Libby's Reviews > All the Pretty Horses

John “Grady” Cole is sixteen years old in the fall of 1949; his grandfather is newly dead and his mother is going to sell their Texas ranch, the only home he’s ever known. Grady has been raised by the Mexican workers on the farm, Arturo and Luisa, and Luisa’s mother, whom Grady calls Abeula (grandmother). We learn that Abuela not only took care of his mother as a baby, but also the wild Grady boys who were his mother’s uncles and who had all died so long ago. Grady’s mother has been absent most of his life, chasing the dream of being an actress. It seems his father has been an in and out presence, mostly out. Cormac McCarthy doesn’t indulge in dozens of paragraphs writing about Grady’s identity; he doesn’t linger on Grady’s emotions, but for the careful reader, the underpinnings of Grady’s life are smoldering embers, meant to be seen and felt as they are walked over. Luisa’s greeting, “Buenos días, guapo.” Good morning, handsome. The touch of her hand to the back of Grady’s neck as she walks to the stove. In contrast the conversation with his mother accentuates their distance, each sitting at opposite ends of a long table. Grady’s pleas to save the ranch fall on deaf ears. He says he can run the ranch and she tells him he’s ridiculous. She has no true knowledge of her son or his abilities, worst of all, she doesn’t seem to care about what’s going to happen to him. He’s going to be as displaced as the Mexican family that’s raised him. If she feels any affiliation with this Mexican family she’s known all her life, she does not let it rise to the level of conflict with her plans.

Grady’s father may not have had much of a part of his raising but he knows one of the most important aspects of his life. Horses. His gift to Grady, the Hamley Formfitter saddle shows this. Throughout the novel, we learn of Grady’s relationship with horses and through this I came to think of this connection as elemental, a part of him as close as his own skin. He talks to his horses in Spanish, which because of his raising is probably his first language.

Blevins’s horse was breathing with slow regularity and his stomach was warm and his shirt damp from the horse’s breath. He found he was breathing in rhythm with the horse as if some part of the horse were within him breathing and then he descended into some deeper collusion for which he had not even a name.

Displaced Grady travels across the Rio Grande into Mexico with his friend Rawlins. There they meet a young, perhaps 13 year-old boy, Jimmy Blevins. Blevins is a tagalong on a beautiful bay horse that Grady and Rawlins suspect he has stolen. Their unlikely association with Blevins will have consequences.

Grady and Rawlins will find work at the Hacienda de Nuestra Señora de la Purísima Concepción. There Grady will fall in love with the owner’s daughter, Alejandra, and that is a story worth reading just to take in McCarthy’s prose, which is simple and beautiful.

In Mexico, there are Mexicans that perceive Grady as ‘other.’ They will cause problems for him. “She (Alejandra) took his arm and she laughed and called him a mojado-reverso, so rare a creature and one to be treasured.” So certain was I that this was a key consideration that I read several articles that referred to this term. That’s the beauty of reading older novels. One can often uncover revelatory insights through the analysis of others. In ‘“Mojado-Reverso”: Illegal Immigration and Cormac McCarthy’s Border Trilogy’, an article by Josh Crain, Crain states that La Purisima can be “can be understood as a parody of the migrant experience in America.” The description of La Purisima reminded the boys of paradise. Just as Mexican immigrants come to America for the better life they’ve seen in the movies and heard of in reports from relatives, so Grady and Rawlins went there to find the paradise they’d heard about. Crain comments that the American paradise is often represented by opportunities for leisure while “the immigrant, whose habit of life has been hard work, stands in marked contrast to them.” This analysis made me want to laugh at the scenes of Grady and Rawlins waking early to break the wild horses, going to bed late, and rising to do this day after day, while they attracted a crowd of Mexican onlookers who observed and partied. While Crain encourages readers not to give these interpretations political meanings, I’m fascinated that McCarthy’s genius is leading us to remember (or consider) what it is like to be the immigrant.