All the Pretty Horses

Sixteen years old, the finest horseman in West Texas, and the last believer in a world that has already ended. John Grady is McCarthy's most sympathetic protagonist — a boy whose talent is real, whose courage is genuine, whose moral seriousness is total, and whose faith in the covenant between skill and reward is completely wrong. He rides into Mexico believing that the world has a place for people like him. Mexico answers with prison, betrayal, and a knife fight. He kills a man, loses the girl, buries his friend's unclaimed horse, and rides west into a sunset that means nothing. He is not broken by this — McCarthy does not break him — but he is changed. The innocence that made him beautiful is gone. The competence remains. Whether competence without innocence is enough to live on is the question the novel leaves open.