The Thumbnail Book Reviews
by John Q McDonald --- 30 October 2005
by Cormac McCarthy
In this award-winning and very popular novel, Cormac McCarthy crafts a moody modern Western set in southern Texas and across the dry ranchlands of Mexico. It is 1949 and John Grady Cole is just sixteen, but when confronted by the sale of his family ranch, in the midst of his parents' dissolution, he grabs his best friend Lacey Rawlins and riding his best horse, heads south, across the border to find a life worth living. That life would be a life of ranching, breaking horses, herding cattle, living amongst honest men and dreaming of beautiful women. Cole and Rawlins fall in with an even younger wanderer named Jimmy Blevins. This boy is nothing but trouble, and his irresponsibility ensnares Cole and Rawlins in various adventures of horse thievery and murder. Even the dream of living on a hacienda is broken by this reckless kid. Cole had, in the meantime, fallen in love with the hacendado's beautiful daughter, but it was a love doomed by the aristocratic demands of her great aunt, anyway. The boys' adventures lead them through a corrupt Mexican jail, across landscape stunningly described in McCarthy's ornate and beautiful prose, and back again to familiar lands and unrealized dreams. Throughout, it is Cole's precocious resourcefulness that gets him through. McCarthy has a gift for description of the land. Cole's love for horses borders on the erotic, and the story ricochets between the animals and the protagonists. There are aspects of Western male fantasy here, but the story is told so beautifully and in a highly atmospheric fashion that it becomes almost mythic and compelling. A worthy addition to the literature of the American borderlands (and the first in McCarthy's Border Trilogy).
(For this book, McCarthy was awarded the 1992 National Book Award for fiction.)
Also by McCarthy: [The Road]