All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy–my initial annotation
This week I re-read Cormac McCarthy’s “All the Pretty Horses,” after a lapse of nearly fifteen years. I reluctantly turned the last page at 3 am in the morning, sighing with an amalgam of satisfaction and discontent, an emotion that serves as the book lover’s brand of erotic experience. Perhaps, like the knight’s confusion concerning his future after rescuing the damsel, I wanted to immediately start rereading the story but hesitated knowing the experience could never be quite the same. A portion of my reading pleasure, as in all forms of delight, appeared because it was unexpected. C.S. Lewis once said, “No book is really worth reading at the age of ten which is not equally – and often far more – worth reading at the age of fifty and beyond.” I was significantly older than ten when I first read “All the Pretty Horses.” I suspect the gulf between this current reading and my memories of the novel does not reside so much in what I missed in McCarthy’s prose during my initial sojourn but rather that I am now a different reader.
Since first reading McCarthy’s book I now pay increased attention to the writing craft. After numerous literary awards, NYT reviews, and a Matt Damon movie adaptation, the story of John Grady Cole’s quest in “All the Pretty Horses” is well known and McCarthy’s many apocalyptic themes extensively critiqued. But often overlooked in a general discomfort with McCarthy’s non human-centric view of the world or his unique grammatical prose style or the Flannery O’Connor-esque fascination with twisted gothic-like characters is McCarthy’s use of classic tragic forms. Early on in this novel we know, as the characters do not, a foreboding sense of decisions being made that will produce awful consequences. Like reading of Oedipus on the road, we know John Grady Cole’s assisting Blevins or his love affair with Alejandra will not end well. McCarthy remains one of the few modern authors writing in this tragic style.
However, I wonder if it was McCarthy’s creation of dissonance between his young character’s innocence and an older cynacism (either by age or experience) that most resonated in my current reading. The author remains fascinated with the mythic shape of our lives. An innocence pervades everything about the 16 y/o John Grady Cole and the other young characters we meet. This innocence stands in contrast with the older characters who have forever lost the ability to aspire or enter into a quest. The old seem determined to confront the innocent, as if innocence in the geometry of McCarthy’s world is a vacuum to be filled. The confrontation between Cole and the formidable but bitter great-aunt over the young lover’s affair suggests experience has little benefit or worse, is the requirement of evil.
Since I first read “All the Pretty Horses” I have also spent more time reading the Old Testament Prophets. The fictional world created by Cormic McCarthy seems strikingly like the world imagined in Job. Perhaps McCarthy’s books are counter-cultural for our narcissistic times in the same way contemporary churches find little in common with the biblical prophet: they both articulate a world and a God that seem to accord human beings far less “pride of place” than we humans believe we deserve. Readers are uncomfortable when McCarthy, without rationale, puts inexplicable kindness in juxtaposition with inexplicable cruelty just as we are frustrated when attempting to justify an all loving God with a suffering world.
This is not a novel that can be described as a “feel good” read. As with all his novels, McCarthy has written a book teeming with unexplained suffering and awful evil; events like imprisonment in a Mexican jail that are profoundly disturbing and difficult, the stuff of our worst dreams. Yet, with this second read I found the novel oddly beautiful. To be sure, it is a novel containing a captivating story full of beautiful imagination, an exemplar that all who write can read for profit. But, journeying through the pain and evil, I also found this classic tragedy beautiful in a larger sense. “All the Pretty Horses” is a novel about the human heart and renders a truthful and painful prose portrait, an image of good entwined with evil. It is not often an author gives us such close-ups of what it means to be fully human.
Cormac McCarthy’s prose contains such aching beauty that I was at times struck dumb by the correspondance of his words to my most private desires, words provoking an entrance into a magical and surreal space. But my silence was also constructed by visceral horror. The author’s story is magically too real, conjuring a consonance with my most dreaded imaginings and nightmares. We can close our eyes, struggle to deny or discredit or ignore John Grady Cole’s story, but these are close-ups of humanity that we know are not wrong and contain shards of our own stories. This is a novel that will haunt my thinking and perhaps my dreams for a long time.