All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy

All the Pretty Horses provides a highly romanticized but startlingly brutal account of a young man’s travels on horseback in Mexico. The traveler, John Grady Cole, is both unremarkable and fascinating. I believe this feature can be attributed to his words versus his actions. The dialogue between him and his two traveling companions is sparse and repetitive, but his actions concerning love, horses, and war are flamboyant. I believe this is part of the attraction for reading McCarthy; it’s almost as if one is reading the work of two distinct writers. There is lush language describing the majestic Mexican landscape side by side with matter of fact descriptions of eating meals or buying supplies from a store.

In a previous review on a McCarthy work, I fixated on his sparse use of commas and other punctuation marks, but I now believe that could be a misguided attempt to mix style with content. Yes, cutting down on unnecessary punctuation marks will help with my writing, but swearing off commas isn’t going to have me writing like McCarthy. While the man in undeniably talented, I wouldn’t want to write just like him. However, I do believe the contrast achieved in his writing is an aspect in which I could truly use more practice.

McCarthy’s attention to detail when describing the plants, animal life, and natural landscape of the Mexican setting is superb. An attempt to add these details to my own work will help with my obliviousness to my surroundings as both a writer and as a human being. McCarthy also describes important human interactions without getting bogged down in dialogue and editorializing body language. I can definitely learn from that.

There were times when I found the descriptions of setting too effusive and the human dialogue too clipped (i.e. John Grady trading so few words with his best friend when they both realized they had survived), too much of a contrast when a middle route wouldn’t have been a sin. McCarthy is a great writer in showing me that contrast may be a consistent option to balance my writer weaknesses with my strengths.