All the Pretty Horses

It took me an unusually long time to finish Cormac McCarthy's All the Pretty Horses. It was not a difficult book, it was simply a matter of timing. First there was the MPRE, then my trial advocacy trial (the jury deliberated for two minutes before returning a verdict in our favor), and then last week was the DeepDiscountDVD sale. That might sound particularly silly, but I spent a lot of time (and money) stocking up on my new anime hobby.

And then I spent a good bit of time creating a section of this website dedicated to my DVDs, with separate pages dedicated to mainstream DVDs, anime, and Asian cinema. That's also why I haven't done much blogging. Whatever time I spent at the computer was dedicated either to DVD shopping or setting up those pages.

Anyhow, back to the book. I loved it. Having spent my teenage years in the mountains of the West, I harbor both a real and ideal vision of the frontier, of the vast expanses of land, the rugged independence. Yet this worldview has been largely untapped by true literary talent, instead left to flounder in the hands of cliched westerns that see only the ideal, and not what lurks beneath.

But McCarthy was able to capture the whole. He saw and portrayed the idealistic code that governs the stoic cowboy worldview, but he dug further, to show that while this idealism can occasionally spur the achievement of its aspirations, it is more often a mask to obscure the harshness of reality. John Grady Cole is strong and silent, honest and noble. Yet he can also be aimless, anguished, heartbroken, and most shocking of all for the cowboy ideal, full of self-doubt. McCarthy is a subtle artist, and draws much of this out in small vignettes, single lines, single moments scattered throughout the novel. The world he paints is beautiful but fractured, full of the ghosts of hopes and dreams. In his novel, he was able to show both the ghosts and the hope, which in the end is the duality of the West, and perhaps of romance and idealism themselves.