Every Version of They Shoot Horses, Don't They?

Sydney Pollack's film benefits enormously from what film can do that prose cannot: it makes you feel the physical exhaustion. The intermittent sprint sequences, the gaunt faces of contestants as days blur together, the MC played by Gig Young with showbiz cruelty dressed as encouragement. Jane Fonda's Gloria is one of the great performances of American cinema from that decade, all fury and self-destruction. Gig Young won the Academy Award for Supporting Actor and thoroughly deserved it: his Rocky is the face of a system that profits from watching people break. McCoy's novel is a tight, cold gem. The film is a body blow.

The novel's structure is what makes it genuinely strange: we know from the first page how it ends, and McCoy uses that knowledge to turn the entire story into an exercise in dread. The prose is spare almost to the point of coldness, which reads very differently now than it did in 1935. At under 200 pages it is easy to dismiss as slight. That would be a mistake. What McCoy built is an architecture of inevitability: the reader is trapped in the same circuit as the dancers, circling the floor until there is nowhere left to go.

There is something genuinely ironic about the fact that McCoy, a California pulp writer who almost certainly never read Sartre, produced what de Beauvoir identified as the first American existential novel. The absurdity of the marathon, the nihilism of Gloria's worldview, the indifferent machinery of the contest: McCoy arrived at all of it through pure American despair, not through philosophy. The French recognized the existential content because they were looking for it. Americans missed it because they expected art to look like art. The novel spent years as a curiosity precisely because it was doing something genuinely new and nobody on this side of the Atlantic had the framework to see it.