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.


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.


From Library Journal
Before this beautifully written novel, McCarthy's sixth and most accessible, won last year's National Book Award and became a best seller, its author was one of the least known of great American novelists. It is a simple story (the first in a trilogy) of three Texas youths whose flight to Mexico on horseback in 1949 traverses far more than geographical borders, marking a descent into the deeper forces of friendship, love, and cruelty. Its style owes an enormous debt to Hemingway, but it pays that debt with interest. That its laconic hero, John Grady Cole, proves resourceful beyond his years (and almost beyond belief) places the novel in the tradition of classic Westerns, but never has any Western been so well told. The novel's moral logic and McCarthy's mystique of "blood" are questionable, but there is poignancy in Cole's yearning to touch something in horses that has passed from the race of men, to find a depth of wisdom that can only come with age, and, like most of McCarthy's people, to escape what is deadly in modern American life. The unabridged version is one of the best recorded books to date, for Frank Muller's narration is such a perfect model of balance and control that it deserves an award in itself. In the Random House abridgment, film actor Brad Pitt simply doesn't compare. With a superb complete version on the market, there is no reason to settle for anything less.- Peter Josyph, New YorkCopyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.


Boston Globe
"McCarthy puts most other American writers to shame. [His] work itself repays the tight focus of his attention with its finely wrought craftsmanship and its ferocious energy."


From AudioFile
In this lyrical, coming-of-age story set in the forties, a young man rides to Mexico from Texas to find work with cattle and horses. Haunting music introduces each cassette and provides background for Brad Pitt's dramatic narration. His even cadence and soft, Southern drawl match the setting. Pitt is especially talented in dialogue, and John Grady Cole and all the people he encounters vividly come alive. Although the presentation begins slowly, Pitt's wonderful narrative style captures the tone and emotion of the author's words and moves the audience along to the story's sad conclusion. A powerful presentation. A.A.B. (c)AudioFile, Portland, Maine


From Kirkus Reviews
McCarthy's work (Blood Meridian, 1985, etc.) is essentially about fatality: grotesque human acts that lack self-direction, that seem to be playing out a design otherwise established. In his more gothic early works, this fatality had a hanging-moss quality that seemed to brush your face invisibly but chillingly as you worked your way through his books. More recently, ever since McCarthy turned into a high-class cowboy novelist, the fatality is, understandably, more spread out--punctured by boredom and ennui and long, lonesome plains. Here, John Cole Grady is a 1930's East Texas teenager, abandoned by his parents' troubles, who sets out with his pal Rawlins to ride across the border to Mexico. Along the way, they pick up an urchin named Blevins and arrive finally at a hacienda, where they're hired to break horses. Grady falls in love with the owner's beautiful daughter--a disaster that leads in succession to arrest and Mexican jail and murder in self-defense. But this clich‚-d plot is not, of course, what one reads a McCarthy novel for. McCarthy is one of the most determined art- prose writers around; and his clean, laconic dialogue is pillowed everywhere with huge gales of imperial style: ``While inside the vaulting of the ribs between his knees the darkly meated heart pumped of who's will and the blood pulsed and the bowels shifted in their massive blue convolutions of who's will and the stout thighbones and knee and cannon and the tendons like flaxen hawsers that drew and flexed and drew and flexed at their articulations and of who's will all sheathed and muffled in the flesh and the hooves...''--and this is just half of the one sentence: no horse would ever move if it had to parse that out first. Like the late D.H. Lawrence at his worst and most pretentious, all blood-voodoo and animistic design, McCarthy makes an awfully unconvincing lot of a little here. -- Copyright ©1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

FROM OUR EDITORS

In highly evocative prose that puts the reader firmly in the saddle, the National Book Award-winning novel All the Pretty Horses -- the first and most-admired book in Cormac McCarthy's acclaimed Border Trilogy -- follows the progress of laconic 16-year-old Texan John Grady Cole, his pal Lacey Rawlins, and the mysterious young sharpshooter Jimmy Blevins as they ride across the border into Mexico in search of adventure. A contemporary classic!

FROM THE PUBLISHER

A critical triumph, this is the story of John Grady Cole, who at 16 finds himself at the dying end of a long line of Texas ranchers, cut off from the only life he has ever imagined for himself. To escape a society moving in all the wrong directions, Cole and two companions decide to seek their future in Mexico, a land at once beautiful and desolate, rugged and cruelly civilized. But what begins as an idyllic, sometimes comic adventure, leads, in fact, to a place where dreams are paid for in blood. Within months, one of the boys is dead, and the other two aged beyond their years.

A story about childhood passing, innocence and an American age, here is a grand story and an education in responsibility, revenge, and survival. All the Pretty Horses is truly a masterpiece.

SYNOPSIS

With the 1998 publication of Cities Of The Plain, Cormac McCarthy's acclaimed Border trilogy is now complete. The first and most admired book of the series is McCarthy's National Book Award-winning All The Pretty Horses. In highly evocative prose that puts the reader firmly in the saddle, All The Pretty Horses follows the progress of laconic 16-year-old Texan John Grady Cole, his pal Lacey Rawlins, and the mysterious young sharp shooter Jimmy Blevins as they ride across the border into Mexico in search of adventure.

FROM THE CRITICS

San Francisco Chronicle

[The Border Trilogy is] an American classic to stand with the finest literary achievements of the century.

Newsweek

A true American original.

Boston Globe

[All the Pretty Horses's} elegiac rhythm captures the badlands of Texas and northern Mexico with a passion most writers either couldn't muster or wouldn't dare.

New York Times Book Review

McCarthy puts most other American writers to shame. [His] work itself repays the tight focus of his attention with its finely wrought craftsmanship and its ferocious energy.

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.Read all 10 "From The Critics" >

WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING

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