True Grit by Charles Portis My rating: 4 of 5 stars Charles Portis, often hailed as a great but unsung American writer, died last month, so I read his most famous novel in memoriam. True Grit, published in 1968, is a Western and a bildungsroman. It is the elderly Mattie Ross's first-person recollection as she … Continue reading Charles Portis, True Grit
Tag: western
Cities of the Plain by Cormac McCarthy My rating: 3 of 5 stars Cities of the Plain began life as a screenplay, and it shows. For most of its length, it is bare description and dialogue. While its scene-setting is often concisely vivid and its cowboy conversations laconically witty, it lacks either the lived-in quality … Continue reading Cormac McCarthy, Cities of the Plain
The Crossing by Cormac McCarthy My rating: 3 of 5 stars The Crossing (1994) is the follow-up to All the Pretty Horses (1992) and the second part of Cormac McCarthy's Border Trilogy, three novels focused on young American men coming of age in the early-to-mid-20th century on the border with Mexico. Unlike its popular precursor, … Continue reading Cormac McCarthy, The Crossing
All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy My rating: 4 of 5 stars All the Pretty Horses is apparently to Cormac McCarthy's corpus what The Crying of Lot 49 is to Thomas Pynchon's or The Ghost Writer to Philip Roth's: it is the appealing vestibule to an oeuvre of appalling heights and depths, a prolegomenon to any … Continue reading Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses
