Synopsis
This second volume of Cormac McCarthy's famed Border Trilogy is set in the 1940s and tells the story of 16-year-old Billy Parham and his obsessive quest to return to Mexico a pregnant she-wolf he has trapped. He leaves New Mexico, setting off on his own, and in the course of this perilous (and doomed) journey he becomes far older than his years. When Billy returns, he encounters a scene of violence and desolation: everything he left behind has been transformed. He strikes out again, this time with his younger brother, Boyd, into the unknown frontier. Boyd becomes a legendary folk hero, then disappears, and Billy's new quest is to find his lost brother. McCarthy has been compared to everyone from Hemingway to Faulkner. This fable-like tale of mythic quests and heroic despair takes on the issues of guilt and innocence, love and violence, and the power of fraternal bonds.
| Details | | Publication Date: | 1995-05-01 | | Series: | The Border Trilogy, V. 2 |
| Size | | Height: | 8.3 in | | Width: | 5.5 in | | Thickness: | 1.2 in | | Weight: | 12.8 oz |
Publisher's Note
Following All the Pretty Little Horses in Cormac McCarthy's Border Trilogy is a novel whose force of language is matched only by its breadth of experience and depth of thought. In the bootheel of New Mexico hard on the frontier, Billy and Boyd Parham are just boys in the years before the Second World War, but on the cusp of unimaginable events. First comes a trespassing Indian and the dream of wolves running wild amongst the cattle lately brought onto the plain by settlers - this when all the wisdom of trappers has disappeared along with the trappers themselves. And so Billy sets forth at the age of sixteen on an unwitting journey into the souls of boys and animals and men. Having trapped a she-wolf he would restore to the mountains of Mexico, he is long gone and returns to find everything he left behind transformed utterly in his absence. Except his kid brother, Boyd, with whom he strikes out yet again to reclaim what is theirs - thus crossing into "that antique gaze from whence there could be no way back forever". What they find instead, singly and together, is in extraordinary panoply of fiestas and circuses, dogs and horses and hawks, pilgrims and revolutionaries, grand haciendas and forlorn cantinas, bandits and gypsies and roving tribes, a young girl alone on the road, a mystery in the mountain wilds, and a myth in the making. And in this wider world they fight a war as rageful as the one neither, in the end, will join up for back home. One brother finds his destiny, while the other arrives only at his fate. An essential novel by any measure, and the transfixing middle passage of Cormac McCarthy's ongoing trilogy, The Crossing is luminous and appalling, a book that touches, stops,and starts the heart and mind at once.
In The Crossing, Cormac McCarthy fulfills the promise of All the Pretty Horses and at the same time give us a work that is darker and more visionary, a novel with the unstoppable momentum of a classic western and the elegaic power of a lost American myth.In the late 1930s, sixteen-year-old Billy Parham captures a she-wolf that has been marauding his family's ranch. But instead of killing it, he decides to take it back to the mountains of Mexico. With that crossing, he begins an arduous and often dreamlike journey into a country where men meet ghosts and violence strikes as suddenly as heat-lightning--a world where there is no order "save that which death has put there."An essential novel by any measure, The Crossing is luminous and appalling, a book that touches, stops, and starts the heart and mind at once.
Industry Reviews
"'The Crossing' generates an immense and sorrowful power....[It is a] soul-shaking novel."
Wolfe
"With McCarthy's white-water prose and fierce, mythic rendering of providence and doom, the comparison to Faulkner is merited and due....[This is] a breathtaking story, told in spare and mesmerizing prose."
Wolfe
"McCarthy has achieved something only a few artists even attempt: He has created his won world...beautiful, nightmarish, isolated."
Wolfe
"Sparse and laconic, yet brilliantly evocative...a work that will stand a long, long time and which comes close to the ever-sought, never-reached accolade of 'the great American novel.'"
Wolfe
"A masterly display of some of the most pitch-perfect prose being written these days....[A] brilliantly imagined book."
Wolfe
"'The Crossing' is a miracle in prose, an American original."
Brandon
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