Violence, machismo, honor, evil…and Brad Pitt.
For an intensely literary stylist who shuns media attention, Cormac McCarthy has hardly been wallowing in obscurity. Oprah’s Book Club has helped to make his grim but magnificent novel, The Road, one of America’s most popular reads, and an upcoming film of his surprisingly genre-based, movie-ready No Country for Old Men will only increase his popularity. Many of his new fans will undoubtedly want to check out All the Pretty Horses, the 1992 book that won him early acclaim (and a National Book Award). The novel was made into a movie starring Matt Damon back in 2000, and now fellow young Hollywood A-lister Brad Pitt has contributed his voice to this audio version.

The book, and its sequels The Crossing and Cities of the Plain, which together make up the Border Trilogy, follow the story of a young cowboy named John Grady Cole. When his family ranch is sold out from under him, he saddles up with a buddy and they light out for adventure, romance and frequent gunplay down in Mexico. Like a generation of filmmakers earlier in the century, McCarthy has found in the Western a fertile ground for exploration of weighty themes such as violence and machismo, honor and evil. He endows these matters with a weight and mythic resonance that may seem over-the-top to some — “What he loved in horses was what he loved in men, the blood and the heat of the blood that ran them,” reads a typical sentence. But as you get deeper into the books, you find that they exert an increasingly hypnotic pull and power. In these early works, McCarthy writes in Hemingwayesque sentences with simple clauses connected by lots of ands. More than most of his contemporary fiction writers, he is passionately involved in the heft and rhythm and poetic resonance of words and sentences, and the choice of audio reader seems particularly crucial.

Brad Pitt, who was born in Oklahoma and raised in Missouri, applies a suitable mild twang to his reading of the books, and does a serviceable job, but there’s something a bit thin about the audio narration when compared with the voice the words might summon in a reader’s imagination. It’s hard not to think that an older, rougher-voiced, more seasoned actor — Tommy Lee Jones? Scott Glenn? — might have done better at capturing the gravitas, depth and grandeur of McCarthy’s words.