All+the+Pretty+Horses

Discussion at Herb & Mavis Perry's home, June 10, 2010
We had a very small but mostly enthusiastic group discussing this Cormac McCarthy novel, which had been made into a motion picture with Brad Pitt and Penelope Cruz, Like __//Blood Meridian//__, __//Horses//__ is filled with violence and achingly beautiful descriptions of the Southwestern landscape.

Some found the characterization of the hero as a bit unlikely for a 16-yr-old, but others felt that in the time and place, John Grady grows up faster and has the skills and abilities that would make such an adventure possible. Think of Huck Finn, or the girl who was attempting to sail solo around the world. Blevins is on a similar adventure, but is younger (13-14?), and of course does not succeed. We also discussed the time frame, some feeling that 1948 was a little too late for these events to take place, while others reminisced about horse-drawn wagons in their own town growing up, and how rural life in the U.S. and Mexico had barely budged into the 20th century, even after the Second World War.

Joan made a convincing connecting to the horses of the title and the major themes of the novel--the raw beauty of nature, the strength and power of men and animals who could survive in that environment, and the courage and "rightness" of the boy, who eventually wins back the extraordinary pony, if not the girl. Horses and horse-related motifs abound--the exceptional horse that the Kid has probably stolen, and that causes so much of the grief; the Arabian ridden by Alejandra when first seen by the hero, the horse-breaking that is done with love and strength, the respect for the skills of the horsemen, and so on.

Several of us liked the book primarily for the lush descriptions. I've personally fell in love with the West when I first came out to California--not just cowboy lore and legend, but the stark timelessness of the buttes, the river-carved canyons, and the light canting over the desert at sunset.

The consensus was that this book was more optimistic than __//Blood Meridian//__. It is still a time in history when there is still hope about possible outcomes, or perhaps the youth of the hero gives it that slant.

Some of us vowed to read the other novels in the trilogy: __//The Crossing//__ and __//Cities of the Plain//__, which follow the life of John Grady into adulthood and more modern times.

Reviews et al.
A plot summary is found at the Cormac McCarthy Society Official Website

Biography of Cormac McCarthy
(from the Amazon Website) Cormac McCarthy was born in Rhode Island. He later went to Chicago, where he worked as an auto mechanic while writing his first novel, The Orchard Keeper. The Orchard Keeper was published by Random House in 1965; McCarthy's editor there was Albert Erskine, William Faulkner's long-time editor. Before publication, McCarthy received a traveling fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, which he used to travel to Ireland. In 1966 he also received the Rockefeller Foundation Grant, with which he continued to tour Europe, settling on the island of Ibiza. Here, McCarthy completed revisions of his next novel, Outer Dark. In 1967, McCarthy returned to the United States, moving to Tennessee. Outer Dark was published by Random House in 1968, and McCarthy received the Guggenheim Fellowship for Creative Writing in 1969. His next novel, Child of God, was published in 1973. From 1974 to 1975, McCarthy worked on the screenplay for a PBS film called The Gardener's Son, which premiered in 1977. A revised version of the screenplay was later published by Ecco Press. In the late 1970s, McCarthy moved to Texas, and in 1979 published his fourth novel, Suttree, a book that had occupied his writing life on and off for twenty years. He received a MacArthur Fellowship in 1981, and published his fifth novel, Blood Meridian, in 1985. All the Pretty Horses, the first volume of The Border Trilogy, was published by Knopf in 1992. It won both the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award and was later turned into a feature film. The Stonemason, a play that McCarthy had written in the mid-1970s and subsequently revised, was published by Ecco Press in 1994. Soon thereafter, Knopf released the second volume of The Border Trilogy, The Crossing; the third volume, Cities of the Plain, was published in 1998.McCarthy's next novel, No Country for Old Men was published in 2005. This was followed in 2006 by a novel in dramatic form, The Sunset Limited, originally performed by Steppenwolf Theatre Company of Chicago and published in paperback by Vintage Books. McCarthy's most recent novel, The Road, was published in 2006 and won the Pulitzer Prize. Photo © Derek Shapton