SOURCE: A review of All the Pretty Horses, in Western American Literature, Vol. XXVIII, No. 2, August, 1993, pp. 182-184.

In the following review, Ahearn provides a brief analysis of All the Pretty Horses, discusses the protagonist's quest, and calls the work "a must read."

After his first four novels, from The Orchard Keeper through Suttree, Cormac McCarthy's regional reputation was Southern, and his renown primarily stylistic. Commentators made comparisons with artists as diverse as Sam Peckinpah and Jorge Luis Borges. Then the Protean McCarthy produced Blood Meridian, a tale of the West that mixed grotesque violence and grotesque humor and delineations that both drew on and mocked the conventions of eighteenth-century novels and epic plots in general, altering his regional identification and adding to his reputation as a prose-wizard and an original visionary. All the Pretty Horses, winner of the 1992 National Book Award, is the first volume of a...