Lonesome Dove

Larry McMurtry died today and in tribute I'm recommending this book, my favorite novel. There are so many deep, interesting, lovable characters in this book. I was intensely sad that I could not spend more time with the characters as I approached the end, a feeling I had only experienced with The Goldfinch.

It's a love story and a western (or anti-western). It's about friendships, fatherhood, adventure. It's about life and forgiving yourself. It does not have enough women.

One unusual thing that's stuck with me is the extent that the American West itself is a character. The rivers are almost characters. The idea of judging distance not by miles or hours but by days or weeks to the next river or the next source of water. The idea of understanding geography as anchored by the Rio Grande, the Red, the Arkansas, the Missouri.

It's the kind of writing that fires your whole brain, sharing the sensations of the characters. The sights and smells and pains and fears.

I don't think it's a book for people who love any particular genre. It's for everyone. I think you'll like it, too.

– originally written 2021-03-26

The bleakest story I have ever read. 5/5 stars.

It's been more than a month now since I finished this book, so it's certainly high time I processed my emotions and put in a review.

This book is powerful. The writing is incredible. Every character is not only a fully realized human being (with all the flaws, faults, absurdities, cruelties, baseness, and deepest sadnesses that being a human entails), but they are all people that you've encountered in your life. They are the real folks on the street corner, serving food at the diner, working as a cashier, sitting on the bed in the hospital, across from you in the office in their cubicle, slogging through this troublesome journey called life. These characters are the people all around you, living real lives of quiet despair that you only catch a glimpse of once in a while. People making the wrong choices and dealing with the consequences of their actions or the consequences of the terrible, devastating misfortunes that life inevitably thrusts upon them.

The realness of the story is what makes it so incredibly bleak. Because real life is scary, painful, and oftentimes hopeless You don't get easy answers, none of us do. When things go wrong, you don't get some deus ex machina to fix it. It just sucks and you have to live with the fall out. There are no good people, there are just people, trying to do their best and fucking it up at every turn. That's how this book is, that's how things go for every character. Just like real life. There are no heroes here.

This is a masterful, powerful book that is well worth your time. If you read nothing else this year, read Lonesome Dove, but know that it is the most bleakly realistic fiction you may ever read. No one is getting out unscathed, least of all the reader.

This is certainly an epic. McMurtry spends 300 pages introducing his characters and then another 600 weaving their stories in and out of a 3000 mile cattle drive from Texas to Montana.

McMurtry obviously loves his subject: the book is full of western tropes but he manages to undermine the myths by showing how harsh and unforgiving frontier life was, and how survival depended on luck as much as judgement and skill.

The action is nicely paced. The characters are all deep, beautifully drawn and uniquely flawed, so you end up loving and admiring them but wanting to slap some sense into them too. The book is funny as well as exciting and sad. It’s worth reading for Gus’ hilarious monologues alone.

Some of the plot lines depend heavily on coincidence. Characters run into each other all the time and at one point McMurtry tries to explain this away by telling us there was only one road. The last few chapters are tragic and pretty bleak, but worse than that, the introspection goes on too long and gets a little boring.

I also wish the author had been a little braver in his myth busting. There’s a lot of frontier justice in this book and McMurtry can’t help justifying every lynching. I think it would have been more interesting and Captan Call had occasionally got the wrong guy.

Still a great book to read.

 A problem with this site is that the structure of it rewards you for reading a great number of books. (That's not something true only here; people have for centuries bragged about the number of books they read.) [a:Larry McMurtry|1055|Larry McMurtry|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1540995857p2/1055.jpg]'s [b:Lonesome Dove|256008|Lonesome Dove (Lonesome Dove #1)|Larry McMurtry|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1559668037l/256008.SY75.jpg|3281465] is 945 pages long. I could've read three books or more in the same length of time.
 The copy I read has been around the house forever. It's a mass market paperback printed in 1986 and cost $4.95 then, pretty expensive at the time, and the pages, not acid free, are yellowed and stained. At first, I wanted to splurge for a better copy, but as read further into it, having an aged copy felt right.
 I've never had an interest in the cowboy genre, which is most of the reason I've put off reading this for so many years despite hearing raves. I can only quote a blurb from USA Today in one of the front pages: "If you read only one western novel in your life, read Lonesome Dove."
 I have zero interest in Texas in 1875, or ranching, or traveling from Texas to Montana. And yet, there's nothing I can say about it I haven't heard many times, like as long as it is, I wish it were longer. No matter how much I like a book I'm reading these days, I'm usually happy to finish it, but in this case, it's like someone I really liked stayed with me for over a month and then left.

Every word in this book seems to be chosen just perfectly. The writing is simple yet evocative and the characters are unforgettable, especially the leads Gus and Call, aging ex-Texas Rangers who engage in a slightly Quixotic cattle drive from the Rio Grande to semi-mythical Montana.

But the tone not so consistent. A chapter of McMurtry’s irascible cowpokes exchanging wit will be followed by brutal sexual assault, then a passage of high adventure will lead to a shocking description of violence reminiscent of Blood Meridian (or perhaps Bone Tomahawk).

And while the cowpokes of the story are shown with depth and humor, nobody else is. In particular the Indians are either remorseless superhuman savages or pathetic criminals waiting around to be slaughtered.

And slaughtered they are. It’s hard to square the wry iconoclasts that Gus and Call start as with the Terminator-like killing machines they become when they interact with Indians. They also beat people severely for minor insults and hang whoever they feel deserves it according to their own unwritten moral code.

The ultraviolence stands out even more because the rest of the adventure is so captivating. McMurtry transported me to the semi-fantastic time of the frontier, when brave men (or Terminators) carved a path in front of advancing Western society.

He’s clearly fictionalizing the period in the same way that American writers have since the period itself, but I can’t deny that the mythic grandeur of the style really grabs me and McMurtry’s writing is wonderful. I just wish that he had acknowledged that maybe a world where strong men with guns decide what’s right or wrong and who lives or dies might not be so great an ideal.