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

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.

We could easily call The Crossing a coming of age story, an adventure story, a quest or an epic poem, but it is all that and much more. As with any coming of age story, Billy Parham loss of innocence comes with a price of great consequence. Like an adventure story The Crossing is filled with action and unexpected situations. As with tales of quests as the Iliad and Gulliver's Travels we meet strange and interesting creatures along Billy's path. Like an epic poem The Crossing is filled with lyrical prose, both in Spanish and English.

Cormac McCarthy is one of the great American authors of the twentieth century and he proves it in once again in the Crossing the second book of his border trilogy. His prose is beautiful to read, with dialogue devoid of quotation marks and contractions missing apostrophes. He shifts from English to Spanish can be challenging to the non-Spanish reader. His scenes rich with descriptors can be stark and ruthless. The reader should be prepared to be shocked and moved.

Reading McCarthy comes with a price. After reading one of his books the reader feels changed, drained and at a loss. I, like Billy cannot retrieve my innocence. It disappeared when I went south of the border with him. As the Spanish Gypsy tells him

"We think we are the victims of time. In reality, the way of the world isn't fixed anywhere. How could that be possible? We are our own journey. And therefore we are time as well. We are the same. Fugitive. Inscrutable. Ruthless."

I cannot helped but be moved by Cormac McCarthy's work and The Crossing was perhaps the favorite, which I have read.


Talk is for sissies (CM will tell you why in 300 pages)   July 14, 2005
 14 out of 27 found this review helpful

Having read All the Pretty Horses, Blood Meridian, and now The Crossing, I feel a little compelled to comment.

I got through 3 of McCarthy's books because the writing technique is very good. The imagery of the desert and of survival is well done and vivid, and makes the flaws in the narrative easier to take, but in retrospect, this book was awful.

The book should have been titled The Crossings, because the protagonist puts himself through the hell of journeying into Mexico three times, each time for a less compelling reason. I almost expected he'd make a fourth trip because he forgot to turn off the stove. Each trip requires an extensive cataloging of the trials and tribulations of the journey, and while McCarthy's writing is good, it's not so good that tedium is avoided in the repeated trips.

The 3 books I mentioned above all share a morbid fascination with Mexico. McCarthy is like one of those moralists who go on and on about the decadence of pop culture, until you start to wonder whether prurience is really the motive for their obsession. For McCarthy, Mexico is the land where the upright, brave and resourceful gringo confronts human weakness and cruelty, slumming among the brown people who either offer him tributes of food, or test his manly mettle with their perfidy. Referring to Mexico as a "negligible republic", and comments about being "nigger-rich" make McCarthy seem like the typically complacent and hypocritical citizen of a country that relies on the misery of others for its comforts and stability. A McCarthy novel would look right at home in the pocket of a Ralph Lauren model.

Another tendency of McCarthy: extended pseudo-philosophical monologues by wizened codgers. The pathetic thing is that the protagonist's response to these windy metaphysics is usually, "Uh huh. Well, gotta move long now."

If you have to read McCarthy, read Blood Meridian, and plan on skimming.


An epic with many sections of perfect storytelling   August 28, 2003
 13 out of 13 found this review helpful

Cormac McCarthy is a national treasure. The Crossing begins with a long section where the protagonist, Billy Parham, is tracking a she-wolf, setting traps which she fails to get caught in, finally catching her, then being unable to kill her. So he sets off to Mexico from his home in NM, planning to return her to the mountains where from which she surely came. Things don't quite work out the way he'd planned.
And when he returns home, he finds his world forever changed. He and his brother, Boyd, return to Mexico to try to find his father's stolen horses and the men who stole them. Again, things don't quite work out as planned.
Without saying too much that would reveal the plot line, I'll mention that Billy eventually sets out to Mexico a third time on a mission of reclamation and redemption. And yet again, all does not go according to plan.
Along the way, there are long stretches of other travelers or characters Billy meets who tell their stories: a priest, a blind man, a gypsy, among others. The overall effect is one of melancholy, and of course, having been written by such a consummate master of the art, the eloquence of the language shines through everywhere. As a side benefit, you'll learn or re-learn quite a bit of Spanish along the way. I began by rewinding the tape and doing word for word translations from my rusty memory. By about tape #6 I became aware that I was understanding the Spanish perfectly, scarcely aware he'd shifted into it.
Spectacular book on tape.


c'mon....   March 19, 2007
 13 out of 19 found this review helpful

I finished Blood Meridian, exhausted, after having read the The Road, which was comparatively less draining. McCarthy starts out The Crossing well, and, by God, you think he's actually going to develop some characters, even a family dynamic? But, of course, no. The family is merely established so that Billy, at 16, one fine morning, obsessed with relocating a wolf, can leave it. And then do what McCarthy has so many of his cipher characters do--just wander the harsh desert and mountainous landscape where they'll face the same passing characters, the same trials and dangers, over and over again, to the point of mindnumbing tedium. We never learn, incidentally, what would possess a presumably undisturbed 16 year old, however enamored and fascinated with a wolf he might be, to just up and leave his presumably loving family one cold crisp morning and essentially never look back? Does this kid have an attachment disorder? In McCarthy's world, this doesn't matter--the boy just leaves, but not without McCarthy's having imbued him conveniently with the survival skills of a mythical superhero. That certainly comes in handy, if you're 16, with just a horse and no money, and have decided to bolt from home and wander about in some of the harshest terrain and conditions imaginable? In Blood Meridian, McCarthy gets away with this complaint by making "The Kid" family-less...thus, he's pretty much involuntarily launched into the peripatetic, violent life that awaits him. But in The Crossing, as noted, McCarthy begins by sketching engagingly and effectively this nice frontier family with two brothers who seem attached to each other and respect their parents. As it happens, Billy does return home briefly, to make a grisly discovery to which he reacts with the emotional depth of an autistic. From there, there are hundreds more pages of scene after virtually indistinguisable scene and repetitively described landscape, that have the cumulative effect of almost torture. I read McCarthy from a kind of perverse fascination with his virtuosity (although I don't enjoy his writing). I may move on to Cities of the Plain after this, despite my criticisms, and continue my strange involvement with this strange writer.


Beauty in Hollowness?   January 26, 2000
 11 out of 11 found this review helpful

I first came upon Cormac McCarthy during my AP English Test in the Spring of 1999 when I had to do a style analysis of the prose from "The Crossing" where Billy had the dream of the she-wolf and how he imagined her running free with the dears and voles and so on. Well I after the test I hated Cormac McCarthy and after receiving my test score I hated him even more. (You do not want to know my score.) But for some unknown reasons I was fascinated with his writing style. It was so beautiful and yet hollow, like a meandering river leading to nowhere. So I bought the "The Crossing." I did not read it immediately. I read it about six months later. At first it was slow but afterward the text became hypnotic and it coerced my mind into a world of haunting beauty and wanton loneliness. It revealed loneliness in you. Is that possible? Coming to the part near the end of Part I and also to where I had to do a style analysis of I found that part to be the most beautiful and incredible moving text I have ever read because the text was rich and it made you like you were Billy and that the someplace you have been or dreamed of before you cannot revisit again. It was simple heart breaking to hear how the words describe how Billy imagined, "Where she ran the cries of the coyotes clapped shut as if a door had closed upon them and all was fear and marvel." The she-wolf to me then seems to be symbolic of the mankind lost or forgotten or dying in certain time and a certain place (remember what Billy thought when he tasted her blood).

After reading this desolately beautiful novel, I read "All the Pretty Houses" and then "Cities of the Plain." However "The Crossing" is in my opinion the best in the trilogy because. . . . .I cannot say since there exist words out there that express my praise and admiration and love for "The Crossing" but that I cannot pinpoint them. The book is beauty in hollowness. "But which cannot be held never be held and is no flower but is swift and a huntress and the wind itself is in terror of it and the world cannot lose it."