The Crossing: Book 2 of The Border Trilogy

THIS BOOK IS ONE OF THE ENGROSSING ONES THAT I HAVE READ LATELY. I FELT LIKE I WAS LIVING THE HARDSHIPS WITH THE BOY AND THE WOLF. BUT WHEN THE WOLF WAS KILLED, I CRIED AND FELT LIKE THE BOOK WAS ENDED FOR ME. BUT WHEN I READ THE SECOND PART, IT STILL WAS A SAD BOOK. WHILE I WAS VERY SAD ABOUT THE BOOK, I WOULD RECOMMEND THIS BOOK FOR ANYONE WHO REALLY GETS REALLY INVOLVED IN WHAT THEY ARE READING.

This is a very interesting book with many twists and turns in the plot line. Unfortunately, many conversations are held solely in Spanish, which detracts from and slows reading. Would be nice to have either footnote translations (or parenthesized) to facilitate comprehension of what is being said.

It begins as an innocent story of two young brothers, Billy Parham, 16 and Boyd Parham, 14 giving food to an Indian. Billy and Boyd live on a ranch with their parents in New Mexico and are required to help with the work there. One of Billies tasks is to trap a wolf who is attacking and killing their cattle. Billy becomes intrigued by the primitive and wild creature, who seems to intelligently elude capture. He attempts to learn about the wolf by asking an old and learned man about the ways of wolves. As Billy begins to feel a kinship with the wolf he discovers it caught in one of his traps. He realizes that he cannot kill it and impulsively sets out for the Mexican border to return the wolf to where it came from. By crossing the border, Billy adventures into an nether world. It is not simply another country, but another reality.
We could easily call The Crossing a coming of age story, an adventure story, a quest or an epic poem, but it is all that and much more. As with any coming of age story, Billy Parham loss of innocence comes with a price of great consequence. Like an adventure story The Crossing is filled with action and unexpected situations. As with tales of quests as the Iliad and Gulliver's Travels we meet strange and interesting creatures along Billy's path. Like an epic poem The Crossing is filled with lyrical prose, both in Spanish and English.
Cormac McCarthy is one of the great American authors of the twentieth century and he proves it in once again in the Crossing the second book of his border trilogy. His prose is beautiful to read, with dialogue devoid of quotation marks and contractions missing apostrophes. He shifts from English to Spanish can be challenging to the non-Spanish reader. His scenes rich with descriptors can be stark and ruthless. The reader should be prepared to be shocked and moved.
Reading McCarthy comes with a price. After reading one of his books the reader feels changed, drained and at a loss. I, like Billy cannot retrieve my innocence. It disappeared when I went south of the border with him. As the Spanish Gypsy tells him
"We think we are the victims of time. In reality, the way of the world isn't fixed anywhere. How could that be possible? We are our own journey. And therefore we are time as well. We are the same. Fugitive. Inscrutable. Ruthless."
I cannot helped but be moved by Cormac McCarthy's work and The Crossing was perhaps the favorite, which I have read.

Several people in our book club objected to too much Spanish in a novel written in English. Unless one is also fluent in Spanish, much of the flavor and content is missed. Translations are available on line but not easy to integrate into one's reading. I believe it is elitism for an author to include phrases in a foreign language in his writing without translation. Great description of skills of a teenager growing up on a ranch. Poor development of characters. Too many long philosophical narratives by minor characters.

Unlike Book 1 of the trilogy, Pretty Horses, The Crossing, is boring, repetitive and predictable. There are few surprises, not a lively plot and the characters, with few exception are simple. Simple young brothers trying to deal with a complex, hostile, country. It begins with some hope in the chasing of a very smart wolf who is killing the family cattle. The most suspenseful part is whether or not the wolf is going to kill and eat his capturer or is the capturer going to tame the wolf.

It is a dark book, with little hope and justice. A gun is the only thing that keeps one alive. Without a gun, even a primitive one, the protagonist is called to use his wits, which we readers do watch as they develop. The plot moves too slow for my taste. I am disappointed in Cormac McCarthy. I will have to read several reviews of Book 3 before I spend my money.

Much like his other novels, I initially found the story to be absorbing...very difficult to put down until about 2/3 of the way through I noticed that the end of one page and the beginning of the next were completely out of sync (Vintage International, March 1995 printing). At first I attributed this to McCarthy's unconventional writing style (LOL), but as I read closer I realized that the pages at this point forward are completely out of order. I guess I got one that the quality control guy at the publishing house missed! I just gave up after searching for the place in the book where the pages were back in order, because by that point I was completely lost track of what was going on in the story. Too bad...it really started off as a compelling read. I guess I'll wait for movie adaptation.

...especially after reading All The Pretty Horses. I'm a fan of McCarthy's work but this was a difficult read due largely to some long winded diatribes on God, religion, faith, etc. Definitely the weakest link in the Border Trilogy's chain.

The plot was disjointed and ran off in theological tangents that were entirely the authors own opinions. Too much Spanish conversation for people who don't speak Spanish. The end of the book was depressing, worst book I have read in a long time. Much worse than Book 1. I would not read Book 3 if I had not already purchsed it.

This book failed to captivate this reader from the very beginning. It contained a slow developing story with tedious subplots loosely connected to the main characters. In addition, the author's choice of poor grammar, disproportionate allowance of slangs, along with his overuse of Spanish expressions effectively distanced the reader from the nuances of the story.

It started off decent then declined through out. Author tails off on these meaningless tangents. Hard to sequel a book with no characters from the previous book. This book pales in comparison to " no country for old men" and "all the pretty horses". Big disappoinent!

The copy of the book sent to me is missing pages 59 to 90. See two attached photographs the first shows page 57. The next shows the page turned to pages 58 and 91. I did not discover this until after the return period had passed.
Extremely disappointed.

Other than that, the book, like everything else I've read by McCarthy is great.

This tale was not fast enough to keep my attention. Since this writer is considered to be a very good, I kept reading it hoping it would get better. The plot seemed non-existent to me as the writer wandered off on tangents that had no or little, bearing on the story. I was also reading it as research about the Southwest at that period. Not too good for that either.

Until I read this book, Mccarthy's several other novels had impressed me. The Crossing is tedious and often illogical regarding plot and motives of Billy, the protagonist. Far too many stories of other people's lives that have nothing to do with imtegrity of the plot. This novel seems to be looking futively to relate SOMETHIG, but fails.

The "Crossing", is not Cormac's first book. As such, it is noteworthy for its narrative. It is a dark moody walk through a landscape of people you hope to never meet. Cormac has a style that sets him apart , as all his novels show; notable, Blood meridian, The border trilogy and others. AS a writer of unusual people he can not be topped ! Check him out..

As of 2011-01-31, please refrain from buying Kindle edition. It's full of typographical errors, many of which are disruptive. I've reported many of them to the store, who (I hope) will work with publisher to fix ... but until then, stick with hardcopy.

I read this second novel of Cormac McCarthy’s “Border Trilogy” just after reading and enjoying the first, “All the Pretty Horses.” Although the main characters in these two books reportedly meet in the third novel of the trilogy, this second novel shares none of the first novel’s characters, and the plots do not intersect. All that the two have in common is that they both involve young men crossing the border and venturing through Mexico in the late 1940s, and have story lines that depend heavily on characters making decisions early in the story that most readers should immediately recognize as questionable.

Although I still very much liked this book, I found it a rockier read than “All the Pretty Horses” due to all of the detours McCarthy takes into philosophizing by some of the characters Billy Parham (the main character) meets in his travels. Some of these detours are pages and pages long, and I confess that despite quite a bit of effort on my part, the meaning of some of those monologues and their relation to Billy’s journey still eludes me. McCarthy’s practice of sprinkling sometimes long bursts of Spanish throughout his text obscured things even more when he applied that technique to these parts of the book.

I am well acquainted by now with the works of McCarthy, having previously read (in addition to “All the Pretty Horses”) “Blood Meridian” and “The Road,” so it is safe to call me a true devotee. All of McCarthy’s works seem to convey at least an approaching darkness (if not an actual apocalypse).

McCarthy creates not just a plot. His descriptiveness also creates an accompanying mood. For me, this mood is almost the written equivalent of the sound track from a good film, in that it is hard to separate one from the other and judge it on just one of them. Sometimes readers are just looking for one or the other, and often are disappointed when neither stands up well on its own.

Cormac McCarthy is not for everyone. There are a few “surface features” to his writing style that some find off-putting. The complete lack of punctuation in his dialogue makes it hard sometimes to follow the identity of a speaker. Liberal sprinklings of Spanish sometimes make for hard going if the reader is not bilingual. (Hint: I read some of the phrases into Google Translate on my phone, and they translated quite easily—very impressive!) Some get bored by the descriptiveness of background, the countryside, the animals, and other details that are not in direct pursuit of a plot line. A few readers like this kind of writing instinctively, while others who give it a chance will find it an acquired taste. Many just never will like this kind of writing. For me it took some getting used to, but it has really grown on me over time.

The copy of this that I read was part of “The Border Trilogy” collection published by Everyman’s Library. It is a fine volume with high quality hard cover binding (unlike many mass produced hard cover books these days) that will stand up to repeated reading. It is a worthy addition to any collector’s library, despite being affordably priced.

This novel is among Cormac's best. It is one that most people when discussing his work have not read. I appreciated the characters Billy and Boyd and their desire to bring the she-wolf back to its habitat. What transpires after all that is like a hallucination, and just when I thought the novel could not become any darker, it took me to a deeper, darker place. Some parts are so damn heartbreaking I considered stopping reading the novel, but I could not. Billy's reaction at the end of the novel is real and deep. I felt the same way ; we are reminded that we are often alone and we are the only ones who can make the journey in the end.
This novel has great suspense. It also has extremely sad parts in it. With all the sadness, it is one of the top books I have read in the the past ten years. Some of it is surreal and hallucinatory, and I wonder how McCarthy can enmagic the reader just with his words.

In my opinion, this is one of his very best.

Cormac McCarthy’s ‘The Crossing’, as the second in his Border trilogy, is a variation on the same travel trajectory he depicted in its predecessor, ‘All the Pretty Horses’. Taking place roughly ten years earlier, it tells of a seventeen-year-old boy, Billy Parham, living on a ranch in Cloverdale, New Mexico, attempting to trap a wild wolf that has been slaughtering their cattle.

Billy finds the wolf and successfully traps it but feels an affinity with the she-wolf and, unclear of his father’s instructions, decides to take it back to its native Mexico. The first portion of the novel has many riveting passages, highlighted by the process of binding and muzzling the wolf without injuring it. The lengthy description of the care he takes of the wolf and their journey together, far from being tedious, is some of the most riveting writing in the novel. McCarthy excels in depicting deliberative action, delineating the physical process of an action. If this sequence were filmed, of course it would be wordless, yet it would alternate between close-ups and longer shots so we would see the workings of Billy’s hands as well as the boy and the wolf within their larger environment.
“She rose and stood with her sides caving in and out. She carried her head low and her tongue hung trembling between the long incisors of her lower jaw. He undid the string from his catchrope and slung it over his shoulder and stepped down. He took some lengths of pigginstring from the mochila behind the saddle and looped them through his belt and unlimbered the catchrope and walked around the wolf. The horse was no use to him because if it leaned back on the rope it would kill the wolf or pull it from the trap or both. He circled the wolf and looked for something to tie to that he could stretch her. There was nothing that his rope would reach and double and finally he took off his coat and blindfolded the horse with it and led it forward upwind of the wolf and dropped the reins that it would stand.”

As is true regarding ‘All the Pretty Horses’, McCarthy seems to have a much higher opinion of most animals than he does of humans. Inevitably, when Billy and the wolf encounter humanity it is of a coarse sort occupied in the thrill of animal subjugation. The wolf is captured as part of a makeshift carnival, attacked by wolves and shot. Billy has identified so closely with the wolf that he offers to trade his rifle for the body.

Returning to his home, Billy finds that his parents have been murdered and their horses stolen. He retrieves his younger brother Boyd from a family he had been staying with and they head south together to recover the horses and perhaps find the murderers. No background on why the parents were murdered or how Boyd avoided the same fate is given. The brothers themselves do not address the subject directly so we have no insight from them.

Along the way, Boyd is severely wounded. Billy feels substantial guilt and wants to care for his brother the best way he knows and the horse that Billy does retrieve is itself severely wounded. All of this is narrated at an angle, without quotation marks or commas. Most of the people that Billy encounters are Mexican and he speaks with them in Spanish, all of which is untranslated. Unless one is sufficiently conversant in Spanish, these passages are largely meaningless without the aid of an English-Spanish dictionary or Google Translate. Short of that tedious effort, the reader is left to infer through subsequent actions what is inferred by the dialogue.

‘The Crossing’ has much less of a linear narrative than its immediate predecessor; what is here consists of rambling travels as Billy crosses and recrosses the border. He encounters roadside philosophers such as a priest in an abandoned monastery. We get samples of cosmic rumination such as the following:
“…the lesson of a life can never be its own. Only the witness has power to take its measure. It is lived for the other only. The priest therefore saw what the anchorite could not. That God needs no witness. Neither to Himself nor against. The truth is rather that if there were no God then there could be no witness for there could be no identity to the world but only each man’s opinion of it. The priest saw that there is no man who is elect because there is no man who is not. To God every man is a heretic. The heretic’s first act is to name his brother. So that he may step free of him. Every word we speak is a vanity. Every breath taken that does not bless is an affront. Bear closely with me now. There is another who will hear what you never spoke. Stones themselves are made of air. What they have power to crush never lived. In the end we shall all of us be only what we have made of God. For nothing is real save his grace.”

Such passages as this are relevant to the larger scope of the novel, encompassing a harsh universe largely devoid of meaning except what the human occupying it bestows upon it. However, they are never integrated or apparent through a gradual accumulation of events, merely being abandoned by a succession of more travels, encounters with gypsies, horse thieves, peasants and drunken bullies. Much more engaging are such passages as a depiction of another physical process—this account of a doctor treating Boyd’s chest wound:
“He gently pulled away the stained and blackened sheeting from Boyd’s chest and lifted it free and handed it up to the woman. He left the black and weedy poultices in place, the one on his chest and the larger one behind his shoulder. He leaned over the boy and pressed the poultices gently each in turn to see if anything should run from beneath them and he tested the air tentatively with his nose for any hint or rot. Bueno, he said. Bueno. He touched gently the area under Boyd’s arm between the poultices where the skin was blue and swollenlooking.”

This sensory description leaves us in no doubt about what is being described or its appearance. McCarthy is unsurpassed in such description.

However, Billy Parham is no John Grady Cole, largely because he is more non-communicative and spends much of the novel traveling alone. We often have no idea what he is really thinking despite spending so much time on the road with him. His relationship with his brother is a pale echo of John Grady’s relationship with his friend Lacey Rawlins or even the more vexing one with little troublemaker Jimmy Blevins. Boyd is something of a cross between those two but less fleshed out than either.

Billy is more of a solitary traveler without family and unaccepted by any community, even the military as World War II breaks out. I can imagine him as a Man With No Name in a spaghetti Western if he were thrust 100 years back in time. In the very poignant conclusion, he seems unable to maintain a bond with any living creature, sentenced to walk beneath the “right and godmade sun”, risen “once again, for all and without distinction”.

After reading three of Cormac McCarthy's books, I believe he is one of the nation's best writers of his generation. "The Crossing", second of his Border Trilogy, is a starkly beautiful story of family, searching, loss, and love. McCarthy's prose is tight and mesmerizing (it reminds me of Leonard Cohen's music). His characters are engrossing and complex. His scenes are beautiful - the deserts and mountains of the Southwest and Mexico. He writes knowledgeably of that country, ranching, horsemanship, Mexican culture, and the hardscrabble life of a vaquero. The story captures, surprises, and haunts you. This is a masterful novel.
McCarthy has a couple of peculiarities in this book that prospective readers should know ahead of time. He doesn't use quotes in conversation-you sometimes have to follow the text closely. Also, he uses Spanish quite a bit, without translation. He leaves it to the reader to figure out what is being said. For some, this could be confusing. For me, after getting use to it, it actually enhanced the experience. I found it more immersing in the Mexican environment.
I won't summarize the story line. The book jacket does that quite adequately. I highly recommend this book.

This book will live on and on, it is literature. McCarthy is the master story teller. Billy and Boyd the two main characters are brothers in the period before WW2. They grow up in New Mexico and travel the desolate roads of Mexico in search of their families' horses. Both of their parents are killed by marauders. Possibly the murders are because of the value in the horses, all of which were taken. This IS the story, but it is written and reads like beautiful music. Everything about the journey will break your heart. Unrealistically the 17 and 14 year old boys think they can retrieve the stolen horses. Don't let me mislead you, the music is in the words and sentences, There is nothing beautiful about the story. The boys had no money, no food, only the clothes they wear and one horse. There are 5 sections of the book. Each section is a new beginning of the same story. We have the same characters but a different time sequence. Prepare to read the finest----yet hard to read experiences you will ever encounter. "Butchers Crossing" by John Williams is a similar story. Both writers are superb craftsmen, both stories are dark and joyless. Both books are westerns and there is little dialog. These men are men of few words. This is not an easy read, there are sections written in Spanish, ---but the reader can understand what is being said. There are deep thoughts to sort out. There is also a mystical feel to parts of the story. You will never forget Billy and Boyd Parham

Bajada a los Infiernos al Sur de la Frontera [Descent into Hell South of the Border]

This novel starts out well enough. The action gets started with teenage brothers setting out into the mountains of Mexico to retrieve the horses stolen from their small family ranch when their parents were murdered, while the brothers were away. Pretty much everything thereafter I detested almost as thoroughly as I appreciated #1 in The Border Trilogy, All the Pretty Horses.

The boys' purpose for journeying deep into the Mexican mountains quickly devolves into a succession of hazy, haphazard jaunts here and there. This wouldn't be negative in itself, but McCarthy splotches this novel with soporific soliloquies told by ancient hombres at various pits stops on the odyssey to nowhere in particular. The boys encounter savagery enough to salt the hide, men who lived like animals and monsters, and women who are mostly no more than toothless, grotesque objects and the few who aren't are either whores or a means to a raping.

Toward the end I felt like my reading had been hijacked por una Hacienda de Horrores. I had a couple of nightmares over this book, which gives me chills even now when thinking about it.

A young man makes several trips into Mexico where he meets mostly awful people and endures all sorts of horrors. There were a few brief moments of decency and humanity but for the most part this was just unrelentingly brutal. To make it worse, it was also boring, filled with long digressions and navel gazing grade school philosophy. There is also a lot of untranslated Spanish. Luckily I was reading on an e-reader so I could select and translate. This did become tedious in certain sections, however. Overall, I just found nothing to enjoy in this book. It's the third or fourth of the author's works I've read and will probably be the last.

Once again Cormac McCarthy takes us on a journey across the border of Mexico. Once again it is a young man coming of age among horses in a foreign land. The land and the actions of our hero are lavishly described. McCarthy is a gifted writer with an economy of style and an ear for terse dialogue. But as detailed as the actions are we know little of the interior life or motivations of the characters. This adds to the wide-open feel of the book. You don't just see the vast, empty landscape, you feel it in the unhurried prose of the author and the methodical pragmatism of the men in this narrative. We are left to make sense of the story ourselves though we are warned against finding too much meaning.
The main character is Billy Parham an adolescent working on his family's ranch. When Billy captures a wolf that has been killing livestock in the area he decides to return the animal to Mexico rather than kill it. We are not told why the animals means so much but we see the lengths he goes to to complete his quest. As Billy says later, he makes three crossings into Mexico and only once finds what he is looking for. The rhythm of the language, the pictures McCarthy draws, the questions about what it all means, stay with you. There is a scene in the book where a blind man tells a tale -- it is a novel of tales told by people who appear and disappear from the story. The blind man says "indeed the tale was a true one. He said that they had no desire to entertain him nor even to instruct him. He said that it was their whole bent only to tell what was true and that otherwise they had no purpose at all." This could be said of the author as well. He has told a tale he thinks is true, in its particulars, its actions. But there is no teaching here and no purpose beyond that. This is a boy becoming man in a confusing and violent world. This is a capable adolescent, responsible, respectful responding to a set of circumstances that cannot be explained or anticipated.

There are writers who explore one theme and leave their readers with an overwhelming sense of redundancy. Then there is Cormac McCarthy. McCarthy's worldview goes something like this: The world is a violent, ever-changing, unstable, and awful place. If there is a god, he is completely indifferent to our struggles, and, make no bones about it, human life is nothing BUT struggle. Searching for god is a fruitless waste of time, and, in this brutal and uncaring world, meaning must be found or made by the individual and the individual alone. The only point of life is the point you ascribe to it, and for McCarthy this generally boils down to developing a personal code of some kind--what is right and what is wrong, what is acceptable and what will not be tolerated, what is good and what is bad. The reason McCarthy can write about this over and over again without repeating himself is that he has chosen to approach the fundamental question of human existence. He is our most existential writer (as well as our most lyrical), and under the umbrella of his existentialism are countless sub-themes and avenues through which McCarthy can and does explore this question.

In THE ROAD he does it with the father/son relationship. In ALL THE PRETTY HORSES he does it by exploring romantic love. And so on...

THE CROSSING explores the nature, purpose, and value of human existence through the lens of brotherhood. It is the story of Billy Parham and his brother Boyd. The story begins with the first of the three crossings into and back from Mexico that Billy will make over the course of the novel. A pregnant wolf has made its way out of the mountains of northern Mexico and is feeding on the family's herd. Billy, Boyd, and their father set out to trap the wolf, a symbol of the beauty and primal violence of Mexico, Earth, and life itself. When Billy manages to catch the she-wolf, he makes the decision to return her to the Mexican hills. He forges a bond with her as they travel. And when she is stolen from him and forced to fight for the entertainment of a small village...well, you end up with one of my favorite scenes in all of literature.

Billy returns to the States and finds that his mother and father have been killed and that Boyd, having managed to survive, is living with a neighboring family. There is tension between the brothers. Boyd has been changed and Billy is racked by the guilt he feels for abandoning his brother. There's a second problem: Someone killed their parents and stole their horses. So, naturally, there's only thing to do: Head down to Mexico and track them down. That's crossing number two.

I don't want to spoil too much of this rich novel for those who have not read it. So I will stop giving away details of the plot now. In THE ROAD, the father repeatedly reassures his son that they are the keepers of the flame. These two are good in spite of the cruelty of their world because they decide to be. It is the same with John Grady Cole in ALL THE PRETTY HORSES. He spins his horse around and goes back for Blevins's horse because to leave without it would be a violation of his code. It would mean giving in to the pointlessness of it all. Here, we watch these two brothers struggle with the same things. Sticking to an unspoken code because it is what they have instead of religion. It is their way of bringing light to the darkness, of making sense of the senseless.

THE CROSSING is tragic, it is beautiful, it is heartbreaking, and it is life-affirming. McCarthy can put together a sentence better than anyone alive and most people long dead. He almost never gets credit for the humor contained within his dialogue, and there are multiple conversations between Billy and Boyd that are laugh-out-loud funny. Ultimately, though, the beauty of this novel is in the elegant delivery of its poignant resolution: WE give meaning to this life we did not choose, and whether we are successful or not in our endeavors to live by our own set of values, whether we achieve our goals or not, whether we live or we die, this uncaring and unwatched rock upon which we live will continue to spin.

@cuppernull

Magic-like. That’ll fit. For now. But not for long. Cos it don’t do this book justice. Nothin’ I say ever will. Or nothin’ you say. Or the next fella. Or the one after that. In this here book, words run into other words, perfect like, just like creeks runnin’ into other creeks, or rivers runnin’ into other rivers. Blink, or look away, and try to be lookin’ back to see where they joined, and of course you can’t. This book is like that. Story tellin’ for rich folk, or for poor folk, or for folk caught in between. Its story tellin for folk that see readin’ for what it is. But I ain’t gonna be tellin’ you what readin’ is. You gotta be workin’ that one out for yerself.

But even that ain’t the truth, either. Not by a long shot. Books by this man ain't tended for commoners, or even for those possessin’ lordly ways. Not even fit for those King-like, or Queen-like, or any of those Royal-like. Maybe only those people fit to read this kinda book are Holy Folk. And their Gods. Maybe only their Gods.

So if you’ll pardon me for usin’ this one, Mr McCarthy, you writ this at the start of book one. And I kinda liked it back then, so if yer don’t mind, i’d kinda like to use it now.

This book ain’t no Western story. It ain’t no Western story. It be more than that. Way more. Its THE CROSSING by that McCormac fella. And that’s all I be sayin’.

C. S. Lewis, in his book An Experiment in Criticism, asserts that there are two kinds of readers in the world. There are those who read to “find out what happens,” and for them once a book is completed the fun is over. They don’t re-read; what would be the point?
For the other type of reader, the first time through a good book is just an introduction. This kind of reader will have books that they will read over and over throughout their lifetimes. They will linger over favorite paragraphs and passages like others will linger over a glass of fine wine. This sort of reader will memorize lines and scenes and find himself repeating them in appropriate moments – or maybe just repeating them.
I must be of the second kind. One of the reasons I know that is Cormac McCarthy. I first started reading him in 1992 when All The Pretty Horses was first published. I was forty years old then, married, with children, a law degree and a litigation practice. But in one way, before I read McCarthy, I was a kind of virgin. Although I was fairly well read by then, I had never encountered an author who did to me what All The Pretty Horses did. I fought him at first. The obscure sentences, the lack of quotation marks in dialogue, the long segments in Spanish untranslated, and the word here and there that sent me to the dictionary.
But I stuck with it long enough to be pulled in. And that is not too strong a description for what happened to me. Partly because his style forces you to focus so closely and partly because he so profoundly and subtly captures landscapes and scenes and characters and interactions between characters, I was drawn into the story – no, drawn into his world – as surely and maybe even more deeply as if I had been transported to west Texas in the early 1940s. I had heard that great literature makes you so aware of another world that you learn to appreciate the real world all the more. That happened with me. McCarthy described the forests and mountains and valleys of west Texas and then Mexico so vividly that I gained a new appreciation for the mountains and streams of West Virginia, where I live. He revealed the thoughts and intents of young men’s hearts so faithfully and so strongly that I became more aware and understanding of my own.
After reading All The Pretty Horses, I waited two years for the promised sequel and when it came I dove into it like I had once devoured the newest Beatles or Creedence album. Of the three works in the Border Trilogy, the second – The Crossing – gets the fainter praise.
But I picked the book up again just the other day and it was like hearing a poignant and almost-forgotten symphony. In the first three or four pages I was so carried away that I remembered why it is that I read. I read for the very thing this book affords. It is haunting, engaging, evocative, mesmerizing, enchanting. It sees and communicates the beauty of the surface and it sees and imparts the deeper beauty and horror of the emotion and motives that are beneath the surface. There are not three pages anywhere in literature that move and transport me the way these first few paragraphs do. There is simply nothing else like it.

The Crossing is the second novel in McCarthy's outstanding Border Trilogy. Readers should note that while the novels are linked by a similar time and place and their larger themes, the novels themselves can be read separately, particularly the first two (the third novel brings together characters and explores the over arching themes of the three novels in an expository epilogue but even it can be read as a 'stand alone').

The Crossing is the story of Billy Parham and three crossings he makes of the border into Mexico. McCarthy's prose is lyrical and his dialogue is sharp and insightful and always authentic sounding. There is a surprising amount of humor in the corn-fed matter-of-fact manner in which Billy (and his brother) view the world and talk to one another and others.

Despite the occasional touch of humor, The Crossing is (like almost all of McCarthy's work) bleak and burdened with tragedy. But the tragedies are never overwrought or melodramatic. The world is harsh and cruel and indifferent. This is a literary work, but at its core it's a compelling story with engaging characters. During the course of Billy's journeys he comes into contact with people who share their own stories, creating a number of stories within stories in the novel. It is often through these stories that McCarthy explores his broader themes.

The Crossing, and the entire Border Trilogy, is about fate and the nature of good and evil in the world.

McCarthy writes: "Above all else, he looked to be filled with a terrible sadness. As if he harbored news of some horrendous loss that no one else had heard of yet. Some vast tragedy not of fact or incident or event but of the way the world was."

"The light of the world was in men's eyes only for the world itself moved in eternal darkness and darkness was its true nature and true condition and that in this darkness it turned with perfect cohesion in all its parts but that there was naught there to see... (it was) sentient to its core and secret and black beyond men's imagining."

"The road has its own reasons and no two travelers will have the same understanding of those reasons."

And "Doomed enterprises divide lives forever into the then and the now."

Just reading those quotes again make me want to re-read this profound and powerful novel. In fact, it makes me want to re-read the whole triology. The Crossing may be the high point in an exceptional and important trilogy. This is an excellent novel. Highly recommended.

I know McCarthy is a major talent, and there are sections of THE CROSSING that are spell-binding, but I didn't care whether the protagonist survived after a certain point. When that happens as a reader, the beauty of the sentences is not enough to carry you forward. Plot development would have helped, as would have a little grace to combat the darkness. But, the last point might be my fault and not McCarthy's for he's consistent in the view of the world he puts forth. As the narrator says, "There is no order in the world save that which death has put there" (47).

Part II of McCarthy’s The Border Trilogy. This book is a force of nature, describing three lengthy horseback journeys from New Mexico to bleak and impoverished Old Mexico before and during World War II. The prose mostly moves forward at the pace and with the deliberation of a man on a horse, with occasional galloping, heart-stopping passages. The poor people 16-year-old Billy Parham encounters seem mostly willing to share what they have with him, including their stories and their hard-won philosophy, while the well-off, few in number though they be, seem intent on stealing or denying him what little he has. McCarthy never tells us how Billy feels about any of this, only shows us what he does about it, as he struggles to maturity and to maintain his integrity. The detailed sense of place makes the reader feel he has been on these melancholy and bitter treks, too. A thrilling read for the purity of the vision and the power of the words. Some favorite metaphors: “As if the darkness had a soul itself that was the sun’s assassin hurrying to the west as once men did believe, as they may believe again.” ” . . .the fence running out into the darkness under the mountains and the shadow of the fence crossing the land in the moonlight like a suture.” And his matchless dialog, half of which is in Spanish but easy to follow.

With a growing focus on studies of the mind and consciousness, more and more clever and brilliant writing on related questions in philosophy and metaphysics are becoming available to us today. But however cerebrally absorbing the dialectic presented in these discussions, we are invariably left with the feeling that something essential is missing there. This may be because philosophy today, as some argue, appears to matter less and less to our everyday lives and one of the reasons for this is the fact that these treatises are rather too academic and clinical and lack the warmth and empathy needed to find answers to a search for meaning. This thankfully is the lacuna which great literature seems to address so eminently. For instance, every time you finish reading a book like "The Crossing" you feel that you may have travelled a little more - even if only a miniscule inch or two - on our journey towards understanding ourselves and in our quest to dispel the existential darkness around us. What makes Cormac McCarthy one of today's best writers is that his books attempt to address so eloquently some of the human questions that we have puzzled over the ages - such as the nature of good and evil, the horror and emptiness in our lives that impel us towards believing in gods whose existence may be uncertain. The fact that his language is so breath-taking and the texture so lyrical present a welcome bonus.

This is my fourth book by McCarthy and I felt that this book made comparatively a more concerted and consistent attempt to plumb the human condition. This is so even when compared to "All the Pretty Horses" (its predecessor in the Border Trilogy) although both books deal with similar themes with loner protagonists never wholly comfortable living in the "cities of the plains" (and their implied requirement to live within and follow restrictive - even suffocating - social norms) and elect to become "outcasts in an alien land". Its approach is also much more metaphorical and allegorical. The flipside to this is that "The Crossing" is a lot more harrowing compared to say even the post-apocalyptic "The Road" or "No Country for Old Men". (As an aside, the amorality in the latter book is beguilingly delicious even, notwithstanding its liberal depiction of crime and bloodshed).

If at all there is a shortcoming to this book - and others by McCarthy - they contain a bit too much of Spanish dialogue. Granted that almost all the action takes place in the borderlands between the US and Mexico one would suspect that Spanish would be as common as English there; and furthermore a sprinkling of Spanish may lend more authenticity and realism to the book. None the less, it tends to be a bit excessive and jarring and there is a risk that a reader lacking sufficient familiarity with Spanish may risk missing some critical elements in the narrative which in turn may dilute the pleasure one derives from reading the book.

Billy Parham is the second caballero we meet in MCarthy's Border Trilogy. Like John Grady Cole, from ALL THE PRETTY HORSES, he is young and wandering, on an undefined odyssey that takes him over the border and back multiple times. THE CROSSING recounts his increasingly hard-luck adventures. We follow Billy on a downward spiral of unfulfilled missions, lost connections, and mounting sorrows. His ill fortune in one country only multiplies in the next: Mexico proves time and again a brutally savage, untamed, and ungoverned land. For all his love of the open range and beautiful country, Billy discovers that fate shows no special kindness to good-hearted men.

Deeper in mood and reflection than the trilogy's first, THE CROSSING explores mysteries and moods of a Mexican landscape littered with gypsies, Indians, bandoleros, civil-war torn families, lawlessness, legends, drunkards, soothsayers, carnivals, and everywhere impoverished and often abused women, acting with a surprising nobleness. Billy is fed everywhere he goes. In this Fellini-like setting, horses are stolen, men are shot, bodies and animals savagely abused to underscore the wildness of old Mexico. It is a stark contrast to north of the border, where ever-encroaching regulatory bureaucracy handcuffs Billy. (A fantastic side-bar passage near the end, recounted by a philosopher-gypsy, inserts a modern contrivance, the American airplane, into the unforgiving prehistoric wilderness.) McCarthy's elegiac lament for the passing of unfettered freedom and all its accompanying wildness continues. And so I am onto the third in the series.

If you want a book that pedals the notion that life is good and easy, and everything works out in the end, and to everyone's satisfaction, don't pick up this book! Yes, it's a stark picture about a stark land with stark landscapes, but if you've ever spent time in the southwest and/or northern Mexico, this shines closest to the truth. Having spent a good portion of my life in the intermountain west , and having made more border crossings than our protagonist - I lived in Mexico for several years, married a woman from Nayarit, and have made numerous vehicular crossings over the past 30 years. As a result, this book resonated deeply with me. I could not put it down. Life can be beautiful, and harsh, and this book drives that theme home consistently. In the end, however, we discover that the sun does rise, over all of us and without distinction.

Comparisons between this and All the Pretty Horses seem inevitable. Here we have another buldingsroman: a teenage cowboy who rides south into the Mexican frontier, coming of age through scenes of privation and violence. But Billy Parham's journey has a a peculiarly mystical quality all its own. He keeps meeting these extremely odd people out in the wilderness who feel the need to explain to him, in deliriously long, wide-ranging monologues, their gnostically inclined ideas of God, History, Man, Fate, what have you. But these weird confessions seem somehow necessary, since in between them, in the main narrative, this kid loses EVERYTHING that ties him to the world. That's what is so weird about this. It's utterly brutal, but it's got this really rich, contemplative spiritual dimension which is so often chocked out by the human cruelty in Mccarthy's work. It's got a powerfully redemptive quality which I've never come across in his writing before, almost in spite of itself. Note: Tons of the dialogue is in Spanish, and it really helps to have a bi-lingual dictionary by you're side when your going through it.

Here is a book so filled with tragedy and hard, desperate living that it is difficult to fathom how people could have possibly survived to old age, or even middle age. And indeed, some did not. Billy Parham's noble and reckless decision to leave family behind to relocate an injured she-wolf to Mexico is understandable given his youth. I believe he felt he owed the wolf that much, seeing as it was his and his father's traps that caused her injury. I can't say I might not do the same myself even at my age. Then again, I don't set traps for wolves so would not be faced with such a choice, which really was not a choice at all for Billy. It was a compulsion (in my opinion). Something he just did without thinking, as teenaged boys are wont to do about many things. This part of the story is almost unbearably heartbreaking and I felt a sense of impending doom as Billy traversed the harsh landscape of Mexico with the wolf in tow. He does right by the wolf, yet not in the manner that you would hope for because he and the wolf are thrust into a helpless situation. On to the next part of the story where he returns home only to find his parents have met with an untimely fate and his younger brother is under someone else's guardianship. They go to Mexico with their voiceless dog to retrieve some stolen horses and meet an assortment of philosophers, bandits and gypsies. More tragedies. Billy returns home again without his brother, but just can't stay out of Mexico and after being turned down for enlistment in the military and working a number of odd jobs, crosses yet again into Mexico in search of his brother.
McCarthy is heavy-handed on the philosophy of wandering souls in this book, and it detracted from the story just a bit for me. The most interesting mad philosopher is the man in the church ruins; after that it grew wearisome. Sometimes it seemed the rambling soliloquies would never end. It is the only thing which kept me from giving it five stars. His prose style and use of language are as always lyrical and haunting; McCarthy is masterful in his depictions of utter desolation, both of land and soul.
The bit with the horse near the end was again almost too much to bear; I actually cried out loud "Oh NO!" when the banditos hurt him. And when he finally gets back home seemingly for good, the bit with the old crippled dog tore me to pieces. Yet Billy does redeem himself, in a sense, and all his reactions were understandable in the end. McCarthy has a gift for ending his novels with poignancy and grace, and he does so no less in The Crossing. I recommend it with reservations as there is much animal cruelty which hurts to read for those of us who are the least bit sensitive.

As a reader, when you know you're cracking open a novel by a living "master," you sometimes tend to put unfair expectations on it. Occasionally, you end up disappointed when it doesn't live up to its reputation. With this novel, however, I reached a point where I didn't care who had written the book. I realized I was no longer merely enjoying a good read, but was allowing the novel's depth of language and deeply emotive themes to speak to me directly.

One of film critic Roger Ebert's recent blog entries discusses the concept of "frisson," a French word meaning "a brief intense reaction, usually a feeling of excitement, recognition, or terror." This sounds a little melodramatic, but I found myself experiencing several frissons reading "The Crossing," moments where I hesitated continuing because I wanted to revel in the captivating, lyrically pure passage at hand.

There are passages that will catch you off-guard and inspire you, regardless of the subject matter:

"He looked up. His pale hair looked white. He looked fourteen going on some age that never was. He looked as if he'd been sitting there and God had made the trees and rocks around him. He looked like his own reincarnation and then his own again. Above all else, he looked to be filled with a terrible sadness. As if he harbored news of some horrendous loss that no one else had heard of yet. Some vast tragedy not of fact or incident or event but of the way the world was."

"The indians were dark almost to blackness and their reticence and their silence bespoke a view of a world provisional, contingent, deeply suspect. They had about them a wary absorption, as if they observed some hazardous truce. They seemed in a state of improvident and hopeless vigilance. Like men committed upon uncertain ice."

Mind you, though "The Crossing" is ultimately a tragic story, there are places where love and light find their way through, like water through the tiny openings of a sieve. I've come to appreciate McCarthy's dry sense of humor which he peppers throughout the very dark subject matter, mainly within the corn-fed conversations between Billy Parham and his brother Boyd.

"You worry about everthing. But that don't change nothin. Does it?
....Boyd shook his head. I don't know, he said. I don't know how it would of turned out if I hadn't worried."

Later, the brothers rescue a Mexican girl from bandits:

"She don't speak no english, does she?
Hell no. How would she speak english?
...Don't be cussin in front of her.
What?
I said don't be cussin in front of her.
You just now got done sayin she dont speak no english.
That don't make it not cussin."

Though few and far between, these lighthearted moments are a nice reprieve from the sadness that pervades the story. And once again, McCarthy uses the setting as its very own character, reflecting both the evil and the goodness that wrestle for superiority in the depths of humanity's soul.

As I've meandered through McCarthy's canon, starting with "The Road" and moving backward, I've come to realize he's a master of the "bildungsroman," the coming-of-age story. And here, it's grief that casts Billy Parham onto the road to maturity. There are parts that are simply and utterly heartwrenching to read.

The first line of Section II effectively reveals the essence and the heart of the entire novel: "Doomed enterprises divide lives forever into the then and the now." Gird up your emotions for this one. You risk being transformed by this searing, extraordinary tale.

Although McCarthy is incapable of writing a bad book, this is a considerably more difficult and frustrating book than the first volume in this series, "All the Pretty Horses." The Spanish dialogue is not really the problem -- I don't know Spanish, but you can easily get the gist of what is being said from the context. It is the long philosophical dialogues that tend to detract from the book.

The book is much more melancholy than is "All the Pretty Horses," as the hero, Billy Parham, courts more and more disaster each time he crosses into Mexico. That crossing seems to be an apt metaphor for the crossing from childhood to adulthood. In addition, while McCarthy does not hate Mexicans (some of the most appealing characters in the book are Mexican), the crossing of the border also seems symbolic of the crossing into a wilder frontier not susceptible to all the controlling forces of American society.

The tragic stories of the wolf and of Billy's family are well told and are heart-breaking. Billy's reaction to these tragedies is not always clear -- he maintains a stoic disposition until the very end, and McCarthy leaves it to the reader to figure out what is really going on. The book ends with anguished regret and tears, but also on a poetic note about the universality of the human experience.

It's depressing and lacks some of the notes of redemption and hope that come through in "All the Pretty Horses."

It is a terrific novel, though not one of my favorite McCarthy novels.

Billy Parhman captures a shewolf on his property. Instead of shooting it, he promptly decides to return it to Mexico. What follows is an odyssey of pain and laughter, sorrow and triumph, and all those other literary nouns people like to use to make a book sound important. In this case, of course, they all fit.

This is, of course, a Cormac McCarthy novel, and so this book is not going to pander to the reader--it's complex and dense, and like all of McCarthy's westerns, large chunks of dialogue are in Spanish. That's part of the joy in reading McCarthy--it's a tough, rigorous experience, but you come out the richer (if more depressed). What caught me off-guard is the humor here; there was some in BLOOD MERIDIAN and ALL THE PRETTY HORSES, but for the most part McCarthy's work is bleak and depressing; THE CROSSING had some laugh-out-loud dialogue, and even more that I could somewhat understand thanks to my four years of Spanish in high school. But make no mistake: the humor is a byproduct here, as is everything; McCarthy always remains true to his environment and his characters, which means that if someone has to die when you don't want them to, they're going to die. That may or may not be a spoiler here; read the book to see. THE CROSSING isn't McCarthy's best (I'd vouch for BLOOD MERIDIAN, and I wouldn't complain if someone said THE ROAD), but it's still a fascinating exploration of humanity...which yes, means a close, hard look at the bleak side of life. McCarthy doesn't lie: he only offers hope when there is some. And for Billy Parham, hope is a hard thing to find.

Of the three books in McCarthy's border trilogy, the Crossing has the largest number of Spanish-language dialogue sections...some of which are quite lengthy.

Many books I've read follow foreign language sections with some commentary (from the protagonist or the narrator) giving the contextual meaning of the foreign language section. McCarthy apparently loves the concept behind the word "sparingly" in his use of explanatory devices.

I happen to speak and read Spanish, so this wasn't an issue for me, but if you don't, you'll either spend a huge amount of time trying to translate or you'll just skip over the dialogue, missing some good passages.

The other two books also contain Spanish-language dialogue, enough to cause problems (I believe) for non-Spanish speakers, but nearly to the extent of The Crossing.

Overall, the books were great, though by the last one (Cities of the Plain) it was pretty easy to figure out how it was going to end for the protagonist(s), though the epilogue for that book was unexpected.

I started reading McCarthy with The Road, and moved to the border trilogy. His ability to describe topography, landscape and scenery is very good, in my opinion, in that I could imagine myself right alongside John Grady or Bill Parham (or both) in all three books.

While Mexico plays a huge role in all three books, I really think McCarthy did a disservice to non-Spanish speaking readers with his extensive use of the language. I enjoyed it, and for me it added a lot in terms of "feel", but for the rest of his readership, I think he could have cut it back significantly without losing anything, and gaining much.

Perhaps the McCarthy's weakest book. It surprises me that this book receives such good ratings on this site. I can't give it two stars because it is Cormac McCarthy but perhaps it is more a 2.5 than a 3. The reason is that the novel embodies all McCarthy's imperfections (imperfections which in a way lead to his cult following) but all at once and for a lot of the novel. In large parts it is baggy, loses emphasis, becomes self-indulgent. Philosophical pondering about the origins of violence and nihilism with a non-character met in a deserted village can take up twenty pages - halting an already slow plot and story arc.

I wonder if this book didn't form the central part of the overall brilliant Border Trilogy and was published stand alone if it would be so claimed. Were many readers still in the beautiful literary trance created by All the Pretty Horses? I suggest that book, Suttree, Blood Meridian and The Road were read before attempting this.

The Crossing is so vividly written that you can smell the southwestern landscape and hear the haunting romance of the cantigas. If you have travel plans to Mexico, however, the tale is enough to make you think twice about going there.

I found the Spanish challenging, although it is simple. I still needed my Spanish-English dictionary, and felt sad about missing the author's point when my literal translations failed. The long passages of Mexican metaphysics were tiring at times because I lost the metaphor. Still, the relationship between the brothers Billy and Boyd was compelling.

It's hard to imagine the starkness of their home, their clothing, food, possessions, comforts and their prose--sometimes I laughed out loud at their dialogue. It makes me want to talk in cowboy language. Billy's plans always seemed to go awry, but he toughed through all kinds of adversities with a simple "tell the truth" philosophy.

The Crossing is not about the borders between Mexico and the US, but it is about boundaries--the boundaries that are within our psychologies--how we define them and how we manage them. It is about how memory creates myth and archetypes. It is about how our impressions of the past often frame our futures.

Reading this author is a real treat--you won't be disappointed. It's such a joy to read his prose.

Life doesn't promise us any rewards, even if we live good and virtuously. For most of us, life is "filled with quiet desperation," and such is the case for Billy Parham, the protagonist in The Crossing.
Divided into two parts, in the first Billy tracks down a wolf that has been killing his family's cattle. Yet when he succeeds, he cannot kill the animal, recognizing in the mammal no animosity or maliciousness. So the boy takes the wolf down into Mexico where he plans to release it. His attempt is challenged by the motives and caprice of humans, and eventually foiled.
When he returns to his home in southwestern New Mexico, he finds his parents murdered, their horses stolen. Billy retrieves his younger brother who was taken in by a town family, and the duo go back into Mexico to seek their family's horses. Again, their objective is continually challenged, and despite Billy's virtuous intentions, he loses everything and returns to a lonely and parapetetic life.
The story includes allegorical encounters with other characters who reveal the cruelty of life to Billy. They remind us that life owes us nothing. And that for some of us, no matter how deserving, life brings us only failure.
You will need to be familiar with Spanish, as some of the characters, as well as Billy, speak it in the book and no translation is provided.
This book is extremely strong on character, while the plot line is considerably weaker. If you enjoy such books, in which the conflicts are just as dynamic internally as externally, then The Crossing will reward you. However, if you prefer books that are strong with plots that propel characters forward, you will be disappointed.

Two words: f**ing depressing (like his other works). Among other things, shows the graphic suffering of a wolf whose leg is destroyed in a trap, is "rescued" by the protagonist, then hauled to Mexico behind his horse, where she's confiscated by assh**s to be savaged by dogs in a dog-fighting pit. Our hero finally shoots her to put her out of her suffering. It's a world of wanderers, the old frontier with Mexico, unexpected dailiness, occasional kindness, fatalistic attitudes, and most of all, opportunists and border bullies who are hateful, ignorant and dangerous as a rule. It's a lot like "The Road," a journey but it's going nowhere good. Human nature at its truest and saddest. The detailed and absorbing writing (particularly enjoyed the Spanish) keeps you reading, though you might be better off to put this book down.

Volume two of McCarthy's "Border Trilogy," draws the reader into its early pages with a tale right out of Disney - a boy's quest to save a wolf from the everyday depredations of man.

It's New Mexico ranch country in the late 1930s, although it could as easily be the late 1800s, but for the intrusions of an occasional rattling truck. Billy Parham, 16, is being admitted to adulthood by degrees of trust and responsibility.

When a she-wolf crosses from the mountains of Mexico and begins preying on the Parham calves, Billy and his younger brother, Boyd, learn the intricacies of trapping - as does the reader. The laborious boiling, cleaning and waxing of the traps to remove all human scent from them; their placement and disguise and the baiting with wolf scent, all meticulously described.

McCarthy's pace and language is Faulkneresque; mannered and measured and consciously rhythmic. At first this seems stiff and artificial. But the details of particular moments and actions and the careful attention to pacing create an atmosphere that separates the reader from the common world outside its western landscape and establishes a mood of dogged, admirable determination that is central to the book.

Billy and his father sacrifice a full two days to the preparation and setting of the traps. Point of view then switches to the wolf. Driven from her mountain home, her mate caught in a leg-hold trap, she is pregnant and dismayed by the lack of wolves in the area. When she catches the scent of wolf she heads for it directly. And as quickly sniffs out the trap. And all the rest of the traps. Each is neatly, almost contemptuously sprung when the Parhams return.

Says a neighbor, quoting the area's master trapper, "Echols one time told me that tryin to get the best of a wolf is like tryin to get the best of a kid. It aint that they're smarter. It's just that they aint got all that much else to think about."

As the likelihood of trapping the wolf recedes, Billy grows more determined. His father lets him take over and Billy spends his days tracking and studying the wolf without ever catching sight of her. And finally, inevitably, his observations pay off. Billy traps the wolf. And discovers he can't bear to kill her or turn her in for the bounty.

In a moment of heroic, foolish decision, Billy turns his back on everything his father has tried to instill in him. At the same time he adheres strictly to an upbringing that fosters faithfulness to principle.

So begins his first crossing into Mexico, to return the wolf to her mountain home. The journey is so wonderfully outlandish, so romantic, the reader is drawn into Billy's passionate, stubborn persistence. His difficulties with the wild dangerous animal seem insurmountable, but Billy contrives with ingenuity and painstaking contrivance to keep the wolf alive and himself unscathed. His meetings with people are more problematic. But Billy is not one to give up. Or to reflect on the consequences of his actions.

Billy emerges from the adventure a sobered but no less romantic figure. He has two more crossings to make, two more quests into Mexico.

The second is with his brother, Boyd, who chafes under the yoke of "younger brother," following Billy's lead, his own more reflective nature silenced under the older's authority. Theirs is a more complex adventure, its passions vivid, its goals obscure. But Billy's last quest is the most vague of all. Even its romanticism is muddied and uncertain.

It's important not to give away too much of the plot. Suspense and inevitability reveal the depths of human nature, hope and cruelty. McCarthy creates a certain mystical feel with digressions along the way - the tale of a religious hermit, a blind revolutionary, a band of Gypsies towing an old airplane. Billy and his brother meet characters of endless generosity and hard-shelled savagery and are touched by both in ways that deflect and nurture the course of their lives.

McCarthy has created a sweeping panorama of a vanished west: dusty, dangerous, lawless and indifferent. And he's forged an intimate link with an inarticulate ardent soul. Billy's life is nothing like ours, his character entirely his own, yet we identify with his flaws, his short-sightedness, his aspirations and nobility. "The Crossing" captures the heart and mind with the beauty of its prose and the breadth of its story.

"All the Pretty Horses" is so terrific that this next work in the trilogy is greatly anticipated. But, marvelous as "Horses" is, it does not prepare the reader for the greatness of "The Crossing". This is a powerful, draining, fascinating, infuriating, poetic, tragic masterpiece. McCarthy is in full form here in his command of language. Most of his novels have numerous passages that are strongly lyric, but the entirety of "The Crossing" is a deep, poetic vision. While experiencing it, one is constantly tempted to read out loud, for the sound of the words and for the vividness of the imagery.
The narrative has an inevitability that is typical of this author. It is as though McCarthy were in touch with some genius of fate that guides the characters through the gloomy, often frightening landscape. McCarthy's command of extended metaphor is equally impressive. In the virtual transformation of a wolf from the novel's beginning into a dog at its conclusion, the author creates a psychological and emotional arc that spans the whole work. This is McCarthy's strongest statement on the basic sadness and evanescence of all living things.
Surely one of the great novels of the 20th century.

The Crossing continues, in a way, where All the Pretty Horses leaves off, with the same premise of a young cowboy crossing into Mexico, though this time with Billy Parham at the reins instead of John Grady Cole.
The title, at least on the surface, refers to Billy's crossing into Mexico, which he makes a few times with different sidekicks. The Crossing may also refer to metaphorical journeys, such as from boyhood to manhood, from tame to wild, wild to tame. I won't say anything else and ruin the story, as other reviewers are wont to do.
A thoroughly engaging and gripping book. At times McCarthy has Billy meet up with strangers who opine for pages on end about the mysteries of life. These intermissions I find excessive and unnecessary to the story, and I almost didn't make it past the first one, though I'm glad I did. By the end of The Crossing your brain will be full of the book, images of horses and guns and senoritas and the Mexican countryside implanted in your head, ideas of mortality, friendship, honor, and duty stuck in your imagination for days.
A few notes to the other reviewers: McCarthy has constructed the Spanish dialogue so that we can figure out what people are saying in context. All you have to do is pay attention. Also, if you aren't used to the lack of punctuation by the third page you might as well pick up the classic comics edition instead. The spare dialogue without quotations draw us into the spare, harsh scenery of New Mexico and Mexico.
On to The Cities of the Plain!

I loved "All the Pretty Horses" and came to "The Crossing" with high expectations, yet I wasn't disappointed. "The Crossing" begins with teenage Billy Parham attempting to return a wolf, trapped on his New Mexico ranch, to its native home in Mexico. Along the way, the wolf is killed and Billy gets in trouble, and upon his return home he finds it abandoned, his horses stolen and evidence that his family was murdered. It is a violent and dramatic introduction to the book, but the action and description is phenomenal.
After this section, Billy finds his younger brother unharmed and they decide to return to Mexico in search of their family's horses. Once they have made their crossing, they face several trials and adventures and they experience everything from love to betrayal to death. All of this is expertly described by McCarthy, who is simply and incredible story teller and writer. This is a superb sequel to "All the Pretty Horses" and again makes the reader long for the days of the open frontier. This is a great book for any reader.

I'm really not sure how to describe this book, or that it is necessary to do so. It is an adventure story that has many different sections which, in ways, don't even seem to fit together. Certainly, it is mainly about two brothers and their journey into Mexico to retrieve horses stolen from their father's ranch. There is nothing predictable about what happens and some of it is even confusing. Yet it held me and I know I'll remember it for a long time.

I found it to be a very sad book too. Some of the sadness comes from the tragic action but some it is contained in the fatalistic restless of the main character Billy Parham. For most of the book the reason for his pain is unknown and then it comes into view briefly and boldly near the very end. Pay attention for it will give meaning to everything that came before.

After I finished the book I went to the beginning and reread the first few pages.

Reading this book was an experience. And I urge anyone who cares about good writing to take the experience. Read slowly. Let it sink in. You will carry it with you for a long time.

This book was ok.
Again, as with all the other McCarthy books I've read (3 or 4 now) there are huge chunks of spanish dialogue that I have to guess what they're saying, because I don't have the time to look it all up.
And there are a few conversations with characters that could have been left out (the priest, the blind man, the gypsy).
At times, I wanted to skim the dialogue with the people listed above.
I enjoy Cormac's writing & don't even mind the lack of quotation marks, but sometimes the dialogue gets confusing...I don't know who's saying what, so I need to back up & go line by line until I've figured it out.
But I love the west & enjoy his stories because he makes me feel like I'm there.
As with his other books, this one has the whole "roaming through the land endlessly on a horse, making fires, looking for food" thing going on.
I read this immediately after reading All The Pretty Horses. I liked the former better. I plan to jump right into Cities Of The Plains next.
Here's what I've read by McCarthy so far & how I rank them (from favorite to least):
1-No Country For Old Men
2-All The Pretty Horses
3-The Road
4-The Crossing

There is more than one crossing depicted here, the total depending somewhat on how open you are about defining their direction. But ultimately, the lead character crosses back into himself.

This story is mostly about love and death, which is what all the greatest stories are about, one way or another.

It starts out very well, blossoms into a fine adventure, then slowly shrinks back into something much more deep and dark.

Nevertheless there is light along the way, and even a ray or two through the clouds towards the end. Something we should all look forward to, because that is maybe the best we can expect.

The story isn't done here of course, but this part stands on its own, like a Colossus straddling that troubled border, casting not just a shadow, but also pointing in the direction of the light we need to follow.

This book is probably the most difficult of the three in the Border Trilogy. McCarthy pulls out all the philosophical, linguistic, and metaphysical stops in his writing here, to an extent beyond even his other famous work, "Blood Meridian". It was tough going, working through the shifting narrative voices, the textual structure (and lack thereof), the absurd and the profound -- and that's not even considering the tragic plot. McCarthy creates a hero in this book, Billy Parham, quite different from the hero in the first book of the trilogy. Billy is not the elegiac mystery that John Grady Cole, of "All the Pretty Horses", is; rather, we are plunged deep into understanding and compassion for him. He seems to be our viewpoint to the nth degree. This of course makes the things he goes through in the tragic plot of the novel, so much more incisive to a reader's mind and heart. Difficult is the word for this book -- difficult and rich.

Great Cormac McCarthy story. I am more accustomed to watching films based upon his books, though did read The Road and The Crossing. Both were great in their lyrical style, imagery, and engrossing in the detail to the point in which you can feel your presence in the scene. Also very morbid and depressing content to read. Another heart-breaking story about immorality, injustice and brutality. But good- don't get me wrong. I would recommend for sure.

things held this back such as too much talking in Spanish without footnotes explaining wtf they are saying. Also there were many parts that just simply dragged. Probably half the book was boring filler n could have been cut out. With that being said there was a lot of great stuff in here. Lots of 'next level' writing weaving through lots of bs.

I agree with most of the reviewers that this is an excellent book, but is very much a tragedy. I was so moved/upset/depressed by the first section, which to me is very very sad, that I found it difficult to sleep for two days. I am not usually that moved by something I am reading. That being said, like a good film, I was very emotionally attached to the characters and the outcome. I went on to read the third book of the trilogy, and it too is a tragedy. While I found the stories to be very sad, the characters are wonderfully developed and I find myself still thinking and reflecting on them and their saga. I highly recommend all three of the books, but not for the squeamish and weak of heart.

The Crossing is the 2nd book of McCarthy's Border Trilogy. There are a lot of positives in this book and if not for some minor drawbacks would be one of my favorite books (a common thing for me to say when I read a McCarthy).

Now for the negatives, a good portion of this book is in Spanish. More so than All The Pretty Horses. There are very few clues to draw from the context so if you don't know any Spanish you will be lost in some parts. I ended up typing some of it into Google Translator because it seemed important to the plot.

The next thing that bothered me about this book was that some parts of the book appeared to be just to stretch out the book. The thing that I enjoy so much in a McCarthy book is that he can take very little action and make it a great story i.e. The Road and Child of God. In The Crossing though, there seemed to be stories told by characters you saw in one scene that had nothing to do with the rest of the book. Again some of it was in Spanish so it could have been better had I know the complete story they were telling.

Overall, The Crossing is a great story of loss and more loss. McCarthy's writing style is unbeatable and I can't wait to start on Cities of The Plain (Pt 3 of the Border Trilogy).

I confess that I am consistently impressed with McCarthy. Though "The Crossing" is not as robust as "All the Pretty Horses" nor as unique a literary experience as "Blood Meridian," it remains a heck of a good book.

In this novel there is perhaps less philosophy, fewer long, rhapsodic monologues exploring the inner lives and motivations of characters. There is more action, and that action leads to no less troubling places. The monologues are replaced to a certain degree with story. Within the narrative there are several smaller narratives told by lesser characters. Though these stories lack any sort of succinct moral, they none the less contain a certain resonant truth within the world of the novel.

The larger work and the shorter stories within that work all circle the idea of truth. The novel opens with the journey of Billy Parham. He captures a pregnant wolf and then attempts to bring the wolf back across the boarder into the mountains of Mexico. In this way, the narrative begins on familiar ground. One thinks of other journey stories, one also thinks of American wilderness stories (White Fang, Call of the Wild). But soon this journey story goes awry, and the narrative we expect turns in unforeseeable directions.

One of the things I find most remarkable about this particular novel and other McCarthy work is his courage. He sets the narrative in motion. He sets a fair path and direction. He lays the groundwork, and then, once things have been set into motion, he leaves the path he has established. Like one of his characters, he strikes off into the wilderness, he crosses roadless country on horseback trusting in the things and the people he meets.

I am not sure if I am making much sense. I am thinking specifically of how this book began as a story about a boy who seeks to return a wolf, how that in itself could have been enough. But once that narrative track is established, McCarthy shifts the focus, he sets the boy off on a journey without direction or purpose, he returns the boy to a home that no longer exists, and then sets the boy off again on a journey that proves as misdirected and pointless as the first. Each time the character sets out on a track or narrative path, McCarthy soon erases the path and we are left to wander for a time in a narrative wilderness.

The narrative is given its form through theme and character. When the plot does emerge, it quickly dissolves. Nothing turns out as one would imagine. There is no foreshadowing or similar such devices. It is just character and layered narrative. Desire and thwarted desire. It seems to be exactly what I want to be reading right now.

Like the hero of "All the Pretty Horses," the first book in Cormac McCarthy's Border Trilogy, Billy Parham is a teenager who crosses the border into Mexico, where he must struggle for survival at a primitive level. At first, he makes the crossing to release a wolf he has trapped and cannot bear to kill. Later, he returns with his brother. In the course of this novel, Billy undergoes just about every misfortune it is possible to encounter, becoming progressively more wretched until the final pages, an understated vignette with a potent, heartrending effect.

McCarthy is a fine writer and story-teller, particulary in the early section concerning the wolf, but I have to remove a star because of a number of dull episodes in which Billy encounters various old Mexicans, gypsies, and soldiers who inflict their convoluted philosophies upon us.

Truly one of the most moving novels I've ever read (and I'm 73, a former English major at U.C. Berkeley). Just thinking about the end of the first section is apt to bring moisture to my eyes; a life-affirming, value-affirming tribute to all who cherish life, as opposed to sharing the all too common relentlessly cruel compulsion to harm and kill what is sacred. I'm always surprised by people who don't like this book, citing among other things passages of dialogue in Spanish and Native American dialects. But the scenes in which these dialogues occur are so visually and emotionally compelling that the connections between the characters resonate like organ music in a cathedral: you don't so much hear it as you do feel it penetrate your whole being. McCarthy has left us with an timeless treasure.

Well what can I say. More brilliant writing by a master AND for the first time I found myself laughing -a lot- while reading a McCarthy book. I know you might not believe me, but truly there are some extremely funny bits in this story. [My husband kept looking at me wondering if perhaps I had slipped the dusk jack for "The Crossing" onto another book. ]

And alas, lest you wonder, McCarthy was just leading me on. Up, up he took me. Wonderful story (expected). Humor (okay, not expected). But I was laughing and soaring and I was beginning to wonder if this book might be wildly different from the others. Certainly neither "The Road", nor "Blood Meridian" had me cackling: those were all grim fare. But rest assured. As high as McCarthy took me, that was where he dropped me from. It was a long plummet but finally I was back on familiar territory... heart torn out... feelings wrenched and twisted.

Five Stars. "The Crossing" is a McCarthy story that should make you laugh and then cry. Simply a wonderful tale with characters to care about. Exquisite prose.

I first read this book about 14 years ago when it came out and it became one of my favorite McCarthy novels. I just finished it again for the second time today and now I'm a bit more critical. I think part 1 is nearly perfect with Billy trapping the wolf and hauling it back to the mountains of Mexico to set it free only to end up having to kill it in the end to spare it from the indignity of human cruelty. For the most part, this is where the novel should have ended, but I guess the author wasn't finished making his point. The rest is more cruelty and injustice 3 times over. My biggest complaint is in the telling of inconsequential events in sometimes excruciating detail. this may be the way daily life unfolds but this is a "story" and I think it's important to only include what is essential to the tale. McCarthy does this all the time, leading you into these little cul de sacs for no apparent reason.

The endless ramblings of half crazed back-water philosophers grows a little old and comes off as less than authentic, and for many people I can see how the numerous passages in spanish could be frustrating if you don't have a basic grasp of the language. The author describes the landscape fairly well and is spot on with landmarks and place names and does a good job in conveying the overall mood of this lonely and brooding place (I'm very familiar with the area in question) yet he leaves out some of the most common elements of the area. One last thing I found odd were the constant references to the cold weather encountered there. Yes, it can be surprisingly chilly in the winter but this story takes place through all seasons and I think most folks would describe it as mostly damn hot country. Strange.

All that said, This book has an abstract, haunting quality that gets inside of you and sticks around. It's about maddening injustice in the face of innocence and honor where the characters never make excuses or apologies. The power of myth is also a central theme and may have been the cause of this fools errand in the first place. This story is also rich with some pretty amusing cowboy lingo and the man can write about horses like none other.

Not an easy read and it's not for everybody but McCarthy's prose conveys a rawness and emotion that counts for alot. It's affecting in such a sad and lonely way that it tears a hole in the soul that is slow to mend.

First: I read the Border Trilogy this week. I haven't read any other McCarthy literature. I was told that if I liked Larry McMurtry, Steinbeck, and Salinger then I would love McCarthy. The first thing I bought was The Crossing. Upon realizing it was part of a trilogy with All The Pretty Horses as the first installment, I was very disappointed. I had no intrest in a Hollywood western novel. But, I grudgingly purchased All The Pretty Horses and read it. (Have not watched movie). That said...
Cormac McCarthy far surpasses any living writer with which I have come in contact. If I had the masterful ability with language that he does, I could express that in a much more emphatic manner.
Any reviewer who complains about things such as puncuation, grammer, or spanish-I feel compelled to respond with this:
1. Would you prefer that all painters created exact duplicates of their subject matter? Are we not better, as a society and as a species, for taking our interpretations further and showing those things we are already intimate with in a fresh or different way? Would you say 'cubism', for instance, is too complicated for you?
2. Are you 25 years old or less? Do you have any true ability to surive in a harsh world without parental aide? The struggles depicted in this novel would, of course, be difficult to fathom in that scenario, especially when teamed with non-traditional grammar and punctuation and a lack of a personal translator.
3. If neither of the two applies to a negative reviewer, perhaps your solution would be ritalin. It is supposed to assist in 'focus'.
On to the review:
The Crossing's main character is just the opposite of the first installment of this triogy's main character. Billy Parnham will never get anything he for which he fights. He will always align himself most closely with a losing cause. It seems that he is completely a-sexual, and the closest bonds he forms almost always precede the demise of said character/animal.
There is something striking in the fact that the moral stance, character, sense of justice are nearly identical for John Grady Cole (the main character in All the Pretty Horses) and Billy. Yet John wins, and Billy loses. Repeatedly. Yet it is Billy who survives all contests, all tragedies, all of his closest bonds. Billy's 'heart' is never joined with any group or idea or convention larger than land and animals. At some points his 'heart' is rejected; but is his survival possibly attributed to his lack of truly 'giving' his 'heart' to any passionate cause? The passion Billy gives us in the final scene of The Crossing, the self-realization and anger and utter despairing are so exceedingly rare that your tears are nearly required after finishing this book. The wolf's climax was another section that makes this book stunning and irresistable.

The Border Trilogy continues with THE CROSSING. In the book's early going, sixteen-year-old Billy Parham visits an eccentric old Mexican man who is rumored to be a brujo. Billy seeks this man's advise regarding the ways of wolves as Billy has been stymied in his attempts to trap a wolf who has wandered into New Mexico from Mexico. As Billy is helping the old man rise up from his bed, McCarthy writes "The boy almost put his hat on the bed but he caught himself." Now what is that supposed to mean, you may ask. Perhaps some western readers of McCarthy may know the reference here, but for rest of you, here goes.

Hats on a bed are back luck - not only bad luck, but specifically the kind of bad luck that this Mexican man may be particularly susceptible to. Here is what Texas Bix Bender writes in HATS AND THE COWBOYS WHO WEAR THEM, 1994, Gibbs-Smith: "Seems the expression comes from way back when people believed in evil spirits - other than the ones you drink. These evil spirits lived in the hair. This probably came from static electricity in the air crackling and popping when you came in and took off your hat. So, the idea was, don't lay your hat where you're gonna lay your head `cause evil spirits are spilling outta the hat. It doesn't make any sense. But then, superstitions seldom do."

So there you have it - why Billy caught himself before putting his hat on the bed.

I first came upon Cormac McCarthy during my AP English Test in the Spring of 1999 when I had to do a style analysis of the prose from "The Crossing" where Billy had the dream of the she-wolf and how he imagined her running free with the dears and voles and so on. Well I after the test I hated Cormac McCarthy and after receiving my test score I hated him even more. (You do not want to know my score.) But for some unknown reasons I was fascinated with his writing style. It was so beautiful and yet hollow, like a meandering river leading to nowhere. So I bought the "The Crossing." I did not read it immediately. I read it about six months later. At first it was slow but afterward the text became hypnotic and it coerced my mind into a world of haunting beauty and wanton loneliness. It revealed loneliness in you. Is that possible? Coming to the part near the end of Part I and also to where I had to do a style analysis of I found that part to be the most beautiful and incredible moving text I have ever read because the text was rich and it made you like you were Billy and that the someplace you have been or dreamed of before you cannot revisit again. It was simple heart breaking to hear how the words describe how Billy imagined, "Where she ran the cries of the coyotes clapped shut as if a door had closed upon them and all was fear and marvel." The she-wolf to me then seems to be symbolic of the mankind lost or forgotten or dying in certain time and a certain place (remember what Billy thought when he tasted her blood).
After reading this desolately beautiful novel, I read "All the Pretty Houses" and then "Cities of the Plain." However "The Crossing" is in my opinion the best in the trilogy because. . . . .I cannot say since there exist words out there that express my praise and admiration and love for "The Crossing" but that I cannot pinpoint them. The book is beauty in hollowness. "But which cannot be held never be held and is no flower but is swift and a huntress and the wind itself is in terror of it and the world cannot lose it."

In this breath-taking coming-of-age story set on the Mexican border early in the twentieth century, Billy Parham's faith in a Godly natural order of things brings him head-to-head with fate when a pregnant wolf is caught on his family's ranch. Returning from the desolate south after repatriating the wolf to her native mountains, he finds his young brother orphaned and their ranch destroyed. Crossing again into Mexico for refuge, Billy and his brother enter nightmares haunted by a mystical love steeped in blood and drowned in the dust of a landscape that offers them nothing but further loss. Told in spare prose poetry that glitters with an all-observant love of life so tenacious that it cannot recoil from overwhelming grief or resist the blind tug of insane hope, this story is sure to become a lodestar to the souls of readers who have loved the bare expanses of the great southwest and that wild icon of hunted innocence, the lone wolf.

Mc Carthy is better than Faulkner, better than Hemingway, better than Carver and O'Connor. He spirals above DeLillo and Roth. He is simply the best author this country has ever seen. I'm tempted to add Long live Mc Carthy but I won't. His books will live on.

Billy Parham sets about tracking a she-wolf roaming his father's land, but by the time he traps it, he finds he has gained a respect and understanding of it and can't bring himself to kill it. Billy muzzles the wolf and pulls it by horseback into Mexico to set it free. As is the course of things, Fate eventually separates the two, and the wolf ends up in a ring baited by dogs. Billy delivers a mercy killing in a moving scene -- as the bloodied wolf is held by the collar up against his leg, the crowd looks on. He trades his rifle for the dead wolf's pelt -- "I don't reckon I know exactly why" -- and heads back to the States, where he finds his home and life have changed forever. . .

Not believing or coming to grips with the news, Billy returns to his home and stands in front of his parent's bed, where he notices rust marks on the up-side of the mattress from the pattern of the bedframe below. Realizing the mattress has been flipped, he turns it over and his worst fears are proved true. He and his brother then set off for Mexico again to retrieve their father's stolen horses and perhaps catch the Indians likely to have committed the crime.

Keeping track of the names of all the villages they pass through can be confusing and tedious; the book is best read not trying. But my deeper complaint is about the extended monologues several of his characters deliver. The Mexico they travel through is a huge country peopled mostly by peasants, and it's doubtful these people (most of them, it seems, withered and blind) would have such sophisticated ideas about fate and order in the universe that they espouse. What's more, all these speakers begin to sound the same: just as if Cormac Mccarthy were delivering the lines himself. Not to mention they're way too long.

This is an unforgiving world. In the final scene Billy sits on the road, his head down and rain falling on him. This is what life has left him. Inevitable and relentless, the world moves without heeding the pleas of men.

Rich, biblical prose. Gives a great feel for remote, hostile Mexico of the 1800's (and forever?). But where certain civilities are practiced. You might get shot, but if you ride until you're starved you can also ride under an archway into a little hamlet and someone will fry you a tortilla without anyone saying a word. Great shady tequila bar descriptions. Great feeling of a teen getting in over his head and slowly starving while on too long of a ride. Revolutionary chaos description. Only trapping scene in modern lit that I know of. Long, seemingly random digressions...but that also fits the Mexican vibe.

'The Crossing' is part two of a trilogy by Cormac McCarthy. However in truth it can stand on its own; no need to read part one. Like part one, it is about young American boys who live along the US-Mexican border and find themselves in (mis-)adventure over in Mexico. All this takes place in the first half of the twentieth century. The author makes Mexico look like it was totally corrupt and lawless, and perhaps indeed it was. And also like part one, 'The Crossing' has a copious amount of untranslated Spanish dialogue sprinkled throughout. While of course this adds tremendously from the perspective of realism it only detracts from reading enjoyment, at least for this reader who doesn't understand Spanish.

'The Crossing' is a rambling story that sort of goes on aimlessly to a tragic conclusion. Unfortunately I never really connected to the characters; I never felt the emotional punch the author intended to give.

Bottom line: too much atmosphere with little in the way of emotion or purpose left this reader wishing the reading experience would end sooner.

Set in the late 30's and early 40's, the novel follows Billy Parham on several journeys back and forth from New Mexico to Old Mexico. Both Billy and the characters he encounters on his journeys suffer immense loss and hardship. It is this sense of tragic experience that lies at the heart of the novel. One of the many ideas McCarthy touches on is the meaning that experience acquires through the retelling thereof. Thus the reader himself becomes interwoven into the story's meaning. McCarthy's beautifully lyrical rendering of the landscape is stunning, while his exploration of the themes of man's relationship to self, nature, and God is timeless. The Best of the Border Trilogy.

I was surprised to find the second book in McCarthy's "Border Trilogy" picked up a completely different set of characters in the same country (America's SW border with Mexico), but quickly found myself caught up in Billy and Boyd's story. Deadly tough, with none of the romantic element of the first book in the series, yet poetic and moving.

once you are hooked on Cormac McCarthy's world of a desperate, stark west there's no going back..sort of like his characters..Billy Parham is innocent enough to believe he can set a captured wolf back in the mountains of Mexico but his journey there dispels him of that innocence and the people he meets along the way..he grows up like we all do..maybe disillusioned, a bit bitter and angry..but the lyrical prose of Cormac McCarthy makes the journey all worth it.

Once again Cormac McCarthy uses simple people and events to tell a story of all mankind and the world we take for granted.
The protagonist, Billy, hearing the echoes from long dead wolves that once roamed free, decides after capturing the she wolf that has been killing his father's cattle, that he will not add one more to the dead. So he decides to return her to her homeland and supposedly, safety. But that land has vanished. As all lands and creations, natural and man made, eventually must. That sense of vanishing lands, and lives, is the heart of this story.
Look at the way the fates of the wolf, then Billy's parents, then the Indians Billy and Boyd discover on their journey, then finally Boyd are all mirrors of what has gone before. The story of the wolf, trying to scratch out a living in a confusing world where nothing that is here today will be the same tomorrow, is beautifully echoed in Boyd's story. The three forms that Boyd takes in the narrative, ending with his poignant return from Mexico, hint that man's fate and the fate of the nature that he destroys - without thinking - every day, are ultimately the same.
McCarthy, like other great American writers, (Melville, Faulker, Toni Morrison) is not merely a writer but a prophet. A reminder that in a world of false realities there is still room for the purest (and rarest) of all blessings. The truth.

A Masterpiece. This book brought me stunning images through masterful prose. I liked it even better than the acclaimed "All the Pretty Horses" which I did in fact enjoy. Be prepared for tears as the reality of life is presented with visual and heartfelt honesty. Loved this great book. *****

Read It for the characters, the long paintings of description, the rough hewn dialogues, and mostly for the river run of words which you must ford. Don't read for the several cataracts of philosophical pontificating you encounter.

Do I mean the men, the animals or the author? All 3. The opening section of this book is so fabulous and satisfying that it is like eating dessert first. One of the finest writers ever, McCarthy's characters are often done-in, disappointed or die due to their own innate decency. While the rest of the world grinds by they tend to run on a course near it but not in it. My only question is: do all old Mexican men have nuggets of wisdom they are dying to impress upon the young?

Cormac teaches you how to read him then he sweeps you through a metaphysical journey with his language and vision alone. A human drama progresses in there and the words as they are put together are the effective agents rather than the philosophy expounded. This code-like speak carries a rather simple experience of returning a wolf to its home into a monumental encounter with evil, care and obcession with the spiritual. Inventive ability puts McCarthy at the head of a class that includes even Faulkner. While there, you recognize he has done his research and he is painting a mostly tragic scene for man, nothing new but, the power overwhelms. The real writing stuff is here, you can't put the man down. You have to read this book if you intend to write anything that is powerful. Singularly addictive, this writing. Read all his books, this one is his best.

After All the Pretty Horses what could one expect except an oddly constructed ultimately flawed novel that seeks to further McCarthy's vision but only serves as a poor retread of Pretty Horses? The novel follows a boy named Billy Parham who after tracking and trapping a wolf decides to return her to the mountains of Mexico from which she came. The trouble with Billy is that he floats in this stark world. As he descends into the bowels of Mexico he meets experience, violence, and mysticsm but learns nothing and emerges from the other side as awkward and ignorant as he was in the beginning.
It is tedious spending so much time with a character to see him brush life but come away no wiser. McCarthy's writing is noble and wonderful but what is the purpose if the characters are yellowed and brittle? There is no hero, no villian, no resolution. I suppose you could say it is the classic antinovel, but that is giving it too much credit. For me The Crossing was a terrible waste and is a classic example of art at its worst - where the ego cares more about the arrangement of words on the page than the story.

I returned this book because it wasn't a sequel to all the pretty horses even though it's touted as a trilogy. They are three separate stories. I wanted to know what happened to the characters in the first book.

This is an undeniably beautifully written book and wonderful story, but was a little less of a personal favorite than was the first book of this Border Trilogy. McCarthy dropped a bit of the power and simplicity of language of "All The Pretty Horses" and instead became much more wordy and allegorical. I appreciated the straight-ahead story of the first book that also managed to project a lasting emotion at the same time. In The Crossing, the language was as beautiful, but there were often stories and sub-plots that stalled out the otherwise fast and engaging book. These asides seemed to have been added to build depth in the characters, but for me weakened the story.

I found all the reviews missing one essential element in this powerfully moving work. I sat in the chair and wept at the end, even the last paragraphs projecting the fate of the wolf which began Billy's quest.

The Wolf, Billy, and the disfunctional dog in the very last page represent eloquently the disappearance from our pre-packaged and sterile society a raw emotion and freedom represented by the disappearance of the wolf from our landscape and the struggles of Billy, his brother, Boyd, and other characters in old Mexico and the Southwest of America to find traction in a society increasingly predictable and unreal. Billy's tragic rejection of the broken dog in the last paragraphs and the morning attempt to find her are wrenching.

In this sense, I found Cormac's adventure tale the opposite of An American Tragedy by Dreiser in its reality relative to a way of life that is essential to our American character: devotion to family, independance, persistance, and raw simple frontier intelligence. To anyone who wishes to be challenged by a poetic and emotionally moving tribute to the Southwest contribution to our National character..read this book!

Amazing story that spoke to me even though I have nothing in common with the characters. It doesn't over-explain but gives you wonderful insights into the human condition of ordinary men. I just loved loved loved it; Cormac McCarthy is a gifted writer.

As I rumaged through the discount table at a bookstore, a hardback book with a striking cover caught my eye. It featured a sepia monochrome photograph. Two bucks. Can't make much of a mistake for two bucks. I had never heard the name Cormac McCarthy. The image, which presented a mass of animal skulls arranged as if a flowing stream, was both stark and beautiful. That likewise characterizes the words within. McCarthy's writing has power, texture, and lyricism. It is intensely masculine. Billy Parham, the main character, embarks on a personal odyssey to return a captured wolf to the distant mountains of Mexico, to an unpopulated wilderness which no longer exists. The story cascades into a visceral tale of loss and his futile struggle to reclaim a fragment of what has been taken away. This heartbreaking novel is probably the best of the Border Trilogy.

McCarthy presents with The Crossing a challenging and hauntingly beautiful novel. I learned much spanish trying to labor through the dialogue and I admit it took much longer to read than most 400 page books. The dialogue, when in English, is understated; the scenery is bleak; and the characters extremely human, sometimes divine. The journey into Mexico is much like Conrad's Heart of Darkness, both physically and psychologically. A book that is hard to forget.

Thank God there was finally a book I enjoyed. I'm not much of a reader, but after an independent reading assignment for my AP English IV class, I discovered that reading just the right book can be captivating. No, I'm not related to Billy Parham...ha ha!I really enjoyed THE CROSSING because of the many extended metaphors and imagery. I could picture everything McCarthy described. I think quotation marks would have been helpful; however, it wasn't all that important. The parts written in Spanish were done cleverly. Since I know some of the language, I could catch the jist of what they were saying. But for those who don't know it, it could have been confusing, but it left a sense of mystery to the novel. Over all, McCarthy really captured the Mexican culture of the day and his creative writing style brought it out in an intriguing way.

I am a big fan of prose and loved All The Pretty Horses. However, I must say that I labored through this second book, frankly, because I could not understand all of the Spanish dialogue; I kept feeling like I was an outsider to a conversation between foreign people.
On the positive side, I am still haunted by much of the images in this novel. It is also one of the most thought provoking works I've read in awhile; trying to piece together all of the parts in an effort to understand what Mr. McCarthy is trying to say will keep you busy rereading sections all of the time.
I will be reading the final piece of the trilogy, so overall the work is very good.

I fear I will be compelled to always be buying his books in whatever form and shape I find them. I finished this one today over lunch and walked back into work and no one knew of what I'd just done. And that I could not understand.

What a long, tiresome, hackneyed description of Mexico, complete with dusty streets, maroon sunsets, sultry and serious women, plates of burritos and beans, and bandits popping out from behind the sagebrush. On top of this belittling and stereotyped background is a character who learns nothing from experience and continues to follow a path of stupidity. McCarthy writes much of the important dialogue in Spanish and rarely 'translates' with any counterpoint English dialogue or explanations. If you don't know Spanish, be prepared for many frustrating pages, or else keep your Spanish dictionary handy. Maybe a master like Hemingway or Castañeda can pull this off in brief spurts, but McCarthy fails. I gave it two stars because it actually does have some wisdom, in the form of philosophical dialogues.

Not everyone will like the author's style and stories but they ring true and are well crafted. McCarthy is not a happy ever after kind of author so do not expect everyone to ride off into the sunset smiling.

I feel that CM really excelled in this second book of the trilogy. While I thought that "Pretty Horses" was quite wonderful, "The Crossing" really works its way into one's mind and soul. Character development, scene description, dalogue are superb. One of the best books I have read.

I looked forward to reading this book, since I considered "The Road" great and really enjoyed the breath taking description in"All the Pretty Horses"and "Cities of the Plain." However, I am so disappointed in "The Crossing" I doubt that I will even finish reading it.
A major complaint is that there is way too much Spanish. I early on stopped even trying to decipher the meaning and just skipped those passages, which are very numerous and sometimes a paragraph or two in length. What is probably an attempt to provide local color becomes merely irritating for those who do not know Spanish. (And I've yet to figure out what Mr. McCarthy has against punctuation.)
The interminable mountains and rivers which, after all, cannot differ much from each other, get pretty tedious after a while, too. As do the stories and philosophizing from people met on the journey. After a couple hundred pages, my feeling is let's get on with it! ( It being the saga of Billy and Boyd.)

There have been few books in my life that greatly affected me. The Crossing is one of them. Cormac McCarthy's writing in this book not only depicts his typical writing characteristics, but also illustrates a level of really beautiful poetry. After reading the first section, I was so affected by the combination of story and style that I had to wait a week before continuing onto the next section. Most people claim The Road as his best work, but I truly believe this book ought to have won him the Pulitzer instead.

I have read 5 of Cormac's books and enjoy his writing immensely but this book is different. The first half of the book is captivating but the last half is long and meandering. The conclusion was an uninspired letdown. Also, there is so much Spanish dialogue in critical parts of the book I became frustrated having missed critical information. All the Pretty Horses was excellent. Stop there and forget the trilogy.

The Crossing was a very interesting book but was a bit hard for me to read because I do not know much Spanish. It was also hard to tell when someone was speaking because there wasn't any quotation marks. Other than that, this is a great story of a boy's life in New Mexico and his travels to Mexico.

Significant amount of untranslated spanish dialogue adds to a difficult read. Several overdeveloped passages bogged down and added nothing to the content. Somewhat entertaining story. Very dark. I don't understand when an author goes out of his way to make his book a difficult read.

I CANNOT SAY ENOUGH GOOD ABOUT THIS NOVEL.
It combines the severity of Blood Meridien with the lyricism of All The Pretty Horses. It is my favorite McCarthy novel and I think about it all the time. You must not deprive yourself of this incredible read. It can be difficult at times but savor it and read carefully and it will fill your heart. I would give it 10 starts if I could.

...it is obvious McCarthy can write the problem is there isn't enough of it to stop one from skimming text to get to meaningful events.

The first third of this novel is tasked to a bizarre crusade to return a pregnant 'wolf' down into Mexico. As if that isn't weird enough, as the inevitable sad, cruel demise of the wolf approaches McCarthy can't help but beat the horrid picture with excessive description which do nothing to entice - instead to keep one's sanity you're looking for a name or place that tells you '...good that's over!'

There are some very well written passages - one in particular is the tale of the old blind man cruelly made sightless by an evil enemy as told by his wife and he himself. There are the comments by a nameless girl who loves his younger brother, Boyd, who frankly is barely different then Billy. Strangely her fate is left unanswered.

Some of the passages are beautiful but sadly far too much time is expended upon small scenes that repeat themselves over and over - going into a bad: tavern, town, relationship - their fates seem to be doomed to be sad and meaningless. One can't help sense it is how McCarthy himself looks at life.

THE CROSSING is the first of the Cormac McCarthy novels I've read; I am rather confident it will be the last. This writer is grossly overrated. His style is that of someone who wants to convince us that he is just an ol' cowboy story-teller, never really tried, you know, to be a writer-type feller. Frightened to death by Faulkner, drunk on Hemingway, his prose is overwrought, outlandishly affected. Much of his stuff wouldn't get past the admissions process in any respectable school of writing. It is quite amazing to me that this sort of fraudulent material passes muster with supposedly sophisticated agents, editors, and publishers. National Book Award? God help us!

I wouldn't normally be bothered to write a review of a book like __The Crossing__, but since so many people seem to have convinced themselves that Cormac McCarthy is the second coming of Will Shakespeare, I thought it my duty to try to set them right. I mean, c'mon, just take one whiff of the overwrought prose of this book! And that's not the half of it!

Indeed, there's much more: Billy and Boyd--I was halfway through the dang book before I could keep them straight--rescue a damsel in distress. That sort of rescue was fodder for parody four hundred years ago. But with McCarthy there's not a hint of irony or parody anywhere about the episode. (For a while, when Billy--or Boyd, I can never remember which--sleeps all night with his shotgun in his arms and wakes up to ask the rescued damsel, in Spanish, if she knows how to ride bareback, it looked like things might get interesting. But they didn't.)

And by the way, while McCarthy may have good Spanish, he also makes lots of mistakes. Minor ones, but if he's going to make a show of using a foreign language he ought to get it perfect. And he doesn't come close.

There's almost no humor in the book either. And what little there is is mostly inadvertent: the laughable philosophical dialogues with aging Indians, sextons of abandoned churches, former revolutionaries with gouged-out eyes, or wandering gypsies. Just thinking about it--gypsy philosophers!--is enough to make me laugh out loud. Or get a load of this one, from the end of chapter one: "But which cannot be held never be held and is no flower but is swift and a huntress and the wind itself is in terror of it and the world cannot lose it."

Still, the book has some things going for it. The first section about the wolf is good storytelling; it's clichéd and manipulative but effective even so, much, I fear, like the westerns of good old Louis L'Amour and his ilk. And besides, today's Friday and I don't have to get up quite so early tomorrow morning. So I'm feeling generous enough to award that third star.

This book reminds me of my childhood, growing up around Bisbee and southern New Mexico. The striking difference between Mexico and America and how this difference affects the human heart. As with most of McCarthy's books this one is worth reading.

You know, reading other reviews makes me realize that my problem is not a unique one; I have now read several of McCarthy's novels, and would not exactly say that I have enjoyed any of them. Yet I keep returning.

There are themes running through every one of his novels, that he returns to again and again. A young protagonist, often family-less, or about to be, wandering the desert looking for nothing in particular. McCarthy also seems to have a fascination with Mexico (or, in the case of The Road, whatever lies to the south) and of course violence. Pointless violence, meaningless violence, unresolved violence.

As others have pointed out, the first third of this novel has more of a plot than we have come to expect from McCarthy. It may comprise some of the best writing that McCarthy has done. But the middle section involving the wolf was a draining experience. I just couldn't read about the slow torture and death of an animal and find anything of meaning there.

I give this two stars because there is no denying that McCarthy can write, at least in the style that he's more or less invented. But I think this is it for me. At the end, I felt like the damn wolf.

This is one of those books that had it not been for the vocabulary would be a high school senior's creative writing assignment. Pompous and overblown, McCarthy often explains what he has just tried to show--like a stand-up comic, he knows everything, notices things we don't and he's going to inform us. "Look, you're jerks and pseudo-intellectuals--I'll tell you what you need to know." His favorite author is Melville, his favorite book, Moby Dick. In The Crossing he tries to imitate Melville's style--inserting long passages about technical matters like bull-roping, chain-making, etc. To paraphrase a V.P. candidate running against Dan Quayle, "Mr. MaCarthy, I have read Herman Melville...and you are no Herman Melville."

Having read All the Pretty Horses, Blood Meridian, and now The Crossing, I feel a little compelled to comment.

I got through 3 of McCarthy's books because the writing technique is very good. The imagery of the desert and of survival is well done and vivid, and makes the flaws in the narrative easier to take, but in retrospect, this book was awful.

The book should have been titled The Crossings, because the protagonist puts himself through the hell of journeying into Mexico three times, each time for a less compelling reason. I almost expected he'd make a fourth trip because he forgot to turn off the stove. Each trip requires an extensive cataloging of the trials and tribulations of the journey, and while McCarthy's writing is good, it's not so good that tedium is avoided in the repeated trips.

The 3 books I mentioned above all share a morbid fascination with Mexico. McCarthy is like one of those moralists who go on and on about the decadence of pop culture, until you start to wonder whether prurience is really the motive for their obsession. For McCarthy, Mexico is the land where the upright, brave and resourceful gringo confronts human weakness and cruelty, slumming among the brown people who either offer him tributes of food, or test his manly mettle with their perfidy. Referring to Mexico as a "negligible republic", and comments about being "nigger-rich" make McCarthy seem like the typically complacent and hypocritical citizen of a country that relies on the misery of others for its comforts and stability. A McCarthy novel would look right at home in the pocket of a Ralph Lauren model.

Another tendency of McCarthy: extended pseudo-philosophical monologues by wizened codgers. The pathetic thing is that the protagonist's response to these windy metaphysics is usually, "Uh huh. Well, gotta move long now."

If you have to read McCarthy, read Blood Meridian, and plan on skimming.

I finished Blood Meridian, exhausted, after having read the The Road, which was comparatively less draining. McCarthy starts out The Crossing well, and, by God, you think he's actually going to develop some characters, even a family dynamic? But, of course, no. The family is merely established so that Billy, at 16, one fine morning, obsessed with relocating a wolf, can leave it. And then do what McCarthy has so many of his cipher characters do--just wander the harsh desert and mountainous landscape where they'll face the same passing characters, the same trials and dangers, over and over again, to the point of mindnumbing tedium. We never learn, incidentally, what would possess a presumably undisturbed 16 year old, however enamored and fascinated with a wolf he might be, to just up and leave his presumably loving family one cold crisp morning and essentially never look back? Does this kid have an attachment disorder? In McCarthy's world, this doesn't matter--the boy just leaves, but not without McCarthy's having imbued him conveniently with the survival skills of a mythical superhero. That certainly comes in handy, if you're 16, with just a horse and no money, and have decided to bolt from home and wander about in some of the harshest terrain and conditions imaginable? In Blood Meridian, McCarthy gets away with this complaint by making "The Kid" family-less...thus, he's pretty much involuntarily launched into the peripatetic, violent life that awaits him. But in The Crossing, as noted, McCarthy begins by sketching engagingly and effectively this nice frontier family with two brothers who seem attached to each other and respect their parents. As it happens, Billy does return home briefly, to make a grisly discovery to which he reacts with the emotional depth of an autistic. From there, there are hundreds more pages of scene after virtually indistinguisable scene and repetitively described landscape, that have the cumulative effect of almost torture. I read McCarthy from a kind of perverse fascination with his virtuosity (although I don't enjoy his writing). I may move on to Cities of the Plain after this, despite my criticisms, and continue my strange involvement with this strange writer.

The Crossing is set in New Mexico and Mexico in the late 1930s, during the last days of the Wild West before the onslaught of the motor car ends the frontier once and for all.

The story is centred on two adolescent, monsyllabilic farmer's sons in New Mexico. When a wolf comes up from Mexico the farmer and his two sons decide to set traps and catch the wolf. McCarthy takes us into the mind of the wolf and an interesting, but sadly short, period of the book ends when the older son, alone, catches the wolf. Here he decides, rather than kill it, to return it to Mexico from where it came. When he reaches Mexico he is surprised to find the Mexicans don't see his generosity in quite the same light. After they commandeer the wolf and set it to fighting dogs Billy shoots it, and drifts through Mexico before returning home where he finds his parents murdered by horse thieves. An obvious plot at this stage would be for them to seek revenge but no. Instead they become thieves themselves and we find ourselves heading back to Mexico, with an unclear goal except to find their horses, a big country in which to find half a dozen horses, and our two protagonists becoming less and less likeable by the page. It is a pity that although McCarthy manages to take us into the mind of the wolf he never once reveals what the two boys are thinking, nor why. What motivates Billy and Boyd? For the entire book we never find out.

They meet a girl in an encounter that will be confusing to anyone who does not speak fluent Spanish. They also meet several Mexicans, some with their parent's horses, and they reacquire some of the horses in equally confusing scenes. Later Boyd, the younger brother, runs off with the girl; Billy returns to the USA, tries and fails to join the army (we are now in the 1940s) and so works on various ranches before returning to Mexico, for the third time, to find his brother.

In `The Crossing' there are in fact three `crossings' into Mexico, which is projected as a lawless country full of generally unpleasant people, much like the USA. In fact, through the book there are few endearing, likeable characters that the reader can actually root for; the wolf and one or two horses are the possible exceptions.

Much of the dialogue is in Spanish and difficult to follow. McCarthy may be pleased with himself for speaking Spanish but many readers of English literature do not and with so much dialogue in Spanish, and untranslated, it makes the story difficult to follow.

This is further aggravated by a lack of proper punctuation. Mr McCarthy should remember that punctuation is something that has evolved with the English language and is there to make the language more comprehensible. To eliminate this not only distracts readers from what you are saying, but stops readers from enjoying the writing. Reading a sentence of 80 words without so much as a comma is very hard work. Lawyers often omit punctuation when writing a legal document to protect them legally. At times, `The Crossing' was much like reading a legal document, you need to read each sentence twice to understand exactly what McCarthy is saying.

Yet McCarthy still gives a compelling story described in vivid locations. Behind the façade of Spanish dialogue, unpunctuated English and dull characters there is a powerful storyteller at work here. It is a pity he chooses two charisma free lads having a loosely connected series of mini-adventures to express himself.

I didn't like this as much as "No Country for Old Men." "The Crossing" bears parts that are nearly perfect, and the dialogue among the characters is wonderful, but the stories that the blind man, the priest, and the gypsy tell nearly lost me. Especially the priest.

The Crossing by Cormac McCarthy is an interesting but somewhat confusing look on the early west of America. The story begins with a father and two brothers trying to track and trap a wolf that had crossed over from Mexico. The Wolf is a mother and is supposedly carrying around pups with her. This part was particularly well written, but became confusing when Spanish was being used heavily. In review of this part I believe that there was something deeper in the crossing of the wolf and thought of it as a metaphor to immigration issues. The short-lived story of the capture of the wolf was ended by a cleverly placed trap by one of the sons.
Instead of killing the wolf as some would have expected (though that would have ended the book rather abruptly) the two sons decided to return the wolf to Mexico. After this happening the brothers go on various adventures including running away with a heartthrob, attempting but failing to join the U.S. army and crossing in and out of Mexico a total of 3 times.
This was a well written book but there were many useless characters in it that just seemed to distract you from the actual point. The over use of the Spanish language confused me and would confuse anyone who doesn't speak it. I thought this book lacked motivation and suspense, but because of the author's brilliant mastery of the English language he was able to entangle me enough to finish it all the way through.

Loved it (what I could understand of it) but there is simply too much Spanish. As a dam blocks the flow of a river so does half a page of Spanish get in the way of this story, again and again and again. If McCarthy is going for authenticity, why not go all the way and just write the book in Spanish, with English dialogue between the American characters? A show-offy, pretentious device, and for that he loses one star.

Cannot believe this book was ever published! Grammar, punctuation, capitalization are nonexistent. Only got one chapter into the book and gave up. Cannot even justify this travesty under poetic license. Did not want to even give it one star but had to in order to post this review.

This novel is terrible. It could easily be 200 pages (half of the total) and lose nothing from the whole of the story. It seems self-indulgent, unnecessary, and occasionally incoherent. Do not waste your time.

I couldn't finish reading this book. There were too many sentences in spanish and I was confused with the translation or at least the assumption of a translation with the response. It was really really boring and just couldn't continue and didn't understand the true plot and content. The cover should at least warn the potentiel reader that you have to be fluent in spanish to read the book. Seriously.

I see "great writing" in some of the other reviews. I found the opposite. I also found it hard to continue after meeting the 78 word sentence in paragraph two. Then the silly indian character appears with unrealistic dialogue. Did not finish it, nor did I get very far into it before giving up. And that with having nothing else to read at the moment.

I think it safe to say I have discovered myself to not be a fan of McCarthy, whose novels seem to be consistent with the author eliminating things such as character development, pacing, plot and plot resolution, punctuation...etc. And most are depressing to boot.

If your favorite Facebook post is "I had a blueberry muffin for breakfast, yum yum" then The Crossing is for you.

If you enjoy pulling wings off butterflies or drowning kittens then The Crossing is for you.

The author tries too hard to establish a sense of stark realism. By going overboard he makes it seem ludicrous.

I wanted to stop reading this book about a third of the way through but unfortunately I couldn't. The reading circles I belong to wouldn't let me opt out. Cormac McCarthy is "serious literature" and if you quit on him then you're a wussy philistine.

A wussy philistine might be a good thing to be.