All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy

Abstract

182 Western American Literature other hand, what does come through in this study is a keen sense of Estes’s love of writing and his enthusiastic and prolific profiling of rural Texas life. While William Humphrey’s career has fared comparatively better, there is considerable doubt whether he is even a westerner or that his work reflects anything that is inherently western. In the introductory section of his study, Mark Royden Winchell admits that the locus of much of Humphrey’s writing is just “200 miles west of Oxford, Mississippi,... where the ‘South draws to a stop’ and the West begins.”This statement is in itself rather problematic; most would agree that the West begins somewhere around the 100th meridian, far from Clarksville in east Texas. The problem here may be Winchell’s confusion of rural with western, and indeed the two have much in common, but few would concede that a book with a rural setting such as, say, Winesburg, Ohiois a western book. This confusion is intensified by Winchell’s citing numerous critics who link Humphrey’s work with Faulkner’s. If Winchell’s sense of geography is debatable, his critical eye is strong and lucid as he digs into the crux of Hum phrey’s writing with an explication that is both penetrating and sound. Edward Butscher’s study of Peter Wild is both interesting and disappoint­ ing. First off, many would agree that Wild is at his best as an essayist. That Butscher focuses exclusively on Wild’s poetry at the expense of his other writing is disappointing. Conversely, this limited focus should also be the source of considerable interest for readers who prefer Wild the poet to Wild the prose stylist. The problem here is not, however, with Butscher’s subject matter so much as with the way he writes. His pleonastic discussion of Wild’s highly personal poetics comes dangerously close to lucubration, to academic parody; yet in Butscher’s defense it is quite likely that writing about prose is significantly easier than working with poetry. Or is it? All in all, these five studies provide clear testimony to both the breadth and vitality of western literary scholarship. And if some of these efforts are less than perfect, each adds to the layer of understanding necessary for continued growth in western letters. (^BILL D. TOTH Western New Mexico University All thePretty Horses. By Cormac McCarthy. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992. 302 pages, $21.00.) After his first four novels, from The Orchard Keeper (1965) through Suttree (1982), Cormac McCarthy’s regional reputation was Southern, and his renown primarily stylistic. Commentators made comparisons with artists as diverse as Sam Peckinpah and Jorge Luis Borges. Then the Protean McCarthy produced Blood Meridian (1985), a tale of the West that mixed grotesque violence and grotesque humor and delineations that both drew on and mocked the conven­ Reviews 183 tions of eighteenth-century novels and epic plots in general, altering his re­ gional identification and adding to his reputation as a prose-wizard and an original visionary. All the Pretty Horses, winner of the 1992 National Book Award, is the first volume of a promised border trilogy, and will attract much attention to McCarthy as a writer of the West, and one who seeks to combine the impulses of the Modernist and the nineteenth-century traditions. This novel is a mustread . McCarthy’s story is elemental: at once abandoned and freed by the death of his grandfather, the divorce of his parents, and the sale of the family ranch near San Angelo, sixteen-year-old John Grady Cole sets out in the late 1940s with a friend on ajourney south, crossing on horseback into the last great approxima­ tion of a dry frontier, Mexico. Into this traditional quest paradigm, McCarthy puts elements of western on-the-road picaresque, and later the purest pastoraland -romance interludes, the dense accretions of social-manners realism, the horror of captivity narratives, the suspense of the cross-country chase, the necessity of an ending. His particular skill is to draw energy from each of these sources without giving allegiance to any of them. His two most memorable characters, in fact, spring from...