Philip Meyer and Cormac McCarthy: The Son and All the Pretty Horses

Literary Analysis: A beginning

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The Son and All the Pretty Horses

I intended this as the first of my line-focused literary analysis essays, and my first instinct was to begin with No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy because I’ve read it so many times. Trouble is, I don’t own a copy, and if I bought one, it would be physical, and that wouldn’t help soon enough. Instead I turned to Philip Meyer’s The Son, which I’d read last year and really enjoyed. The trouble there was that it has a straightforward style, written in what I’ve called balanced prose, and I wasn’t sure I know how to do a line analysis of that sort of book. Not every story is written to be scrutinized on a sentence level, even really well written books.

I picked a paragraph to see what could be done with it.

Then we reached the village. The tipis went on out of sight, swirling designs of warriors and horses, soldiers stuck with arrows, soldiers without heads, mountains and rising suns. The air smelled like green hides and drying flesh; there were racks standing everywhere with the flayed meat hanging in the sun like old clothes.

The Son by Philip Meyer

Then we reached—simple telling statement to ground the reader.

The tipis went—I love this clause now but didn’t think much of it when first going through the paragraph. It doesn’t sound like much, with the weak verb went, but it’s an understatement of the impact of the sight (and site) before him. The village is huge, and he’s reached the limits of his vision before hitting its end.

Swirling designs—this begins with the expected. The tipis are painted with images of the world they know and care about: their warriors and horses..mountains and rising suns; but what comes between those pairs heightens the tension, reminds the reader of the danger, and demonstrates the violence of their world, a threat of violence directed at our protagonist’s hope of rescue. To cap all this off with a return to nature confirms the normality of death as part of the landscape. This is important to the immediate story as the family of a fallen warrior has been denied a trophy from the raid—and their attention and anger are turned toward our young protagonist.

The air smelled—I used to have a problem with authors telling us that the air smelled like a thing. I’d clung to this notion that we had to describe the smell itself, and this was just telling us the green hides and drying flesh were there (and that they had a scent, whatever that was). I was young. What can I say? It works. It’s fine.

Like old clothes—the simile here at the end is appropriate to our character and easy enough to relate to—even if the practice is before your time. The general description of the village is productivity and purpose, only the designs on the tipis portend danger.

The power if this paragraph is in its mixed focus. It’s a description of the sights and sounds he encounters upon coming to the village for the first time, but the reality of the violent conflict hauntingly remains.

The novel has three narrators: Eli McCullough, his disapproving son, Peter, and Peter’s granddaughter, Jeanne, who inherits much of Eli’s vision and ruthlessness. It’s a family story across generations from the 1840s to the 21st century. If you were to say it’s a contemporary classic about Texas and the brutal truths about America’s growing pangs, I’d believe you.

The most powerful part of the story, in my view, is Eli’s in the first half of the book, and the most emotional is Peter’s over roughly that same period. The second half is carried by our interest in these characters and in the ramifications that follow after them—even across generations.

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All the Pretty Horses

He pulled the horse around and they rode out of the camp and into the road south. Rawlins looked back and put his horse into a trot and John Grady came up and they rode side by side down the narrow rutted track. No one spoke. When they were clear of the camp a mile or so Blevins asked what it was that the man in the vest had wanted but John Grady didn’t answer. When Blevins asked again Rawlins looked back at him.

He wanted to buy you, he said. That’s what he wanted.

All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy

Both passages were chosen fairly at random, saving that I was avoiding dialogue as much as possible. This is a minimalistic passage with a modest taste of his characteristic polysyndeton,¹ used (perhaps) to help avoid punctuation.

He pulled the horse around—this first sentences combines two independent clauses without a comma; the second sentence combines three, but there’s a nice rhythm to the clauses between the conjunctions. It puts you in the mind of trotting horses, or I just like McCarthy and am willing to see what’s not there.

That rhythm demands completion, and McCarthy provides that with an short sentence—no one spoke—which separates the two main actions of the paragraph. The next line has a different rhythm, one that flows quickly, like Blevins pulling forward to pester John Grady with his innocent questions.

The paragraphs from both books emphasize the danger our protagonists find themselves in, but in this random comparison, Meyer provides the more subtle reminder.

All the Pretty Horses is set in the 1940s among characters who long for the old west and travel to Mexico to try to capture some of that adventure. In The Son, during the same period, we see the family trying to make a cultured woman out of a young Jeanne who has too much of Eli in her for such a life.

As I approach the books for these essays, how will I find the passages to analyze?

My goodness, said Perez. My goodness. You think there are no crimes without owners? It is not a matter of finding. It is a matter of choosing. Like picking the proper suit in a store.

All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy

What I need to do is organize the series as a read-along, and as much as I recommend The Son—I’m not ready to jump back in after only a year. Read it, but not for this. Our first book will be All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy.

To give you time to secure your copy and read chapter one (about a hundred pages), I’ll release the next essay on 2/18/2025.

Blevins went to sleep as well. He sat watching the firmament unscroll up from behind the blackened palisades of the mountains to the east. Toward the village all was darkness. Not even a dog barked. He looked at Rawlins rolled asleep in his soogan and he knew that he was right in all he’d said and there was no help for it and the dipper standing at the northern edge of the world turned and the night was a long time passing.

All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy

— Thaddeus Thomas

You don’t have to wait two weeks to dig into All the Pretty Horses and the techniques McCarthy uses. Following the publishing of this essay, I followed it up with The Secret of Style: Part II, in my Prose Style series, and it picks up where we left off here.

Check out all my essays:

1. I have to remember that not all have you read my essay on polysyndeton. It’s a purposeful overabundance of conjunctions.