Captain's Log: Lonesome Dove

Riding the long trail with Larry McMurtry

Captain’s Log is where I’ll share immediate thoughts about whatever I’ve read recently, share some links, and shoot the shit. Thanks for being a paid subscriber!

Photo by Karsten Winegeart on Unsplash

In the introduction to the 25th anniversary reissue of Lonesome Dove, Larry McMurtry takes a second to talk some shit. Lonesome Dove is the book, McMurtry says, “that allows me to join the small company of ‘respectable’ writers whose fiction deals with the American West: Cormac McCarthy, Walter Van Tilburg Clark, Tom Lee¹ and a handful of others, below whom comes the vast desert of the pulpers, the sons and daughters of Max Brand (Frederick Faust), Louis L’Amour and many hundreds of others.” Hey, 25th anniversary of your Pulitzer Prize winning and most popular book (or second most - Terms of Endearment has its fans), time to pop off a little. But after reading Lonesome Dove, Larry ought to have built a little level for himself somewhere below Cormac McCarthy and sat himself comfortably there.

I’m no great fan of Cormac McCarthy – I think he’s fine, though a bit derivative of Faulkner – but whatever he’s doing in his Westerns is different than what McMurtry is doing. McCarthy frequently uses his Western fiction to try out weird experiments in syntax, stretch the limits of punctuation, and put cosmic sermons into the mouths of cowboys. Lonesome Dove features none of those flourishes; it is a well-told but also plainly told story. I hate to call anything a guilty pleasure, but this one is squarely in that zone – a good yarn with extremely well-drawn characters and a good plot. No frills!

Lonesome Dove is ‘modern’ in the way that Game of Thrones is ‘modern’ – McMurtry knows what the conventions of the genre are and works against those, killing off characters indiscriminately and often anti-heroically, and looks at power and history-making in a realistic way – whoever’s left on top gets to tell the story, and usually in their favor, no matter how grimy or lucky the process to get there.