A lot of McCarthy’s characters have the gypsy habit, a trait they share with their author. In “Child of God” (1973), the necrophiliac mass murderer Lester Ballard is evicted in the novel’s first chapter and thereafter wanders the Tennessee hills, going madder with every step. The title character in “Suttree” (1979), a reputedly autobiographical novel, lives on a houseboat. McCarthy himself, having written exclusively about the South in his first four books, abandoned Tennessee for El Paso more than a decade ago and in effect began a second career writing novels about the Southwest. “I just decide to go to a place, take a room and write,” he once said.
McCarthy keeps to himself. He rarely grants an interview, never gives readings, never teaches. Occasionally the world seeks him out. His novel “The Orchard Keeper” (1965) won the Faulkner Foundation award for a first novel. In 1981 he received a MacArthur fellowship, the so-called genius award. Nevertheless, despite the awards and the rave reviews, McCarthy remains perhaps the best-kept secret in American letters.
The readiest explanation for this neglect is that McCarthy’s vision is simply too dark for most people. His characters-Tennessee white trash, Texas outlaws-are sociopaths, often murderous, more often half mad. They exist in a world almost bereft of kindness, happiness or any other civilizing aspect. When McCarthy writes of Lester Ballard, “Were there darker provinces of night, he would have found them,” he could be describing nearly all his characters.
“All the Pretty Horses” is McCarthy’s sixth novel and the first of a projected trilogy. It is, by his standards, a pastoral tale. Recounting young John Grady Cole’s cowboy adventures in Mexico, it lyrically re-creates that time in life when a boy is finding his footing in the world of men. In Mexico, Cole and a pal get work busting mustangs on a ranch. There, too, Cole falls in love with the rancher’s daughter, and winds up in prison for his trouble. To be sure, there is blood aplenty before the story is done, but unlike other McCarthy characters, Cole partakes of violence with the greatest reluctance and wears its memory with genuine remorse. This young man–gentle, stubborn and honorable-ranks with his creator’s greatest achievements.
In many ways Cole is that old familiar thing in American literature the Natural Man. “What he loved in horses was what he loved in men,” McCarthy writes of the boy, “the blood and the heat of the blood that ran them. All his reverence and all his fondness and all the leanings of his life were for the ardenthearted and they would always be so and never be otherwise.”
As in all his books, McCarthy delights in the natural world. The fatalistic harshness of the desert fits his temperament like handmade boots. He also has a sharp but compassionate eye for the self-seriousness of youth. Particularly fine are the laconic exchanges between Cole and his scapegrace father as they ride horseback together and linger over coffee and pie in nameless cafes:
You still seein that Barnett girl? He shook his head. She quit you or did you quit her? I dont know. That means she quit you. Yeah.
A little later, “The last thing his father said was that the country would never be the same. People dont feel safe no more, he said. We’re like the Comanches was two hundred years ago. We dont know what’s goin to show up here come daylight.”
All McCarthy’s books are admirable, but this one is likable too. Without ever taking his eyes off the general scheme of his tale, the writer lingers over every scene, sculpting each to its essence. This hymn to youth and times past is sweet-tempered but never sentimental, accessible without compromise. While it may well mystify the fans of McCarthy’s darker, more savage books, it should nonetheless attract the larger audience he deserves. A modern-day Western full of horses and gunplay and romance, it transcends the bounds of its genre with rambunctious, high-spirited, bottomless inventiveness. “All the Pretty Horses” is a true American original.
