Product Description

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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #9168 in Books
• Published on: 1995-03-14
• Released on: 1995-03-14
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 432 pages

Amazon.com
The opening section of The Crossing, book two of the Border Trilogy, features perhaps the most perfectly realized storytelling of Cormac McCarthy's celebrated career. Like All the Pretty Horses, this volume opens with a teenager's decision to slip away from his family's ranch into Mexico. In this case, the boy is Billy Parham, and the catalyst for his trip is a wolf he and his father have trapped, but that Billy finds himself unwilling to shoot. His plan is to set the animal loose down south instead.

This is a McCarthy novel, not Old Yeller, and so Billy's trek inevitably becomes more ominous than sweet. It boasts some chilling meditations on the simple ferocity McCarthy sees as necessary for all creatures who aim to continue living. But Billy is McCarthy's most loving--and therefore damageable--character, and his story has its own haunted melancholy.

Billy eventually returns to his ranch. Then, finding himself and his world changed, he returns to Mexico with his younger brother, and the book begins meandering. Though full of hypnotically barren landscapes and McCarthy's trademark western-gothic imagery (like the soldier who sucks eyes from sockets), these latter stages become tedious at times, thanks partly to the female characters, who exist solely as ghosts to haunt the men.

But that opening is glorious, and the whole book finally transcends its shortcomings to achieve a grim and poignant grandeur. --Glen Hirshberg

From Publishers Weekly
This second volume of McCarthy's Border Trilogy-an 11-week PW bestseller-follows two teenage boys across the American Southwest and Mexico in the years before WWII.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
Sixteen-year-old Billy Parham is obsessed with trapping a renegade wolf that has crossed the border from Mexico to raid his father's cattle ranch. By the time he finally succeeds, Billy has formed such a close bond with his prey that he decides to return the wolf to its home, and the two head off into the mountains. Billy returns months later to find that his parents have been murdered by horse thieves. He abducts his kid brother from a foster home, and they ride into Mexico to retrieve their property, encountering gypsies, desperadoes, and itinerant philosophers along the way. Essentially a boy's adventure story written for adults, The Crossing is thematically related to the award-winning bestseller All The Pretty Horses (LJ 5/15/92; "Best Books of 1992," LJ 1/93, p. 54-58.), but it is not a sequel. McCarthy's luminous prose style, spare as the desert landscapes it describes, is almost Beckett-like in its blend of deadpan humor and existential despair. An exceptionally vivid and rewarding novel.
--Edward B. St. John, Loyola Law Sch. Lib., Los Angeles
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Customer Reviews

A difficult novel
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.

Highly recommend!!
This story has all the elements that draw a reader in and hold them fast: love, tragedy, revenge, hope. Try it, you'll like it!

Like Life, Slow and Unexpected
Volume II of The Border Trilogy, The Crossing is McCarthy's follow-up to All the Pretty Horses. The United States-Mexican border is the only recurring character from the previous volume, but the settings and themes are quite similar.

However, The Crossing is unlike its predecessor in the fact that while All the Pretty Horses followed a fairly linear story, The Crossing resembles exact life in that one never knows what the next day will bring and sometimes today's conflict has no resolution tomorrow. Nonetheless, we grow and learn from one day to the next, whether we intend to or not.

The Crossing begins with Billy Parham, a teenager, inexplicably deciding to return a captured pregnant wolf to Mexico and neglecting to inform his parents of the trip. The plight continues for such a lengthy time that I found myself wondering if the entire book would be about the return of the wolf.

It isn't.

In true McCarthy style, the wolf's tale comes to an abrupt conclusion. However, Billy's story continues on.

He returns home, only to have a horrifying discovery. He now must return to Mexico with his younger brother on a new odyssey. They have a mission, but that mission soon gets derailed and practically forgotten.

After a great deal of conflict, Billy finds himself alone once more and returns to America. He wanders for several years and then resolves to return to Mexico a third time and find his brother. What he does when he finally locates his brother will both stun and touch you.

McCarthy writes The Crossing in elaborate detail that sometimes can lull your interaction with the book. However, just as things become almost dull, he jars you back to full alert. Because of this, I like to compare this book to real life because follow-through is so rare in our day-to-day affairs. We never know what to expect and predictions are so infrequently accurate we wonder why we bother in the first place. McCarthy understands such nuances of true life but manages to synthesize such reality with enough drama and conflict to keep the reader invested. We follow Billy on an epic journey that plays out over years and we watch him grow from a boy to a man, experiencing hardship that would annihilate most people.

I wouldn't say The Crossing is one of my favorite reads, but I learned a great deal from the author about pacing and description. I also learned more Spanish from this novel than three years in high school and understand the complexities of horses and camping on the open plain far more than I ever could have imagined, thanks to this book.

~Scott William Foley, author of Souls Triumphant