SOURCE: "John's Passion," in Los Angeles Times Book Review, May 17, 1992, pp. 3, 13.

In the following review, Eder discusses All the Pretty Horses, provides a plot synopsis, and comments on McCarthy's descriptive prose.

When John Cole's grandfather dies in 1947, leaving the 18,000-acre Texas ranch he spent his life to assemble, the 16-year-old begs his mother to lease it to him. She is determined to sell out; she is an actress, likes a good time and cannot stand the place. So John and his buddy, Rawlins, take two horses, two guns and a little money, and light out for Mexico.

Cormac McCarthy's All the Pretty Horses is the ambitious first part of a trilogy. It tells how John, in love with the disappearing world of horses and infinite horizons, comes violently to manhood in a place and culture where the Old West survives in a Spanish configuration of passion, honor and...