All the Pretty Horses

This is still good country.
Yeah. I know it is. But it aint my country.
***
Where is your country? he said.
I dont know, said John Grady. I dont know where it is. I dont know what happens to country.

- Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses

I just finished reading the first installment of Cormac McCarthy's border trilogy. It was a beautiful novel that illustrated the differences between our romantic view of the West and the violent, bloody reality of the West. The story is of a sixteen-year-old John Grady Cole that sets out for Mexico on horseback with his seventeen-year-old partner Lacey Rawlins. John Grady, an unlikely romantic, finds the harsh reality of his romantic ideals of the West--or, in this case, old Mexico.

McCarthy does well to demythologize our view of the West in this novel, and I highly suggest reading it. I know that my praise for this book is unnecessary; afterall, it was a National Book Award winner and a winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award. Nonetheless, McCarthy is one of the most important writers in American history. Not to mention, he's one that is still writing.

McCarthy just came out with a new book, The Road, which I hope to read soon. I believe that he's currently my favorite author. I've only read three of his novels--Child of God, Blood Meridian, and All the Pretty Horses, but everything I've read has been unbelievable. I highly suggest reading his work. If you want a good introduction to his, I wouldn't start with Blood Meridian; although, that is his best novel. It's pretty dense--not with pages, but with depth. I haven't read it, but I heard that 2005's No Country for Old Men (his second most recent novel) is a fairly quick and easy read. To give you some background, all of his novels before Blood Meridian are set in the South and deal with issues of the South. Blood Meridian marks McCarthy's shift from southern literature to westerns. However, don't shudder at the word "western." He's no Louis L'Amour. McCarthy's westerns are considered some of the most important novels of the last twenty-five years.

**Edit: To quote my professor, Dr. Robert Brinkmeyer, "McCarthy's worst novels are better than 98% of the stuff by everyone else in American literature."