This week's book, All the Pretty Horses, by Cormac McCarthy, stands in bold contrast with last week's Little Bee. In fact, adjusting to its brusque tone and lack of punctuation took a few chapters; I didn't really hit my stride on this one until about 100 pages in. Does that ever happen to you? I tend to dive right into unfamiliar authors, but as my man Vince can attest, I really struggled getting into the story, occasionally even grimacing (okay, let's be honest, yelling!) at McCarthy's habit of forgoing commas and refusing quotation marks all together. I mean, how am I supposed to know who is talking to whom?
Thankfully, I stuck with it, and as my brother Brett would say, the juice was worth the squeeze. In fact--once I adjusted--McCarthy's unadorned style suits the story's rugged setting and plain-speaking characters. Furthermore, his tendency to form run-on sentences by stringing together a series of ands establishes a kind of rhythm that mirrors the actions being described, which is then contrasted with a clipped "Then..." Let me give you an example:
"It [the train] came boring out of the east like some ribald satellite of the coming sun howling and bellowing in the distance and the long light of the headlamp running through the tangled mesquite brakes and creating out of the night the endless fenceline down the dead straight right of way and sucking it back again wire and post mile on mile into the darkness after where the boilersmoke disbanded slowly along the faint new horizon and the sound came lagging and he stood still holding his hat in his hands in the passing ground-shudder watching it till it was gone.
"Then he turned and went back to the house."
Woah! Now that is some kind of protracted sentence! But can't you feel the train coming at you, as you keep reading, quickening your pace, feeling the rhythm of the words like the rhythm of the train ties? Then it just stops, and you are back in the quiet night, back to a simple singular action as the boy turns back towards home.
I think another advantage of McCarthy's style is how it really propels plot. At its most basic, All the Pretty Horses is the coming of age tale of John Grady Cole, a sixteen year old Texan who goes to Mexico with two companions seeking a new life when his family ranch comes to an end. The story spans two countries, prisons, horse ranches, near-death experiences, love affairs, murder and more, all in 300 pages. My favorite aspect is how romance and realism are so seamlessly blended together in those pages, as the harsh truth of life in the 'wild west' collides with the main character's hopes and intrinsic sense of integrity. At times, we see John Grady Cole's resolute sense of rightness challenged by ugly human nature and politics, but we also see him prevail. Bottom line: while I don't think I will be reading any more Cormac McCarthy in the near future, All the Pretty Horses truly captivated me.
Moving on to the next couple of weeks! This is a friendly reminder that this week's book is The Help, by Kathryn Stockett. I just started it today and can already tell it's going to be a winner! Also, next week I will be reading, The World to Come, by Dara Horn. Now folks, this story sounds absolutely brilliant! As far as I can tell, it is about a typical New Yorker who--while at a singles' cocktail party at a museum--sees a Chagall painting he is sure used to hang in his family home. So, he steals it back (obviously!). "This work of art opens a door through which we discover his family's startling history--from an orphanage in Soviet Russia where Chagall taught to suburban New Jersey and the jungles of Vietnam." Horn has twice won the National Jewish Book Award for Fiction, and I am hoping this story will appeal to those of you out there who are really into art (Sarah M.), books that mix history and fiction (Sara B.), and everyone else, too!
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