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Horses and Men
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20674 |
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BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
Date : |
9 / 1992 |
3,308 Words |
| Author
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Bruce Allen
Bruce Allen is a contributing editor to Kirkus Reviews and a
freelance reviewer for the Boston Globe, Sewanee Review, and
several other publications.
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In one of those unforeseen twists of fortune that give hope to dark horses everywhere, this year's most visible and acclaimed literary presence is the hitherto little-known (or, if you will, invisible) iconoclast-novelist Cormac McCarthy.
Though his five previous novels have provoked both extravagant praise and Olympian dismissals, McCarthy himself has remained apart, if not aloof, from the literary community, producing at intervals of several years between each book a quarter-century's worth of starkly imagined, sparely written fiction that, while not without several discernible literary influences, exudes a compelling originality and integrity.
What we know about McCarthy amounts to the minimal information given on his books' dust jackets and, most recently, that presented in Richard B. Woodward's essay "Cormac McCarthy's Venomous Fictions" (New York Times Magazine, April 19, 1992). Woodward, having somehow gained limited access to the taciturn McCarthy, in effect sidles cautiously up alongside his prickly subject, dispensing bits of biographical information while building up a teasing picture of an unusually self-contained, confident writer and man.
We learn that McCarthy was born in 1933, in Rhode Island, and grew up in Tennessee. He has been twice married and divorced, served four years in the Air Force, and has lived in the Southwest (currently El Paso, Texas) since the early 1970s. In addition to his novels--which have been warmly received by fellow writers, if not the general public plays, one of which, The Gardener's Son, has been televised. In 1981 he was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship, a generous financial grant that presumably has aided the composition of McCarthy's major work in progress, The Border Trilogy, of which this new novel is the initial volume.
Despite crucial differences (its benign title, adopted from a children's lullaby, not the least of them), All the Pretty Horses follows logically upon the dark, brooding, challenging books that preceded it. McCarthy's first novel, The Orchard Keeper (1965), for instance, tells of a murder committed, then concealed, in Tennesse's Great Smoky Mountains during the 1930s. The story focuses on a boy's awkward reach toward maturity within a context of unsolved mystery and lingering peril. It memorably introduces readers to what I would call McCarthy's uncompromising vision of human exposure to mortal danger.
Outer Dark (1968) offers brutal parody of the Nativity in
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