All the Pretty Horses

"It’s about John Grady, who leaves home, gets a job on a ranch, and falls in love with the daughter of the rancher. It looks like his life is really going full speed ahead: a good job, love, everything fine. And then it all goes horribly wrong: he gets arrested for conspiring in the murder of a man, who in fact he had nothing to do with, and thrown into jail. He loses everything. In this book it’s an ongoing gaining of wisdom. I’m quite interested in that whole subject of finding out where you belong in the world, which is not a search that starts and ends between 18 and 21. It’s a process of optimism and again maybe the passion of youth: the expectation that things will go well, that the world is not against you, is not evil. The wisdom John Grady gains is very chastening and tragic; he’s lost the woman he loves. You sense he’s starting again, but with something harder than he did last time. I know I’m not alone, but I absolutely love McCarthy’s expressionless, very flat prose that doesn’t lead the reader in any way. All the Pretty Horses is one of my five or ten favourite books in the whole world. There’s something absolutely thrilling about his lack of inflection because it allows the words to do all the work and therefore anything horrific that happens happens without any sentimentality or manipulation or emphasis. It all happens in your head. The book really mixes up loss and gain and wisdom and sorrow, and it ends with a sense of potential for John Grady, which is based on the wisdom he’s gained on the way."

"Yes. It came out in 1992 and was an immediate bestseller. There was a bidding war over the film rights, though a film didn’t get made for some years—that’s a whole other story. Like Blood Meridian , All the Pretty Horses is a Western. It is violent, but it has the appearance of being more traditional, more romantic. It’s got a very appealing protagonist, the 16-year-old boy John Grady Cole, who is dissatisfied with his life in Texas and decides to make a clean break and ride to Mexico with his best friend. So it’s an adventure tale. Readers really respond to it. It is a nice balance of accessible and challenging. The plot is pretty accessible—again, it doesn’t have either the density or the hyper-violence of Blood Meridian— but the language is gorgeous. Starting from the first page, it’s got sentences that will just stop you cold, which is why I responded to it so much when I first read it. And yet his virtuosic style is not an impediment to the book, and that’s one of the reasons why it teaches really well, and one of the reasons that a lot of people like it so much. That said, it’s also a book that is not as traditional or romantic as it initially seems. I read it quite differently now to how I did when I first read it. So people can get pretty different idea out of it, depending on what kind of context you’re coming from. I’m not sure that he would put it that way. Certainly not writing in the 1960s. But I think this idea of what does it mean to be a man, what does it mean to have a sense of masculine identity, is there in every book that he writes. But I would be one of the critics who would say he’s critiquing that. John Grady Cole in All the Pretty Horses is almost astonishingly skilful, very appealing, quite sympathetic, but by the end, he doesn’t end up where he thought he would. And I don’t think he ends up where the reader expects him to be either. Especially if you’re expecting it to be a more kind of traditional story. And I have always loved the figure of Alejandra in that book, the girl that he meets down in Mexico and falls in love with, and romances. Do you mind spoilers? Well, in the end she says, ‘Sorry, I can’t be with you. I’ve got my reasons, and they’re important to me.’ He doesn’t get it, although he probably could’ve seen it coming. In fact, her grand-aunt, the Dueña Alfonsa, basically tells him this for pages and pages in this elaborate meeting they have. He still doesn’t really get it. And he doesn’t understand why his mother would want to move to San Antonio to be an actress. He just doesn’t get women, really. And he continues not to get them, later in the Border Trilogy , and I find that kind of refreshing. McCarthy’s not overtly telling you that he’s thick in this fashion, but he is a character that gets confronted with his ideas about how the world should work. You can see that as tragedy, but you can also see that as a fairly sharp critique of what happens when you have those ideas in the first place. Right. A woman is not a horse, it turns out."

"Yes. I chose All the Pretty Horses , which won the National Book Award when it was published in 1992. Some readers might take issue with me for not choosing Blood Meridian or No Country for Old Men . But I think all of these novels take up that problem of violence, and ask: once unleashed, can violence and brutality ever be contained? Masculinity becomes a crucial topic in these books. Specifically in All the Pretty Horses , fathers play a large role, and they remind us of the ways in which the Western itself asks questions about what it means to be a man. All the Pretty Horses takes place in a modern period, post-World War II. It asks whether the older generation of men will be able to serve as good role models for the younger generation. McCarthy seems to ask whether his main character, John Grady, should follow in the steps of his father or are there other standards of masculinity that might be available to him? John Grady’s father was a POW and in some ways never made it back from the war. He experienced horrific violence and, as a result, is emotionally shut down. McCarthy features a lot of male characters in his novels who have been violent-ised or turned into killing machines by military training or experience in battle. In discussing her novel Trinity , about the atomic scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer , Louisa Hall explained the importance of exploring these highly conflicted and troubled men. Her argument is that we absolutely need to understand these men and their motivations if we want to survive them. I think that All the Pretty Horses is exactly about that. John Grady is a young cowboy from Texas who faces a series of losses. This is a common settler theme in the Western: elegy, loss, nostalgia. The West he has known all his life is changing due to the Cold War military infrastructure and a developing oil boom. After the death of his grandfather and transformations in the ranching world, he ends up leaving home in search of new possibilities. Along the way, he meets Lacey Rawlins, and the two head south of the border. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . By locating its setting in Mexico, the novel reminds us of the colonial underpinnings of many Westerns, and how the genre’s Western adventures typically take place in greater Mexico. While the Western often positions the West as a place of promise and possibility, in McCarthy’s novels the West is really revealed to be a settler dreamspace. The title of the book, for instance, draws from the lyrics of a nursery song, which is an interesting choice. The nursery song itself conjures up that whole idea of bedtime stories, the notion of a dream world. This book is really about settler fantasies, the desire for so-called ‘innocent times.’ It’s about the fantasy of acquiring power, mastery, and ownership. The way the main character imagines Mexico and Alejandra, the love interest, really foregrounds the limits and restrictions of those fantasies. There’s a critic, Sara Ahmed, who talks about how critique is ‘sticky’; it often sticks to the very person engaged in making the criticism or launching the critique. So, in the case of McCarthy and his novel, I find it interesting how some readers accuse the author of engaging in gender stereotypes and colonial fantasy. I would argue that McCarthy is precisely trying to lay bare these ways of thinking, and how these desires for ownership and domination come to us from the place of the fantastic or the dream world. Of course, horses in the Western represent freedom and mobility, the classic settler myth of the West itself. Freedom, possibility, promise, mobility. Horses represent a time before modernisation and industrialisation. They represent the possibility of making deeper connections to the natural world that some Americans believe they have lost. Yet there are also long scenes in the book where the cowboys are breaking horses. Clearly this is showing us a major contradiction in the genre, and we start to see the underside of the fantasy, and the nightmare that the dream has really become. It really does engage all these different affects in the reader. So: loss, mourning, nostalgia. Also humour, and an appreciation of beauty. But it also, I think, tries to nudge us in a new critical direction. The Western is a messy genre, so perhaps it’s not surprising that all these things stick to it."