I read All The Pretty Horses since I put it on my TBR Pile. Several craft ideas struck me as interesting. I have the film version coming on Netflix so I’ll get to see how the book translates to screen.
Show vs Tell
Cormac McCarthy has a great ability to write in action without needing interior thought. If you are accustomed to reading with a lot of interior thought, this might seem odd but after a few pages, you know you don’t need it. So if you need a book that is almost exclusively show, and no tell — this is the book. It will stay on my book shelf forever due to this first point.
Theme
I don’t want to state the theme of the book for fear of being wrong but there are a lot of different aspects of the book that have to do with less is more. Internal thought above is one example. The stark landscape of Texas and Mexico is another. The author’s use of women is a third. The book is almost exclusively about men. So when the author does bring a woman onto the page, I took notice. “Oh, it’s a woman. Cool!” He didn’t do this by accident. His way of not using something, then dropping it fully onto the page is used throughout the book. Another example is when he finally gets a look a the Rancher’s daughter, the author lets the main character spend a whole paragraph on that one look. The author has yet to slow a moment down in such a way so the reader can’t help but take notice. The last example is when the author finally allows the main character to reflect on his emotions, he is allowed a whole page of internal thought.
The End
The end is the reason I have the movie on my Netflix queue. The author appeared to struggle with where the end of the book should be — when are all the elements resolved. In my opinion, the author goes on a bit long. The ending isn’t tight. I would have edited it differently. The issue of Blevins’ horse and why Blevins was such a great shot with a gun were never resolved. But that was sort of how the whole adventure took it’s turn into darker territory. I can see an argument for the idea that the answers are irrelevant but I want to see how the film deals with it.
But I could have missed the answers. McCarthy is not a repetitive writer. He could have written one line with a vague allusion to what happened (he does this in a couple of crucial spots), and I would have missed it.