SOURCE: "The Man Who Understood Horses," in The New York Times Book Review, Vol. XCVII, No. 20, May 17, 1992, pp. 9, 11.

In the following review, Bell discusses the differences between All The Pretty Horses and McCarthy's previous novels, and calls the book the "most accessible" of his works.

Cormac McCarthy has practiced the Joycean virtues of silence, exile and cunning more faithfully than any other contemporary author, until very recently, he shunned publicity so effectively that he wasn't even famous for it. By his single-minded commitment to his work and his apparent indifference to the rewards and aggrandizements quite openly pursued by the rest of us, he puts most other American writers to shame. The work itself repays the tight focus of his attention with its finely wrought craftsmanship and its ferocious energy.

The magnetic attraction of Mr. McCarthy's fiction comes first from the extraordinary quality of his prose; difficult as...