Category Archives: Fiction

All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy

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In 1949, two teenage boys leave their homes in Texas and ride their horses to Mexico. They meet another boy along the way, who eventually loses his horse and winds up in jail. The other boys get jobs working on a big ranch. One of them, the main character, falls in love with the rancher’s daughter. Unfortunately, the police are on their trail, wrongly believing that all three boys are horse thieves. Things do not go well after that.

All the Pretty Horses is the first novel in McCarthy’s Border Trilogy. I don’t know if I’ll read the next one. This one was worth reading, but not very convincing. The main character, who is 16 or 17, is almost a superhero. In addition, the novel contains way too many run-on sentences and too much dialog in Spanish.

Two passages near the end of the book:

“He stood at the window of the empty cafe and watched the activities in the square and he said that it was good that God kept the truths of life from the young as they were starting out or else they’d have no heart to start at all.”

“… for a moment he held out his hands as if to steady himself or as if to bless the ground there or perhaps as if to slow the world that was rushing away and seemed to care nothing for the old or the young or rich or poor or dark or pale or he or she. Nothing for their struggles, nothing for their names. Nothing for the living or the dead.”  (11/19/12)

Horseman, Pass By, by Larry McMurtry

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Horseman, Pass By was McMurtry’s first novel. It was the basis for Hud, the classic movie from 1963 about a small Texas cattle ranch facing a crisis. 

The screenplay didn’t change the setting or plot, but several improvements were made. Some unnecessary characters (a grandmother, some ranch hands) were eliminated. The role of Hud was greatly expanded (the horseman in the novel’s title refers to Hud’s father, not Hud). The black housekeeper Almea became the white housekeeper Alma. 

That last change was an improvement because it resulted in a more interesting, less predatory relationship between Hud and the housekeeper, a deeper relationship that doesn’t seem possible in the book, partly because of the way McMurtry writes what Almea says (“dese”, “dat”, “I needs to be leavin'” etc.).

This is one of those cases in which the film version is better than the original material.  (8/17/12)

The Score by Richard Stark

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Published in 1964, this is the fifth in Donald Westlake’s series of hard-boiled crime novels. This time Parker agrees to join a dozen or so other thieves in taking as much as they can get from a small town in North Dakota. They plan to knock over a mining company, some banks, a loan company and some jewelry stores all in one night.

This is one of the best Parker novels I’ve read. It’s fast moving and relatively plausible, although Parker breaks some of his own rules, which leads to the usual complications. 

Parker only speaks when necessary and only says enough to get his point across:

“I don’t kill as the easy way out of something. If I kill, it’s because I don’t have any choice”.

“You mean self-defense”. 

“Wrong. I mean it’s the only way to get what I want”.  (7/8/12)

The Emigrants by W. G. Sebald, translated by Michael Hulse

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Reading The Emigrants is a strange experience. It is fiction that reads like non-fiction. The novel tells the story of four unrelated people who emigrated from Germany during the 20th century, but it is written in the first person, as if the narrator is recounting these people’s experiences based on his own research. In addition, there are photographs scattered throughout the book that seem to represent the characters and settings that Sebald describes in an apparently realistic way.  

The paperback edition of the book indicates that many early reviewers considered the novel to be a masterpiece. I enjoyed Sebald’s later novel The Rings of Saturn more. I didn’t find the characters in The Emigrants especially interesting. Perhaps the reviewers were influenced by the newness of Sebald’s technique. They must have been impressed by his prose. The English translation is spare and often matter-of-fact but always beautiful. (6/30/12)

Dog Soldiers by Robert Stone

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Dog Soldiers is a novel about some misguided people who smuggle heroin from Viet Nam into the US during the Viet Nam war. Some bad guys try to take it away from them. The novel won the National Book Award in 1975 and was made into a very good movie called Who’ll Stop the Rain. A while back I watched the movie again and thought the book might be even better, or that it might better explain the characters’ motivations.  

Having read the novel, I think the movie is better, even with the movie’s altered Treasure of the Sierra Madre ending. It probably helped that Robert Stone was one of the screenwriters. Although the movie didn’t include some characters and incidents from the book, it included enough. In addition, the people who chose the actors did an extraordinarily good job finding performers who perfectly fit the roles: Nick Nolte as the modern day samurai; Michael Moriarty as the confused writer; Tuesday Weld as his troubled wife; and the three gentlemen who played the scary bad guys. 

I’m not sure why the book won the National Book Award. Perhaps because it captured the dark side of the 70s so well and portrayed some vivid and convincing characters. Here is a passage, not necessarily representative, but expressing a characteristic attitude:

“In the course of being fragmentation-bombed by the South Vietnamese Air Force, Converse experienced several insights….One insight was that the ordinary physical world through which one shuffled heedless and half-assed toward nonentity was capable of composing itself, at any time and without notice, into a massive instrument of agonizing death….Another was that in the single moment when the breathing world had hurled itself screeching and murderous at his throat, he had recognized the absolute correctness of its move. In those seconds, it seemed absurd that he had ever been allowed to go his foolish way, pursuing notions and small joys. He was ashamed of the casual arrogance with which he had presumed to scurry about creation. From the bottom of his heart, he concurred in the moral necessity of his annihilation.”  (6/9/12)