Category: American Literature

Cowboy Time: All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy

The Wild West. There is something evocative about cowboys and Indians, big, open spaces, horseback rides, gunfights and barfights. The period of the Old West is a mythic period, yet also one that seems particularly close to us, particularly recent. As a comparatively lawless zone, it enables a more fluid morality, placing responsibility into the hands of individuals. As a place of violence, it makes us think more explicitly about the nature of human life and of its destiny. Westworld’s first season is probably my favourite television series; Butcher’s Crossing is one of my favourite books. Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses is another excellent Western, one consciously concerned with the way we construct and think of myth. As a coming-of-age story it is less brutal than McCarthy’s earlier Blood Meridian, but it still forces us to confront the truth of a harsh world.

Growing up is a matter of finding the truth beneath illusions. The Wild West is perhaps one of the ultimate illusions. It is a series of legends obscuring one of the most brutal periods of a brutal country, where murder, rape, and pillage were nothing and where whole cultures were annihilated at the pull of a trigger. John Grady, the sixteen-year-old hero of All the Pretty Horses, discovers the terrible vacuum underneath his idea of the world. His story is not a rejection of the West, but one where he becomes the kind of man who can survive in the West as it actually existed. It is the origin story of a real cowboy.

A desert.

The Plot: The Cowboys and their Trip

All the Pretty Horses takes place shortly after the end of the Second World War, a time long beyond the end of the Wild West by most reckonings. The story begins with the funeral of John Grady’s maternal grandfather, the last male of the Grady line. Although his last name is Cole, after his father, John Grady’s respect for his grandfather leads him to go by his grandfather’s name instead. It is the first act of controlling one’s own identity featured in the book.

All is not well for the cowboys in the post-war period. The ranch where John Grady grew up is being sold, and both his mother and father are unable to provide parental support. Even his relationship with a local girl doesn’t seem worth bothering over anymore. Meanwhile, the landscape of great open spaces is becoming enclosed and dotted with oil derricks, as America consolidates its post-war economic ascendency. And so, with his friend Lacey Rawlins, and their horses, Redbo and Junior, in tow John Grady decides to head to Mexico in search of a better life.

“If I don’t go will you go anyways?”

John Grady sat up and put his hat on. “I’m already gone,” he said.

McCarthy has such verve for pithy, cinematic one-liners, and indeed his prose style as a whole owes much to cinema, with its emphasis on framing shots of its characters, often from unusual angles. People are often described not as they are, but how they are seen reflected within a window or glass object. In addition to being very cool, this flourish draws our attention to a certain distance between reality and our perception of it. Which is one of the key ideas of the book.

John Grady and Rawlins are always thinking of themselves through the lens of the Wild West and its myths. When they encounter a fellow escapee, a boy called Jimmy Blevins riding on a horse that is almost certainly stolen, they wonder whether they look like desperados to him. When they get new boots they are particularly excited because it appears that now they will really look like cowboys.

John Grady and Rawlins make it to Mexico. They start work on a big hacienda, or large estate. And John Grady falls in love with the owner’s daughter, a beautiful young lady named Alejandra. When she reciprocates his feelings, the scene is set for a passionate and illicit romance, but McCarthy allows us no rest, sending his story into Mexican prisons, through gunfights, and much more besides. Along the way John Grady becomes a real cowboy – scarred, rough, and more than a little heroic.

Truth

Becoming a cowboy is not just a question of going to Mexico, or stealing a horse. It is to engage in the mythmaking process that characterises the Wild West. If Blood Meridian was a shattering of our illusions about the West, All the Pretty Horses shows us how myths can instead be constructed. Thrown in jail because of his association with Blevins, initially John Grady speaks the truth as he understood it, explaining that he has nothing to do with Blevins’ criminal misdeeds to the police captain. It does not work. “You see. We can make the truth here. Or we can lose it”, says the captain. The character of the captain represents authority, embodying the truism that history is written by the victors. John Grady tries to protect his personal truth at first, but it is impossible to maintain that against the strong powers of the world.

When revenge comes, John Grady no longer describes the truth. He says what needs to be said to create a legend – he makes a legend out of himself, without consideration for whether strictly speaking what he says is true. For after all, who cares about the truth? Certainly not the captain, whose whole life is built upon the shame that came from a single moment of cowardice. The Wild West is a place where survival is difficult for those who are merely themselves. But for those who can stretch themselves into the boots of a myth, so long as they can shoot a rifle too, those people will flourish. Perhaps.

Nature and the World

“In the end we all come to be cured of our sentiments. Those whom life does not cure death will. The world is quite ruthless in selecting between the dream and the reality, even where we will not. Between the wish and the thing the world lies waiting.”

These words come from Alejandra’s grandmother, and they speak the central truth of All the Pretty Horses. Whatever hopes we may have, whatever dreams, they will prove worthless and firewood for an uncaring world. Early in the novel there is a bush into which countless little birds have been blown and impaled by the force of a great storm. It’s nothing special, just another description among many, but it too hints at the nature of the world. If there is a God, and the characters of McCarthy’s novel aren’t entirely sure on that front, then He doesn’t seem to care very much for his creation.

If anything, McCarthy sees the world as shaped by Man, and Man’s violence. I use the old-fashioned Man in part because McCarthy’s world is a Man’s world, and men are to blame for it. All the Pretty Horses is full of the traces of destruction men have wrought. From the oil derricks to the breaking of the horses, there seems no place where we have not brought pain and destroyed sacredness. The wild horses are deprived of their “communion” once they have been captured and broken. I know McCarthy is guilty of using biblical language liberally, but here it is entirely valid – we have broken the natural, spiritual bond of the animals, all that we might make use of them.

At another point McCarthy describes a storm thus: “as if repairs were under way at some flawed place in the iron dark of the world.” Our world is made unnatural, industrial, by the simile. Yet who can say that the world we live in now is natural anymore? So much of it is covered by the traces of Man and his violence. The deepest desert has scraps of blue and black from discarded plastic. It is hard to be proud of ourselves, knowing both what we are capable of, and what we as a people have already managed.

The Values in the World

All the Pretty Horses does not suggest things will get better, either – it is no narrative of progress: “No creature can learn that which his heart has no shape to hold”, and our hearts are not build for peace. We may transition from horses to pickups, from carriages to airplanes, but in the end one thing remains – we are a violent species, and we like war.

Yet unlike, I think, Blood Meridian, All the Pretty Horses is a relatively positive book, finding in the amoral world values worth holding on to. First of all, and unmistakable, is beauty. It is somewhat silly to mention it, but even the novel’s title suggests this. And McCarthy’s style is awesome. It takes some getting used to, especially because it is so brazen in its approach – deliberately biblical, experimental, raw. But once we start running along McCarthy’s tracks, so to speak, we notice moments and phrases of such beauty that they make one want to cry:

“She rode with her hat pulled down in the front and fastened under her chin with a drawtie and as she rode her black hair twisted and blew about her shoulders and the lightning fell silently through the black clouds behind her and she rode all seeming unaware down through the low hills while the first spits of rain blew on the wind and onto the upper pasturelands and past the pale and reedy lakes riding erect and stately until the rain caught her up and shrouded her figure away in that wild summer landscape: real horse, real rider, real land and sky and yet a dream withal.”

That last clause is so unbelievable. I mean, it doesn’t even have to mean anything – it just sounds so good that I cannot get it out of my head.

And besides beauty, there are virtues too. Even old-world Wild West virtues. John Grady sticks up for the little guy; he tolerates no abuses of unearned authority; he is heroic and fearless. He falls in love and doesn’t let society get in the way, and he is a good friend to Rawlins. Even if his world is dying, John Grady is still a good guy by its own value system.

Between the wish and the thing the world lies waiting…

Conclusion

I write this review in the desert sands of Jordan, the place of my own little Wild West adventure. All the Pretty Horses is one of those books I know I will read again. It contains that richness that always disheartens me when I try to write about books for this blog – there is simply too much to say, and what I write can do justice to almost nothing of the book’s power.

I love the easy themes, of loyalty and friendship and love, just as much as I love the darker, or more complex ones, hidden beneath the surface of the work, such as the ambiguous position of American power, or the bleak and empty moral content of the world. Most of all, perhaps, I love the language. Whether it is the pithiness of John Grady’s one-liners or the epic sweep of McCarthy’s landscapes and storms, All the Pretty Horses is a beautiful book.

Homelessness and Hope: Marilynne Robinson’s Lila

I had a dream last night about Jack, the prodigal son of Reverend Boughton who plays a major role in the events of Marilynne Robinson’s novels Gilead and Home. This is quite extraordinary – I cannot think of another time I have ever dreamed of a literary figure – and it goes some way to suggest the sheer power that Robinson’s novels have over me. Jack does not feature in Lila, the third novel of the series, except in conversation, but his presence hangs over the book just as it does in the previous two. Instead, Lila is the story of Reverend Ames’s wife, a woman who we learned in Gilead just turned up one day in Ames’s church seeking shelter from the elements, later marrying him, in spite of his old age and their many differences.

Lila, like Jack, is an outsider. Through Lila’s memories the novel juxtaposes the story of her childhood and youth to the story of her courtship and marriage to Ames. As with Robinson’s other works, Lila can be accused of being boring – it is slow, often tender, and infused with wonder – but despite that, it is a very different novel to either Home or Gilead, though they mostly share the same small pool of characters. Here, the main questions are about the trust and the loneliness that can lie at the heart of existence.

Beginning

Robinson’s language is quite extraordinary. I remember being disappointed by her style while I was reading Housekeeping, her first novel, but I have never had that feeling with any of her other ones. What is true is that it is deceptively simple – Robinson does not use words that send us to the dictionary; rather, she uses words in combinations that send shivers down our spine. Take our encounter with Lila on the first page:

“The child was just there on the stoop in the dark, hugging herself against the cold, all cried out and nearly sleeping.”

“all cried out” – how simple the phrase, but how easily it captures the abjection of her situation! A little later we read how the people inside her house “fought themselves quiet” – Robinson makes her own language brutal, direct as the fighting itself. How much less powerful the phrase would be if it were “fought until they were quiet”. And the “themselves” is excellent too, hinting at the futility of the fighting – these people are only hurting themselves, they are destroying their own community, their own home.

Lila, aged about five, waits outside, where she is “saved” by Doll, an older woman, and taken away. Away from the family that does not care for her, Lila and Doll eventually join a group of roving workers, a ragtag bunch of rough young men and women. But first she gets a name – at home she had only learned to swear. At the time when Doll takes her away, she is so weak that she can barely walk, and the two of them stay with an unnamed woman, working for her until Lila begins to get her strength back. The woman suggests the name Lila: “I had a sister Lila. Give her a pretty name, maybe she could turn out pretty.”

“I got nowhere to be”

Lila’s life is not pretty. Lila meets Ames at the end of the 1940s, but her youth was spent during the years of the Great Depression. Where earlier the group she had gone with had managed to get by, once work dries up the group splits up and many turn to crime to survive. Doll, who acts as Lila’s mother, manages to get her a year at school, where Lila learns to read and write, but it is the only formal education she has. After working outside, she also spends time in a hotel and, terribly, a brothel. Lila’s time in the brothel is the most challenging section of the book to read, so soaked in despair is it. We have a real sense of just how trapped the women are there – financially, emotionally. Most significantly, they lose their names. Once again, Lila seems to have lost herself.

John Ames gives Lila a name – his own surname. She drifts into Gilead and takes shelter from a storm in his church, where she sees him performing baptism on a small girl, “wearing a white dress that spilled down over his arm”. Instead of leaving Gilead, Lila finds herself attacked by kindnesses, as Ames uses his position to give her work and support. Lila is almost feral when she arrives, so little of kindness has she received in her life. Doll is out of the picture by the time she reaches Gilead, so the only other memory of goodness is a school report she once received: “she has made remarkable progress”. Lila teaches us to look even at the “strays” as people deserving of love and affection by showing how these provide the water that helps people grow and flourish.

Lila, eternal drifter, ends up married, ends up pregnant. Yet the great tension in the novel is over whether she will truly stay. Although she grows under Ames’s care, and comes to love him and almost, perhaps, to trust him, still we are left questioning whether she can truly change her nature.

“Even now, thinking of the man who called himself her husband, what if he turned away from her? It would be nothing. What if the child was no child? There would be an evening and a morning. The quiet of the world was terrible to her, like mockery. She had hoped to put an end to these thoughts, but they returned to her, and she returned to them.”

We know, of course, that she decides to stay, because Lila is set before Home and Gilead. We have a feeling of the truth of it too, thanks to the beauty and joy and belonging that Robinson lets Lila feel – “if there was one thing she wished she could save from it all, it was the way it felt to walk along beside him”. At the same time, there is always a “but”. We do not know what will happen once Ames – aged 76 in Gilead – passes away. But we do know that Lila has grown, that the hardness of her heart has started to soften. There’s an extraordinary moment in Home where Jack is in agony at feeling his own wretchedness and damnation and it is Lila, the quiet one, who speaks up to tell him that people can change, that he can change. Lila does.

“Life on earth is difficult and grave, and marvellous”

Lila is wonderful in the truest sense of that word. As with her other novels, Robinson’s descriptions of nature are particularly lush, as if divinity is hiding behind the tree trunks: “There is a way trees stir before a rain, as if they already felt the heaviness”. The growing love and tenderness of Lila and Ames’s relationship is also something that is extraordinary. I kept sending the most ridiculous and sentimental messages to my friends while I was reading Lila. Robinson has a way of getting to me, of making the world so obviously imbued with religion that one feels silly not to agree with her, and embarrassed at one’s eyes whenever they do not reveal the beauty incarnate in every living thing.

Yet here is a review that is rather more critical of Robinson’s use of religion, and worth reading for that reason. I think Robinson’s fiction is amazing because it makes clear to an audience of non-believers or half-believers why religion can and should appeal to them. It has a clear sense of good and evil, of Man’s fallenness and of his potential redemption. The character of Jack is, as my dream indicates, a particularly special creation. For Robinson is aware that the world stretches beyond Gilead. One particularly impressive moment in Lila comes when she says to Ames that he doesn’t mind thinking about hell because he doesn’t know anybody who would ever go there. And it’s true – what can a man who has barely left his small town know? On a similar note, one thing I loved about Home was its treatment of race and racial politics.

Robinson, it might be said, is guilty of choosing her world sneakily, so that only the positive aspects of religion are emphasised. But this is not quite the aggressively closed world that Wendell Berry loves. One cannot say that Robinson is ignorant of religion’s complexities, or of the world’s. Doll kills a man, perhaps Lila’s own father. Lila works in a brothel. At one point we encounter a young man who believes he has killed his father. It is not that there is no damnation in Robinson’s world, so much as that for anyone with an ounce of good, redemption is always possible.

And so it should be.

Conclusion

Ultimately, I find myself struggling to write about Lila. There are many things I don’t feel qualified to talk about, most of them religious. As in Gilead, for example, there is a lot of discussion of baptism. The novel’s themes – the loneliness of Lila’s life, and her shame and guilt, are all better experienced than read about in my review. It is of course a book I recommend, but less so than the other two novels. There is a lot of bleakness here that is quite difficult to read, whereas a work like Gilead is more dominated by wonder. Home, I think it is fair to say, is the masterpiece – balancing wonder and bleakness together so perfectly. I am sure to read Jack itself, so you will not doubt here my thoughts on that a bit later too.

I can only hope that Robinson will continue writing, and that the inhabitants of Gilead will continue to grow.

Race and Redemption in Marilynne Robinson’s Home

Phenomenal, unbelievable, awesome: Home is one of those books I cannot recommend enough. In many ways a quiet, boring affair, much like Gilead before it, Home is so deeply packed with life, lived and felt, that it expands inside us like the impression of tree does, the moment we stop walking and start to give it the attention that its complexity and majesty undoubtedly deserves. Home takes place almost contemporaneously to Gilead, and the characters are shared between the two works, but the tone is very different. Gilead had seen the aging Reverend Ames writing letters full of love to his young son, consigning his own failures and guilts mostly to the margins. But Home, which takes us into the home of Ames’s friend Reverend Boughton as it deals with the return of a prodigal son, Jack, and a failed daughter, Glory, is a much more ambivalent tale.

The book is filled with tensions, with guilt, with shame, with pain. But at the same time it shines with the radiance of love, conditional and unconditional, and faith and grace. Unlike Gilead, where Ames’s occasional digressions on doctrinal matters such as baptism may have turned off readers with limited exposure to the Christian tradition, Home is a much more down-to-earth book in terms of its religious fundament. The central questions concerning redemption and grace are, I hope, a little more palatable to people, and more relevant to their own lives.

Glory

“Home to stay, Glory! Yes!” Her father said, and her heart sank.

The opening line of Home is brutal, and immediately informs us of the pain at the centre of the novel. Glory is the youngest daughter of Reverend Robert Boughton, youngest of eight children, and almost forty when the book begins in the late 1950s. Where other brothers and sisters have made successful marriages, or started successful careers, Glory worked as a teacher while engaged in a long courtship with a man who ultimately abandoned her. Apparently married, she could not even return to her teaching job. And so she has returned home, the only place that will offer her a refuge.

Her father, Reverend Boughton, is not the sprightly, young-at-heart man that Ames was. He spends most of Home being carried from chair to bed to chair. He retired from the pulpit ten years before the story begins, and his mind has declined where Ames’s remains nimble. But he is determined to make his home be a place where his children are welcome, and to show them the unconditional love of parents towards their children, no matter what they have done. Glory has come home, and she doesn’t really know what to do with herself, so she gives herself up to her father, caring for him as best she can, cooking and cleaning and doing the practical chores he is too weak to do. But she is desperately lonely. In the town she grew up in, all she has is the radio for company.

The Prodigal Son

That is until her father receives a letter from Jack. Jack is the prodigal son, the vanisher – he hasn’t been home in twenty years. As a child he was the only Boughton to scorn the church and steal and hide away. Eventually, he turned to alcohol too. What hangs over him, at least in the eyes of others, are two particular acts, committed long enough ago. The first is that he seduced and then abandoned a young girl, whose child later died; the second is that he did not return home for his mother’s funeral either. But he is his father’s son, and Boughton is determined to show him kindness.

The letter that arrives says Jack will be home soon. Boughton’s joy is so simple, so pure: “This letter is from Jack,” he said. “I know his hand. This is his hand… I’ll be needing a handkerchief, Glory, if you don’t mind. They’re in the top right-hand drawer… So we know he’s alive. That’s really something.”

And though he delays, and sends further letters, Jack does eventually come:

Then they heard bedsprings and their father calling, “Do we have company, Glory! I believe we do! Yes!” And then the slippered feet and the cane.

Robinson has an eye for the perfect detail. The action of Home takes place almost entirely within the walls of the Boughton home, and between these three people. But Robinson uses every sense, every minor gradation of feeling, to paint an extraordinary picture of family life in all its painful, wondrous, complexity.

Jack

Jack is back for his own reasons. For Glory, her older brother’s return is in a way a blessing. “At least I know what is required of me know, and that is something to be grateful for”. They have not seen each other for years, and Home is a record of intimacy gained, lost, fought for. Where Glory was duped, Jack is guilty. Most of all, he is battling against the notion of predestination, the idea that his life has already been decided for him, and that no matter what he may do he is doomed to hellfire because of something incorrect in his nature, in the very nature that God had given to him. He is a modern day Ivan Karamazov, knowledgeable about God and the Bible but unable to accept them for his own reasons, even as he rages against the despair stemming from having a terrible black hole inside him.

Jack comes home, he tends to the garden, he fixes the family car. He drinks, he hides, he hurts himself. His alcoholism is one part of his character, but in a way, as an addiction it sums up the heart of his problem. Anyone who has faced addiction will know the way that it can feel like predestination to fall back into old habits. No matter how we try, it seems as if an external force, like a cruel god, drags us back towards our vices. When faced with addiction, it’s sometimes impossible to feel that we can ever change, that we can ever right our course. While the two reverends discuss the thorny nature of predestination within their respective churches, it is Lila, Ames wife (and heroine of Robinson’s third Gilead novel), who steps up to reassure Jack. “A person can change. Everything can change.”

Like Jack, Lila has spent most of her life as an outcast. But after she meets Ames, something we only really hear about vaguely in Gilead, her life changes for the better. She is, in a way, saved. Does Jack redeem himself? Does Jack get saved? I’m not sure these questions are the point of Home. Jack comes home, and he leaves again. Life is not neatly tied up, and Home recognises that. In Jack’s story – here, in Gilead, and no doubt in Robinson’s latest novel, Jack –what matters is the process. Jack’s life is a swinging between salvation and perhaps, as he claims, perdition. And in our own lives, full of mistakes and guilt and yet bursting with beauty and always with the possibility of making things right again, Jack appears as a thoroughly human, thoroughly sad, brother.

Race and Religion in Home

Last summer I read a lot of books about race, but Home is probably more effective than any of them. At the end of Gilead we learn about why Jack is interested in racial tensions, and in Home this information is once again saved for the end. But early on, when Glory finds him reading W. E. B. DuBois, we have a sense that even though the village of Gilead is made up of traditional rural white Iowans, race will someway figure in the novel. Later, to entertain their father, Glory and Jack get him a TV set. Home is set during the height of the American civil rights movement, and Jack has spent a lot of time in the South. His father, meanwhile, appears scarcely to have even left his state.

Now, I confess, being not an American, I know little about the civil rights movement, so I may get a few bits wrong. As they watch the television, and read about protests in the newspaper, a division appears in the family.

After reading about white police with riot sticks attacking black peaceful demonstrators, Boughton speaks to calm his son: “There’s no reason to let that sort of trouble upset you. In six months nobody will remember one thing about it.”

But Jack replies. “Some people will probably remember it.”

Boughton is a religious man, but he is not necessarily a wise one. His vision of the world is small. The idea that the African Americans who were suffering may have slightly longer memories than his own, watching them on the television, is not something that comes naturally to him. It is less hypocrisy, than ignorance, but it remains a problem. When Jack cries “Jesus Christ” after a particularly brutal moment, Boughton’s anger is aimed at his blasphemy, rather than the actions of the police. Eventually, he attempts to be conciliatory. “Young people want the world to change and old people want it to stay the same. And who is to judge between thee and me? We have to forgive each other.”

At times like this Robinson describes Boughton as “statesmanlike” – she uses this adjective several times, and in a way that is far more ironic than anything else. Boughton asks who can judge, but the answer, for readers, is clearly that we can. We know better, we know now the suffering of black Americans thanks to social media and publicised brutalities. We know that the civil rights movement has not finished, and Boughton’s faux-conciliatory remarks which paper-over real and legitimate suffering are just the same ill-judged remarks we hear today, from certain sections of society. The blacks were rioting, they were violent. But even when disproved we continue to hold fast to these lies. I don’t mean to disregard the violence of certain protests last year, only to indicate that there is a continuity not just in terms of the problems, but also in how they are represented and dealt with.

Robinson’s story reveals that underlying hypocrisy. Yes, we should avoid judgement in many things. But in matters of racial justice, at least in the sense that we shouldn’t tolerate brutality, refraining from judgement becomes a moral stance. And we know, I hope we know, enough to know that things that were wrong then, in the 1950s, must still be wrong now.

Conclusion

Gilead was in many ways a paean to the blessings of the everyday little things that make life so magical but which we often pass over without a thought. And Home is filled with that same, slightly religious sentiment. But Home goes further than that, in that it asks moral questions too. Are we managing to be good people, even as we enjoy the world? Is there a chasm between our beliefs and our actions? Are we Christians or whatever to all people, or only to a few? In its portrayal of Jack’s tortured complexity, both his good and his bad, and his struggle for what perhaps we could call redemption, Home is a much more gritty book than its predecessor. But it is a book whose message is every bit as important as that of Gilead. Perhaps, unfortunately, given the world we currently live in, it may be even more so.

But either way it’s fantastic, brilliant, and well worth reading.