All the Pretty Horses Part III

Well Mr. Coon, I have finally settled on a book and I decided to pick All the Pretty Horses. I know you were adamant on us to start reading The Crossing, but if kind of felt weird to start reading the middle part of a trilogy even if they book don’t really intersect until the third novel. It would have always been in the back of my mind, and I’m feeling a lot better about picking the first novel.

So far I’ve read about 75 pages, and the first part of the book was extremely confusing. There was no main character I was able to identify, but after reading further I found out that John Grady Cole was having his final interactions with his family members before deciding to go off on this journey. His grandfather has just died, his mother ran away to go pursue her own dreams, and for some reason he doesn’t live with his father and has a slightly awkward relationship with him. From what I’ve pieced together, he wants to go Mexico so he can live the cowboy life he idealizes. He takes along his friend Rawlins who I don’t know too much about and along the way they meet this annoying kid named Blevins.

Now that I’ve summed up what I know, I guess I will give some of my opinions about the book. The book started off a bit difficult to understand but it has gotten a lot easier since I’ve come to the part about them running away. So far there hasn’t really been much action either which is kind of disappointing. They have just been riding around, but I’m hoping as I get further along in the book it will start to pick up. I’m kind of excited to continue reading because the book has received many accolades and Cormac McCarthy is regarded as one of the premier writers of my generation.

If I had to find some kind of theme so far, I guess it would have be to about the idealized versus reality. It seems as if John Grady Cole and his friends have an idealized version of what cowboy life is like, but they really haven’t faced many hardships. For example, Cole thinks he can make his family ranch profitable once again even though it hasn’t really been producing for years. I also find it amusing as to how Cole and Rawlins find a liking to the cowboy lifestyle even though they have been using money to but food for themselves and haven’t really faced any hardships. As I progress through the novel I assume their naiveté will clash with reality and I look forward to seeing what the results are. The West has usually been romanticized (this is an assumption as I don’t read a lot of western novels) and it will be interesting to see how McCarthy comments on it losing its allure through his characters.