SOURCE: "Cormac McCarthy's Next Pilgrimage," in Los Angeles Times, June 12, 1994, pp. 3, 12.

In the following review, Eder discusses The Crossing, lauding the descriptive passages but faulting both the portrayal of Mexico and the use of the Spanish language in the novel.

In the second part of Cormac McCarthy's epic trilogy, as in the first, the border between the United States and Mexico plays the same role as the rabbit-hole and the looking-glass in Lewis Carroll's two books of Alice. The young adventurers—McCarthy uses a pair—set out from a real though vividly charged Arizona and New Mexico, and cross into a world where realism, folklore, outsized passions and gnomic myths swirl in stormy colors.

Here is the difference: What is remarkable in the Alices lies at the bottom of the hole and the far side of the mirror. McCarthy's writing, powerful on this side of the border, frequently...