Awards
1992 Winner of the National Book Award for Fiction
Synopses & Reviews
Now a major motion picture from Columbia Pictures starring Matt Damon, produced by Mike Nichols, and directed by Billy Bob Thornton.
The national bestseller and the first volume in Cormac McCarthy's Border Trilogy, All the Pretty Horses is the tale of John Grady Cole, who at sixteen finds himself at the end of a long line of Texas ranchers, cut off from the only life he has ever imagined for himself. With two companions, he sets off for Mexico on a sometimes idyllic, sometimes comic journey to a place where dreams are paid for in blood.
Review
"Massively promoted and publicized as his breakthrough book, Cormac McCarthy's sixth novel is more reader-friendly than any of the previous five, being sequentially plotted and possessing somewhat sympathetic characters, but, remarkably, without any diminution of McCarthy's flinty integrity nor any noticeable softening of his harsh world view. Starting with a MacArthur 'genius' grant a few years back, McCarthy's rank in the literary stockmarket has been steadily ascendant. This story of the adventures in Texas and Mexico, set in 1949, by 16-year-old John Grady Cole, a genuinely memorable protagonist, is wonderfully written and realized. The Cormac McCarthy cult, including a significant number of English professors, will be surprised, though not disappointed by the new accessibility. And All the Pretty Horses should earn him a lot of new readers. A good place to discover McCarthy if you haven't already." Reviewed by Daniel Weiss, Virginia Quarterly Review (Copyright 2006 Virginia Quarterly Review)
Review
"Rambunctious, high-spirited...All the Pretty Horses is a true American original" Newsweek
Synopsis
The national bestseller and the first volume in Cormac McCarthy's Border Trilogy, All the Pretty Horses is the tale of John Grady Cole, who at sixteen finds himself at the end of a long line of Texas ranchers, cut off from the only life he has ever imagined for himself. With two companions, he sets off for Mexico on a sometimes idyllic, sometimes comic journey to a place where dreams are paid for in blood. Winner of the National Book Award for Fiction.
Synopsis
NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER
- NATIONAL BESTSELLER -
The first volume in the Border Trilogy, from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Road All the Pretty Horses is the tale of John Grady Cole, who at sixteen finds himself at the end of a long line of Texas ranchers, cut off from the only life he has ever imagined for himself. With two companions, he sets off for Mexico on a sometimes idyllic, sometimes comic journey to a place where dreams are paid for in blood.
Synopsis
NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER
- NATIONAL BESTSELLER - The first volume in the
Border Trilogy, from the bestselling author of
The Passenger and the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel
The Road
All the Pretty Horses is the tale of John Grady Cole, who at sixteen finds himself at the end of a long line of Texas ranchers, cut off from the only life he has ever imagined for himself. With two companions, he sets off for Mexico on a sometimes idyllic, sometimes comic journey to a place where dreams are paid for in blood.
Look for Cormac McCarthy's latest novels, The Passenger and Stella Maris.
About the Author
1.
All the Pretty Horses opens with one death--that of John Grady'sgrandfather--and ends with the death of the family servant called Abuela,"grandmother." (At the novel's end, John Grady also learns that his father has died.) How do these deaths impel the novel's plot? What larger meanings do they suggest?
2. What other events in this novel occur more than once? How does McCarthy use repetition as a structuring device?
3. How does the author establish John Grady's character? How has he changed by the novel's end? At what points in the book do we see him change?
4. What attributes does McCarthy seem to value in his characters, and how can you tell he does so? Do these traits always serve them well, or are the boys in All the Pretty Horses victims of their own virtues?
5. On the hacienda an old man named Luis tells the boys that "the horse shares a common soul and its separate life only forms it out of all horses and makes it mortal...that if a person understood the soul of a horse then he would understand all the horses that ever were" (p. 111). "Among men," Luis continues, "there was no such communion as among horses and the notion that men could be understood at all was probably an illusion." How are these statements borne out or contradicted within the novel? To what extent does the author allow us to "understand" his horses, while keeping his human characters psychologically opaque? What sort of contrasts does McCarthy draw between the communal soul of horses (see especially pages 103-107) and the profound solitude of men? What role, generally, do horses play in this book?
6. On page 89 Rawlins says: "A goodlookin horse is like a goodlookin woman...They're always more trouble than what they're worth." How does this statement foreshadow events to come? Where else in the novel do casual statements serve as portents?
7. How does the author establish the differences between the United States and Mexico? How do their respective inhabitants seem to view each other?
8. Alejandra's aunt offers two alternative metaphors for the workings of destiny, comparing it both to a coiner in the moment he places a slug in the die and to a puppet show in which the strings are always held by other puppets (pages 230-231). Which of these metaphors seems more apt to the narrative as a whole? Is what happens to the boys in the course of the novel the result of character or fate?
9. Do the boys' journey and subsequent ordeals ever seem foolish, futile, or anachronistic? If so, how does McCarthy suggest this?
10. All the Pretty Horses is spare in exposition (note the economy with which McCarthy establishes John Grady's situation at the book's beginning) yet lavish in the attention it devotes to scenes and details whose significance is not immediately clear (note the description of the cantina on page 49 and the scene in which John Grady and Rawlins buy new clothes on pages 117-121). Why do you think the author has chosen to weight his narrative in this way?
11. Although John Grady and Rawlins are innocent of stealing horses, McCarthy suggests that they are culpable of other crimes. At different points in the book he compares them to "young thieves in a glowing orchard" (p. 31) and "a party of marauders" (p. 45). When John Grady makes love to Alejandra, we are told that it is "sweeter for the larceny of time and flesh" (p. 141). What kinds of theft might McCarthy be writing about? Might the boys' suffering be seen as warranted by earlier transgressions? What sort of moral system applies within the universe of this book?
12. Is All the Pretty Horses a violent book? How do the novel's characters feel about the deaths they cause? At a time when graphic and gratuitous descriptions of mayhem are standard in much popular fiction for purposes of mere shock and titillation, does McCarthy succeed in restoring to violence its ancient qualities of pity and terror? How does he accomplish this?
13. What role does history play in McCarthy's narrative? To what extent are his characters products of a particular era?
14. Although the occurrences in All the Pretty Horses are, strictly speaking, plausible and its human voices, in particular, are nothing if not realistic, the book also contains a strong mythic component. How, and where, does McCarthy introduce this? What specific myths and fairy tales does the book suggest?
Reading Group Guide
The questions, author biography, and reading list that follow are intended to enhance your group's reading and discussion of Cormac McCarthy's All the Pretty Horses. We hope that they will provide you with new ways of looking at--and talking about--a novel that won both the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1992 and that has established McCarthy as a writer whose popularity now approaches his critical reputation.