The Border Trilogy (1992-1998)

All the Pretty Horses (1992); The Crossing (1994); Cities of the Plain (1998)

All the Pretty Horses features John Grady Cole as its main character. The Crossing features Billy Parham. Cities on the Plain features both. All three are set in mid-20th century southern Texas and New Mexico and northern Mexico, which seems to be the most obvious element tying them together as a trilogy, hence its name. There's also the stoicism, but that seems to be a constant in Cormac McCarthy's oeuvre. All the Pretty Horses is arguably the best, a fully realized classic romance of star-crossed love and its various dooms, with a stirring respect and abiding passion for the rhythms of the life that the land provided in its times. For me, The Crossing—certainly the first half and every bit of the story involving the wolf and the momentum it provided as far as I could ride it—contains some of McCarthy's most memorable and affecting writing, images and action and language striking like thunderbolts, or even like the nuclear detonation that closes the novel, a surprising, apt, powerful, unforgettable moment, nicely done. (No one writes better last pages, even last paragraphs, than McCarthy.) Both these novels work essentially fine as standalones, and rank with his best. Only Cities of the Plain, reportedly intended as a screenplay and adapted from same (and it shows), relies in any way on the foregoing, and perhaps too much at that, though I wouldn't say that's the problem here. Composed almost entirely, and mechanically, of alternating dialogue, which too often goes deep into the Spanish weeds and loses a monoglot such as myself (I was able to bear up under McCarthy's ongoing conceit of its untranslated use in the first two novels, their contexts providing much of the meaning, though not all), with empty frenetic action, it's as close as I've seen McCarthy approach yet to using violence as slapstick shtick (though haven't yet read either No Country for Old Men or The Road), and it's the one here that I think you can skip. But those first two are your basic McCarthy essentials.

In case it's not at the library (which it almost certainly will be ... the edition I'm pointing to is a nice Everyman's volume but n.b., cheaper paperbacks are definitely out there if you're looking for your own copies).