Best 1992 Adventures (2)

By: Joshua Glenn
June 5, 2020

One in a series of 10 posts identifying Josh Glenn’s favorite 1992 adventure novels.

Cormac McCarthy’s Border Trilogy western adventure All the Pretty Horses.

Shortly after WWII, John Grady Cole’s grandfather dies and their Texas ranch is sold. Now on his own, the taciturn sixteen-year-old, who is fluent in Spanish and good with horses, mounts up and heads for Mexico. He is accompanied by his friend, Lacey, and a young runaway, Jimmy. Although less violent and apocalyptic than other McCarthy stories, this one is characterized by the author’s gorgeous writing, and its saga-like pace and tonality. When Jimmy loses his magnificent horse in Mexico, then steals it back from its new owner, he is pursued right out of the story (for a while). In Coahuila, John Grady is hired as a a horse trainer and breeder… but when he falls in love with the rancher’s beautiful daughter, he runs afoul of her strong-willed great aunt. A group of Mexican Rangers arrests Rawlins and John Grady, because Jimmy — it turns out — ended up killing a man. The frontier idyll turns into a Mexican prison story, then a hunted-man story as John Grady retrieves his stolen horses from the corrupt Rangers. The last portion of the book is perhaps a bit longiloquent, and we miss John Grady’s companions… but this is a powerful, romantic Western.
Fun facts: The bestselling All the Pretty Horses won the U.S. National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. It was adapted in 2000 by Billy Bob Thornton as an OK movie starring Matt Damon and Penélope Cruz. The other installments in the Border Trilogy are The Crossing (1994) and Cities of the Plain (1998).

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Best 1992 Adventures (2)

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