All The Pretty Horses calls me out

review

Heavyyyyy spoilers!!!

What he loved in horses was what he loved in men, the blood and the heat of the blood that ran them.

McCarthy is a show-off. All The Pretty Horses is the kind of book where you finish a sentence and sit with it for a moment before moving on, because something in it has landed and you’re not quite ready to let it go.

The novel follows sixteen-year-old John Grady Cole, a Texas boy born a generation too late - 1949. His grandfather has died and his mother is selling the family ranch. The world he was made for — horses, open land, a certain code of living is being left behind by most Americans. He rides into Mexico with his friend Rawlins, looking for something more real. He finds that he’s still out of place, possibly searching for something that never existed.

The End of an Era

The Mexican hacienda John Grady rides into is a relic. Don Hector, its owner, is the last of the hacendados — a class of landowners whose feudal grip on Mexico was broken by the Revolution thirty years earlier. The manners, the horses, the codes of conduct: all of it is a facade maintained out of habit or sentiment, not power. John Grady has crossed a border to find an older world, instead finding America with a Mexican movie filter

McCarthy doesn’t editorialise any of this. There’s no elegy, no explicit lament. Things just are. The world moves on, and it doesn’t particularly care:

And for a moment he held out his hands as if to steady himself or as if to bless the ground there or perhaps as if to slow the world that was rushing away and seemed to care nothing for the old or the young or rich or poor or dark or pale or he or she.

That indifference — of the world, of fate, of other people — is everywhere in this book. Characters speak in ellipses and half-meanings. Promises are made that may or may not be promises:

Did you give your word? said Rawlins. I dont know. I dont know if I did or not. Well either you did or you didnt. That’s what I’d of thought. But I dont know.

Like Jane Eyre or The Remains of the Day, McCarthy understands that understatement is its own style. The most devastating things are said sideways, or not said at all.

Belonging

I can relate to the feeling of being unmoored - of changing things for the sake of feeling like I have some authority over what happens next. John Grady’s wandering makes a kind of sense to me that I find uncomfortable to admit.

But McCarthy is clear-eyed about what that wandering actually is. John Grady isn’t searching for himself in any neat redemptive sense. He’s searching for a place or a country

Where is your country? he said. I dont know, said John Grady. I dont know where it is. I dont know what happens to country.

The novel suggests that belonging isn’t something you find by moving. It’s something you build. John Grady never quite grasps this, which is probably why the ending lands the way it does.

Alejandra

The love story with Alejandra, daughter of Don Hector, is where the novel becomes painful. McCarthy writes it with a restraint that makes it more devastating:

She was so pale in the lake she seemed to be burning. Like foxfire in a darkened wood. That burned cold. Like the moon that burned cold.

There is no forgiveness, you see. For women. A man may lose his honor and regain it again. But a woman cannot. She cannot.

Alejandra cannot choose John Grady without losing everything her world defines her by. It ends the only way it can:

I cannot do what you ask, she said. I love you. But I cannot.

What Remains

The book ends with John Grady riding back into an America that does not feel like his. He carries something with him that he didn’t before — not wisdom exactly, more like a weight:

He remembered Alejandra and the sadness he’d first seen in the slope of her shoulders which he’d presumed to understand and of which he knew nothing and he felt a loneliness he’d not known since he was a child and he felt wholly alien to the world although he loved it still.

The last clause, “although he loved it still,” does a lot of work. It’s what stops this from being a simple tragedy. The world is indifferent, and it passes things by, and it breaks things, and you can still love it. That, I think, is the only answer McCarthy offers.