All the Pretty Horses

McCarthy's later masterpiece — written after fatherhood, after hope. If All the Pretty Horses asks whether innocence can survive the world, The Road asks whether goodness can survive the end of it. Read together, they form the arc of a life's thinking.

Americans abroad discovering that the codes they believed in no longer hold. Jake Barnes and John Grady Cole are both damaged romantics in foreign countries, both maintaining dignity through skill, both losing the woman to forces larger than love.

The other great American Western of the late twentieth century — but where McMurtry allows sentimentality and heroism, McCarthy insists on consequence. The same genre, opposite temperaments.

Both novels are about young men whose faith in a beautiful idea survives every piece of evidence against it. Gatsby believes in the green light. John Grady believes in the horses. Both are destroyed by the gap between their vision and the world.

Both novels ask what love permits under impossible conditions — Morrison from inside the legacy of slavery, McCarthy from inside the death of the frontier. Both use prose styles so distinctive they amount to private languages.

Another novel about a young man's loss of innocence through violence and betrayal — Knowles at a New England boarding school, McCarthy at a Mexican hacienda. Both understand that the fall from innocence is not a metaphor but a physical event that changes the body.