In an interview on Coming of Age

And what is All the Pretty Horses about?

It’s about John Grady, who leaves home, gets a job on a ranch, and falls in love with the daughter of the rancher. It looks like his life is really going full speed ahead: a good job, love, everything fine. And then it all goes horribly wrong: he gets arrested for conspiring in the murder of a man, who in fact he had nothing to do with, and thrown into jail. He loses everything.

Does he come of age in jail?

In this book it’s an ongoing gaining of wisdom. I’m quite interested in that whole subject of finding out where you belong in the world, which is not a search that starts and ends between 18 and 21. It’s a process of optimism and again maybe the passion of youth: the expectation that things will go well, that the world is not against you, is not evil. The wisdom John Grady gains is very chastening and tragic; he’s lost the woman he loves. You sense he’s starting again, but with something harder than he did last time.

I know I’m not alone, but I absolutely love McCarthy’s expressionless, very flat prose that doesn’t lead the reader in any way. All the Pretty Horses is one of my five or ten favourite books in the whole world. There’s something absolutely thrilling about his lack of inflection because it allows the words to do all the work and therefore anything horrific that happens happens without any sentimentality or manipulation or emphasis. It all happens in your head. The book really mixes up loss and gain and wisdom and sorrow, and it ends with a sense of potential for John Grady, which is based on the wisdom he’s gained on the way.