NOT the same central characters as All the Pretty Horses ... oh well. Maybe this is one of them thar "thematic" trilogies.

My initial surface thought about the first section (most enjoyable section in my opinion) was that it could've been subtitled "A Boy and His Wolf" (there's a science fiction story by Harlan Ellison that had a huge impact upon me as a teen called "A Boy and His Dog"). Upon completion it dawned on me an even more obvious predecessor, The Call of the Wild. As John Grady Cole was a sort of J.C. to the horse, Billy is sort of messiah to The Wild, starting(?) with a fascination for coyotes and culminating in a kinship with the she-wolf. And once they connect, he's separated from the rest of us.

And then suddenly the novel's not about the boy and his wolf. Limited to a lone character—who's merely Billy, not Billy the Kid and NOT The Kid from Blood Meridian—who wanders from conversation to conversation, with strangers, i feared it'd be too static for my taste. (also, i might, i say, i just MIGHT be using all the punctuation, especially the commas, for this review, the ones McCarthy opted not to use ... or maybe e.e. cummings used them all in advance—of McCarthy *and* me—so now i'm impoverishing some future writer?! ahhhhh!)

OK, so i was lamenting the absence of tension between 2 main characters before that dopey tangent/note but I SHOULD OF KNOWED McCarthy could devise an act of violence (mercifully offstage) that would blast Billy out of his isolation & into a relationship: with his little brother, a messiah of another sort. Apparently (and inexplicably, to me) Boyd's a golden boy among the dispossessed Mexicans (apparently) without having to do or say a thing. (Maybe his blonde hair is even more blondier than his brother's?!)

Boyd's instapopularity remains a source of consternation for me and i still can't make sense of who says what when the boys encounter The Girl. Therefore, i'm not sure how to interpret a lot of what follows that crucial hook-up, the most central thing being Boyd's mythical status among The People.

That lack of connection combined with some of the more metaphysically-mired "conversations" make it impossible for me to give this 5 stars.

On a similar note, this novel imposes upon the reader tales told by the narrator on the behalf of the many people that Billy encounters in his peregrinations. I barely endured the tedious metaphysics lecture masquerading as a personal history from the lapsed(?) priest but really enjoyed the ciego's lifestory "as told by" his wife.

Finally, some lit-critter's writing mentioned "the importance of stories" in this book in the same musty paragraph as the word metafiction. My obsession with creative writing and how most of it is (at the least, subtly) about books/writing/language didn't kick in at all during this reading. My interest in it hasn't died (e.g., it was one of the many things i enjoyed tremendously about Don Quixote) and this book contains every metafictional signifier, so why didn't i get all intellectually jazzed and make a million notes in the margin? I cannot know it.

I theorized that All the Pretty Horses was an exploration of Being v. Doing v. Saying. The Crossing seems focused on Saying. There is a LOT of talk and probably as much monologing (the narrator does it on behalf of the characters). I think the narrator really loves these characters for what they enable him to say: he can wax poetic about destiny, good/evil, justice, history, and other tiny topics, sometimes for several pages at a time.

Some readers will really really dig that stuff. It's not my favorite part of McCarthy's style. In fact, the disjunction of simply narrated action to sweeping soaring sermon often reminded me of a poor transition from dialog to a musical number.