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Aug 05, 2017ro_cohen rated this title 5 out of 5 stars
Spoilers Ahead ⚠️. All The Pretty Horses is an “American Western" turned up-side-down. The hero, teenager John Grady Cole, is a superb horseman and cowboy. He meets a girl, loses her, but never gets her back. The anti-western quality is foretold by a beautiful metaphor in the very first line of the novel. A candle flame (and its reflection) in a pier glass, twists and then rights itself, when Cole enters his family’s ranch house on a cold night. He is there to view the body of his grandfather, who ran the family cattle ranch in western Texas. The story takes place in the late 1940s – after World War II. The ranch is up for sale. Cole’s mother, who inherits the ranch, has taken up acting – a peculiarly non-Western career choice. Despite Cole’s pleas, she insists her son (and only child) is too young to run the ranch. Cole’s father, emasculated by the War and by his wife, is unable to run the ranch himself, or even intercede on his son’s behalf. Disillusioned, Cole takes to the road on horseback. Not to the American West. It has vanished. But, south to Mexico, a terribly beautiful land where he encounters lawlessness, official corruption (that would make a Philadelphia policeman blush) and many very bad people. He is joined by his best friend, reluctantly; and by a companion they meet along the way who provides some comic relief. But, that is ephemeral; and, apart from a brief and forbidden love affair with the aforementioned girl on her father’s cattle ranch – an Eden-like place deep in the heart of Mexico – all sorts of bad things happen to the adventurers. Things so bad that they bend, but do not break, Cole’s idealism and adherence to the cowboy code. The code, a remnant from the old American West, values thoughtfulness over verbosity, modesty over boasting, concise wisdom over elaborate argument and repression of emotion over expression of fear. Think- Clint Eastwood or Hemingway’s alter ego, Nick Adams. Sadly, this ethic is now rare among men. There is a sunset in the final scene. While the hero rides off into it, he does so without any sense of well being, accomplishment or resolution.