All the Pretty Horses

All the Pretty Horses
by Cormac McCarthy
read: 2012
Guardian 1000 Novels, National Book Award


Cormac McCarthy is one of the most interesting novelists working today.  I laid out some thoughts on his writing in my review of The Road, but I think I sold him a bit short.  This is what I wrote:

McCarthy has stated in interviews that he doesn't think much of literature that doesn't "deal with matters of life and death."  I disagree with him on this front; once we move past concerns of life and death, we can engage what Faulkner called "problems of the human heart in conflict with itself."  My issue with The Road, and with McCarthy in general, is that he doesn't take us there.

Having just finished my fourth McCarthy novel now, All the Pretty Horses, I realize that I was wrong.  McCarthy is dealing with many of the same themes and issues as the other great writers, but he's coming at things from a different angle.  To McCarthy, talk is cheap, and thoughts are even cheaper; it's action that reveals character.  He's not always going to spell out what going's on in the characters' heads, but their actions open a window to their minds and souls.


The question of fate looms large in All the Pretty Horses.  The novel is open to the idea of a Christian God who controls the destiny of His subjects.  This is laid out early in an exchange between John Grady Cole and Lacey Rawlins.  Cole suggests that if Rawlins' parents hadn't met, he never would have been born.

Rawlins lay watching the stars.  After a while he said: I could still be born.  I might look different or somethin.  If God wanted me to be born I'd be born.

And if He didnt you wouldnt. 

Fate, God, and destiny show up repeatedly in the story.  Blevins is petrified he will be killed by lightning because his family members were all killed by lightning.  Cole himself is a born horseman, who "if were begot by malice or mischance into some queer land where horses never were he would have found them anyway."  Alejandra's aunt notes the trouble her families women has with men and hopes it's not "tainted blood" or "a family curse."  When Cole returns to the ranch towards the end of the story, the workers tell him "that it was no accident of circumstance that a man be born in a certain country and not some other."  However, Cole later tells Rawlins that America, his land of birth, "ain't my country."  There is a capriciousness to birthrights.


Fate is a major topic in a conversation between Cole and Alejandra's aunt after he is released from prison.  She makes the analogy to

A tossed coin that was at one time a slug in a mint and of the coiner who took that slug from the tray and placed it in the die in one of two ways and from whose act all else followed, cara y cruz.

She suggests in the next breath a "puppet show" where the puppet strings "terminate in the hands of yet other puppets, themselves with their own strings which trace upward in turn, and so on."  All the Pretty Horses is open to the idea of a Christian God, but it doesn't matter.  Because if God exists, His will is virtually indistinguishable from nihilistic randomness.  And ultimately, how can we know if something was fated to happen, or whether it just happened to happen?  The aunt makes this point also:

In history there are no control groups.  There is no one to tell us what might have been.  We weep over the might have been, but there is no might have been.  There never was. 

The closest McCarthy gets to laying out some sort of theory, some method to God's madness, is Cole's thought that pain exists as some sort of currency to create beauty.  "The blood of multitudes might ultimately be exacted for the vision of a single flower."  It's not clear whether this is a blessing or a curse; Rawlins says early on in the novel that a good-looking horse or woman is "always more trouble than what they're worth."


How is a person to act in a world where he does not have control over his destiny?  The book makes two suggestions.  The first is acceptance.  Cole's mother leaves his father and he cannot keep the farm, but he bears this pain without fighting back, even accepting the divorce.  The judge who exonerates Cole near the very end of the tale is another model of acceptance.  He tells Cole that "I sure didnt want to be a judge," but ultimately ends up taking on that role out of duty to his country.  "I think I just didnt have any choice.  Just didnt have any choice," he says.


The other option is raging against destiny.  Alejandra's aunt describes wanting "very much to be a person of value" when she was younger.  "If one were to be a person of value that value could not  be a condition subject to the hazards of fortune.  It had to be a quality that could not change.  No matter what."  Cole subscribes to this philosophy.  Later in the book he tells the judge that his greatest regret is not attempting to intercede when Blevins was killed.  The judge asks him "Would it have done any good?"  He replies, "No sir.  But that dont make it right."  Very early on, McCarthy tells us that "all his fondness and all the leanings of his life were for the ardenthearted and they would always be so and never be otherwise," in a rare instance of the narrative voice telling and not showing.  In a way, All the Pretty Horses mirrors the Book of Job, except unlike Job, Cole does not humbly accept his suffering and trust in God's plan.


There are no easy answers.  Cole's father wastes away, "thin and frail," with "sunken eyes."  Blevins, takes great pains to avoid death by lightning but in doing so sets off a chain of events that results in his death.  Alejandra's aunt tries to set up a better life for Alejandra, but it is unclear whether her machinations will be successful.  Cole's quest to find Blevins' horse's rightful owner, and with it possible absolution in the eyes of Alejandra's family, fails.  So is man to accept his fate, or rage against it?  McCarthy leaves both doors open, but behind each is suffering and death.