a sort of responsibility toward him, and it’s this attachment that will haunt John Grady months down the road.
After Blevins parts ways from John Grady and Rawlins, the friends end up on a ranch, where John Grady shows his talents breaking in horses. He also captures the eye of the ranch owner’s daughter, and they fall in love, though it is a forbidden one. As Rawlins predicted, Blevins is trouble, and as he’s arrested for theft and murder, the Mexican officials come after John Grady and Rawlins. They are arrested and thrown in jail.
I won’t give away the ending, but it’s full of heartbreak, violence and redemption. Overall, I was less pleased with the ending than the rest of the story. I forget, sometimes, that McCarthy’s book are considered “westerns” by some standards, and a barn shoot-out shouldn’t surprise me. But it always does.
McCarthy’s writing in All The Pretty Horses is pitch perfect. He paints a landscape like no other. His Faulknerian prose, lack of punctuation and gritty descriptions are truly works of art. I don’t know he pulls it off, but McCarthy does, and I am always a better reader as a result.
I look forward to reading the Border Triology’s second book, The Crossing, later this year. Until then, the story of All The Pretty Horses will weigh on my mind for a long time. ( 
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