One hears echoes of Vietnam in these writers

By Carl Heintze

Lately I've been rereading All the Pretty Horses, Cormac McCarthy's story of cowboy life along the Texas-Mexican border, part of his trilogy of novels called "The Border Trilogy."

It's the third time I've read the book and, as usual, it left me in tears, though I'm not quite sure why.

The novel follows the path of John Grady Cole, son of an alcoholic failure of a father and a mother who's deprived Cole of all he really wanted--the family ranch--as he rides across the border with a friend into Mexico.

More of the story I won't reveal except to say that the novel has a wonderful feel of the country--both Texas and Mexico--and a heart-wrenching love story. It's the best of the three novels in the series, all of which tell us McCarthy's contention that life is both wonderful and terrible, cruel and beautiful, but never dull for very long.

Cormac McCarthy, who seems native to the land about which he writes, but actually isn't, is one of a group of American writers who came to prominence in literature about the same time and, so it seems to me, have some things in common.

They all grew up with the Vietnam War in the background, and they all seem indirectly affected by its sadness, cruelty and sense of betrayal, even though they don't write about it directly. Instead they use its time of division and dissension, of the search for new American values, as their theme. They do this in different ways and with different sets of characters, but the results seem to me to be the same. They find the world a place in which faith and honor have to be re-examined and rediscovered and where there is little surety of anything except a very personal, mostly ill-defined, code of behavior.

They're not motivated by traditional faith, yet they have a kind of faith; they live fragmented lives, but they do the best they can with them. Sometimes, as in the case of John Grady Cole, that's not much, but it still seems to have some honor about it.

In many ways, or so it seems to me, the characters drawn by these writers are a little like Don Quixote, who found the rest of the world out of sync with his, but who, as the song says, dreamed the impossible dream anyway.

They include Richard Ford and Mary Morris and some others less well known. Their subjects are people on the fringe of society: John Grady Cole, for instance, who left home at 16 and was a man by the time he was 17 and who never really gets anything big out of life. But he also seems not to expect to.

As McCarthy writes, he expected the world to be cruel, but not so personally cruel.

He could be typical of the people about whom this group of American writers write. But even though life never gives him much of a chance, John Grady Cole always lives by a certain sense of what I guess you'd call honor. He makes mistakes, but he tries to correct them as best he can. He doesn't discern his code of conduct very clearly, but he knows he's got one. It's what keeps him going.

In this sense, John Grady Cole and all the heroes and heroines of the group of writers about whom I'm speaking persevere in spite of what they find life to be. They are like Hemingway heroes who know life is a dirty trick, but who insist on living it anyway--Robert Jordan, the hero of For Whom the Bell Tolls, is an example.

I find this a dark message, even though it is an honest one. In all these writers, though, the message is redeemed by the way it is given, by the beauty and clarity of their prose.

All the Pretty Horses, for instance, is a gem of a novel. It flows as if it were life, moving at a speed that always brings you along, but that never hurries. Everything seems just right, somehow, as if it were alive and real. That's what a good novel should do, I think.

John Grady Cole sometimes seems to have more knowledge than his 16 years, and so does his love, Alejandra, but that's a quibble. By the time you've finished the book--moist-eyed, I hope, because it is truly a tragedy, a life from which escape is not possible--John Grady Cole, Alejandra, Cole's sidekick Rawlins and even Alejandra's father and her aunt all seem like real people. Unusual people, it's true, but real characters, nevertheless.

So I commend All the Pretty Horses to you, even if I can't say the same for The Crossing and Cities of the Plain, the two books that follow.

John Grady Cole reappears in the last book, but I wish he hadn't. I would prefer to remember him as he was in All the Pretty Horses, a young man with many admirable qualities, foremost among them a sense of honor.

Who could ask for more than that?

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