Look, I need to talk about the Spanish. I know, I know — everybody brings this up with The Crossing, and maybe that makes me predictable, but Cormac McCarthy drops entire paragraphs of untranslated Spanish into this novel like he's daring you to keep up, and Richard Poe reads them with such unhesitating commitment that you either surrender to the music of it or you spend half your listening time frustrated. I chose surrender. And I think that's the point.
I was walking the lakefront with Denise last Saturday — one of those October mornings where the lake looks like hammered steel and the wind makes you question every life choice — and Poe was reading the section where Billy Parham first runs the she-wolf in that homemade trap. The cold in McCarthy's prose matched the cold on my face so perfectly that Denise had to tap my arm twice before I realized she'd been talking to me. (She's used to this. She married an English teacher who listens to dead men's sentences for fun. She knew the deal.)
The Wolf Doesn't Care About Your Feelings
That first section — Billy and the she-wolf — is the best thing McCarthy ever wrote, and I'm including Blood Meridian in that statement. Come at me. The wolf is not a symbol. The wolf is not a metaphor. The wolf is a wolf, and McCarthy writes her with the kind of terrifying specificity that most authors reserve for human characters. When Billy captures her, when he begins that insane, doomed journey to return her to Mexico, you understand something about this boy that he doesn't understand about himself yet: he's someone who will break his own life in half for a creature that would eat him if it could.
Poe reads these passages with a kind of restrained grief that I found devastating. He doesn't oversell it. The prose deserves to be savored, and Poe seems to know instinctively when to pull back and let McCarthy's rhythms do the heavy lifting. There's a flatness to his delivery in the violence — when things go wrong with the wolf, when Billy encounters the cruelty of men who see animals as either tools or entertainment — that hit me harder than any dramatic reading would have. The narrator understands that pause is punctuation.
Three Crossings, Three Heartbreaks, One Stubborn Kid
Here's what nobody tells you about this book: it's not one story. It's three journeys into Mexico, and each one strips something else away from Billy Parham. The wolf journey is the one everyone remembers because it's extraordinary — visceral and strange and heartbreaking in ways I won't spoil. But the second and third crossings are where McCarthy does something truly wild. He fills the road with storytellers. Hermits, blind men, wandering philosophers — people who stop Billy and tell him long, winding parables about God and fate and the nature of stories themselves.
My students would hate this. I love it. I kept thinking about the long, winding narrative detours in Harvester — another book that trusts its reader enough to meander, and that either rewards your patience or loses you entirely depending on the day.
These sections are demanding. I won't pretend otherwise. At 14 hours and 43 minutes, this is not a casual listen, and the philosophical digressions can feel like McCarthy is testing your patience on purpose. (He probably is. The man never met a reader he didn't want to challenge.) But if you let them wash over you — especially at 1.0x, especially with Poe's steady, unhurried delivery — they start to accumulate into something bigger than any individual story. This reminds me of what Hemingway said about writing: "Prose is architecture, not interior decoration." McCarthy builds cathedrals and then sets fire to them.
I should note: I've seen people online who prefer the older Frank Muller or Brad Adams narration, and I respect that. Poe's version is more measured, less overtly dramatic. But for this particular book — which is essentially about a boy learning that the world will not explain itself to him no matter how far he walks — I think Poe's restraint is the right call. He doesn't try to make it exciting. He trusts that it already is.
Who Should Cross This Border
If you loved All the Pretty Horses, this is its spiritual successor — but darker, stranger, and more willing to leave you without answers. If you're the kind of listener who needs plot momentum every chapter, the middle sections will test you. If you want McCarthy-lite, go read No Country for Old Men instead. But if you've ever stood outside on a cold morning and felt the world was both beautiful and completely indifferent to your existence — that's this book. That's exactly this book.
Don't listen to this as background. Don't listen at 1.5x. Don't listen while scrolling your phone. This demands your attention, and it will reward it.
Worth Pausing the Faculty Meeting For
I finished The Crossing at 11:30 PM on a Tuesday, sitting at my kitchen table with a stack of ungraded essays and a glass of bourbon I'd forgotten to drink. The last few minutes — Billy alone, the world empty and enormous around him — left me sitting in silence for a long time after the credits rolled. This is why we still read the classics. Even the ones that aren't old enough to be classics yet. Even the ones that hurt.
