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Introduction: Cormac McCarthy's All the Pretty Horses
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20669 |
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BOOK WORLD
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9 / 1992 |
308 Words |
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Cormac McCarthy's novels have elicited exceedingly mixed reactions from critics, and his latest, All the Pretty Horses (excerpted in the following pages), is no exception. "A novel so exuberant in its prose…one searches in vain for comparisons in American literature," trumpeted Publisher's Weekly. "Like the late D.H. Lawrence at his worst and most pretentious, all blood-voodoo and animistic design, McCarthy makes an awfully unconvincing lot of a little here," sniffed Kirkus. Unlike his previous efforts, however, Horses had by midsummer started inching its way up the New York 'Times best-seller lists, and the deafening chorus of praise has now made him the best-known "unknown" novelist in America.
And there is something stunning about McCarthy's spare prose, fat with the sort of meanings that make academic literati reach hungrily for their carving knives. A coming-of-age story about two Texas teenagers in his hands becomes a lyrical portrait of the cruel but beautiful desert landscape, and sustained meditation on the tensions between fate and free will, good and evil, and justice and chaos.
Following the excerpt two commentaries discuss the book and its significance. Critic Bruce Allen (p. 340) gives an overview of the plot. Lawrence Literary scholar Tom Pilkington (p.373) examines the work in the context of other writings on the American West and fleshes out the theme of fatality that infuses the novel. By novel's end the young hero learns, in Pilkington's words, that "life is a shimmering web, and every time a strand is struck by the assertion of will, the web vibrates with consequences for all." In the following excerpt, seventeen-year-old John Grady Cole and his pal, Lacey Rawlins, trapped in a Mexican prison, show
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