Gli è stato concesso di spiare le falle dell’uno e le falle dell’altro, di valutare i meriti, di criticare le intemperanze. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. The novel can surely be read on its own, but those who have read the earlier novels in the trilogy will find a richer reward.

Like its brilliant predecessors, All the Pretty Horses and The Crossing, Cities of the Plain tells a riveting story that is simple in form but presses outward toward the archetypal and the infinite.

Similarly, in The Crossing (1994), teenage Billy Parham, out of New Mexico, spontaneously leaves his loving family and sets out by horse for Mexico seemingly out of a vague sense of melancholic nostalgia for the old ways. All the Pretty Horses (1992), takes place a couple of years after the end of WWII when 16-year old John Grady Cole, put out of his Texas family ranch when his mother decides to sell the ranch, rides into Mexico where he impresses the rich owner of a huge hacienda with his expertise of breaking wild horses. He starts strings of dialogue by only giving the name of the first speaker, all the while eliminating the use of quotation marks. For reference, my favorite of the trilogy was The Crossing, followed by Cities of the Plain, then All the Pretty Horses --though each book is a masterpiece in itself. Characters caught in the insularity of an impersonal universe, a persistent, dark night of the soul, but one marked by fleeting sparks of light of an ineluctable beauty.

I would have given this book 2 stars, but since the prose was good, it gest a 3, even though I didn’t notice his prose since I was so bored. When the two boys come together as men, in the trilogy's final volume, a dangerous chain of events will bring this story to its savage, inevitable conclusion. At the end of the chapter, we see a taxi drop Magdalena off by a creek where John Grady is waiting for her.The change comes when John Grady falls in love with a beautiful, ill-starred Mexican prostitute and sets in motion a chain of events as violent as they are unstoppable.

There are wide fields of grass and sage, distant mountains, and cattle not in pens but grazing on the land until they need to be rounded up. Not least is that Magdalena (her real name) works for a pimp who also happens to be in love with her. What claims do age and youth have on these characters and how are “beauty and loss one and the same?

Judged, as it must be, in the context of its brother novels, Cities of the Plain is nonetheless, flaws and all, an essential component of a contemporary masterpiece. Like the Western settings he captures to perfection, his work is both heart-wrenchingly beautiful and uncompromisingly brutal. The trilogy examines an extinct way of American life and combines gut punches with beauty as it takes us through rural Mexico life and the 20 th century American southwest.