SOURCE: "Dream Work," in The New York Review of Books, Vol. 40, No. 12, June 24, 1993, pp. 5-6, 8-10.

In the following review, Donoghue discusses All the Pretty Horses in relation to McCarthy's other novels, asserting that McCarthy is at his "best with what nature gives or imposes, rather than with the observations of culture."

All the Pretty Horses, which won the National Book Award for fiction in 1992, is the first volume of The Border Trilogy, and Cormac McCarthy's sixth novel. The earlier ones are The Orchard Keeper, Outer Dark, Child of God, Suttree, and Blood Meridian or The Evening Redness in the West. McCarthy has been regarded as a writer's writer, a craftsman, a rhetorician, but not likely to be popular. All the Pretty Horses has changed that impression: it has gained critical approval, and become a best seller. Reviewers are comparing him with Faulkner. McCarthy may be a recluse...