All the Pretty Horses

I struggled with this one, just like I struggled with my first McCarthy go-round in The Road. Here's what I could muster up on Goodreads, and I don't think it's one of my better or more insightful paragraphs:

Reads like a sunset. For all his talents, McCarthy's greatest strength might be how thoroughly and deeply he can paint a scene in a few simple sentences with an economical vocabulary. Can't help but imagine all those Coors commercials with Sam Elliott's voice are trying to imitate it, really. The book's a modern Western, which is to say an anti-Western, a story that pits a young man's code of cowboy ethics against the harsh realities of the world. What if Ned Stark had carried a six shooter instead of a broadsword and gone to Mexico instead of King's Landing? Yeah - this is that sort of story, giving way to "cold cruel world" nihilism without ever losing that penchant for romance and beauty on the margins of it all. It's about exposing idealism as a dangerous myth, but it's not about tearing down the ideals themselves. A perfectly fine read that might have gone down just a bit easier if McCarthy weren't fundamentally opposed to using quotation marks around his pitch-perfect dialogue. The scoundrel.

Meh. Never a good sign when all I can do is half-heartedly touch on the themes of the story less succinctly than you could pull them off of Sparknotes. Maybe McCarthy just isn't for me - but the frustrating part is, he really should be! The ideals of the American cowboy running full force into the wall that is the cold indifference of the world - that's something I can get behind, usually. And I'm not kidding when I praise the man's descriptive word-paintings. This really is some beautiful writing! Oh well - plenty more opportunities for me to get behind Cormac McCarthy, I'm sure.