SOURCE: "The Lone Soul State," in The New Republic, Vol. 211, No. 4147, July 11, 1994, pp. 38-41.

In the following review, Birkerts notes similarities between The Crossing and All the Pretty Horses, and comments on the differences between these two works and previous novels.

The myth of Cormac McCarthy is the myth of hard knocks endured and surmounted. There were long, lean years when novels now seen as brilliant were unable to find an audience. The author acquired a reputation as a drifter, a misfit and an uncompromising solitary. And then, in 1992, came a double play. All the Pretty Horses, the first volume of McCarthy's projected Border Trilogy, won two of the major fiction prizes. All of a sudden everybody knew the writer and always had. Through the alchemy of retrospect, the sorry sales figures became dues paid, and McCarthy emerged as one of our grizzled eminences.

McCarthy's arrival at highbrow...