- Romance for Men
I believe that the novel is a blueprint into a writer's soul. Anyone who has ever attempted to write one knows how much of the author is embedded into its sentences and structure. When I read what I consider to be a bad book, I notice that it is usually written by an arrogant person.
Cormac McCarthy's All the Pretty Horses (1992) comes immediately to mind. I think of it as a romance novel for men, his trilogy included. Like all good romance novel writers, McCarthy uses clichés and derivative characters to sell millions of copies. He gives men a romanticized view of manliness. McCarthy wraps his characters in half-truths and idealized anecdotes, much like Jackie Collins does, only his are about the Lone Star State, the border, and its cowboy myths. His strong, silent, and very American John Grady Cole is a main character that can only come from reading Louis L'Amour pulp fiction and watching John Wayne and Clint Eastwood Westerns.
McCarthy, originally from Tennessee by way of Rhode Island, adds his superiority complex into the tale when he has Cole and his two companions traverse the border into the wilds of Mexico where adventure awaits. Cole beds the "Felina" of McCarthy's imagination (only in this tale her name is Alejandra, and she is rich) and holds his own in a Mexico that is seen through his colonizing lens, meaning a foreign country filled with black and white (mostly black). The natives are either violent and corrupt or gentle and honest. Cole gets the best of these natives in the end, teaching them a thing or two about his truth and diplomacy, and heads back home to the good U.S. of A.
Is it any wonder that such a book was written by a man who said in an interview last year, "I ended up in the Southwest because I knew that nobody had ever written about it"?