All The Pretty Horses (McCarthy, Cormac) 1992

I didn't care much for the overall plot, but it's not so much the story as how McCarthy tells it.  He generally does a wonderful job of showing us what we need in order to get to know John Grady Cole through his words and actions, rather than spilling the beans and telling us.  All in all there are three brilliant passages.  I was reading the Vintage International paperback edition from June 1993:

1. The part beginning "The hacendado had bought the horse through an agent...", which tells the story of how Antonio traveled to America to bring the stallion back to Mexico.  When Antonio turns out his pockets to deliver over the horse's papers, I laughed out at the full list of objects he hands to the hacendado.  This reads like a writer's workshop assignment to tell a story in a single paragraph that turned out outstandingly well. (pages 125-126)
   
   
2. The billiards game with the hacendado, particularly near the end where the hacendado misses a shot and then complains that "the French [meaning here the thinking that comes of obtaining a modern continental education] have come into my house to mutilate my billiard game.  No evil is beyond them." The use of "mutilate" to describe the defects in his billiard game also made me laugh out loud.  (pages 143-144)
   
   
3. Just about everything after John Grady Cole returns to Texas, but most especially the courtroom scene (pages 286-298).

My favorite parts were all comic (though the scene following the courtroom at the judge's house is both touching and sums up the character of John Grady Cole and his experiences in the book), and I'm not sure if I'm simply biased towards the comic scenes or McCarthy is simply gifted at writing them.  I think it's a happy confluence of McCarthy's minimal writing style and the level of understatement necessary to make these particular scenes "work" and be really, really funny.


[finished reading 9/21/09]