Lonesome Dove – Larry McMurty

In kindergarten they tell us not to judge a book by its cover, just before teaching us the process by which we should pre-judge books, often by their covers.

Common saying aside, judging books before you by them is not necessarily a bad thing. If anything else it will save you money. My mother had a copy of Lonesome Dove and she spoke fawningly about this book for years. My mother also grew up reading Tex, and had a deep love for the American West that I simple could never understand. I was a sci-fi kid, who cared about the west?

But this book also came up on a few ‘100 best books ever’ listicles, and so it somehow made it onto my radar.

It deserves the praise. This book truly is excellent.

Mildly, there are some spoilers below.

Lonesome Dove follows a whole host of characters from the titular town of Lonesome Dove all the way up to Montana and then back. As they travel the run through a whole host of standard Western tropes, but none of them occur in a way that felt cliched. Roughly speaking, it follows some cowboys driving a cattle train from Texas to Montana, and the many other people’s whose lives are intersected by this seemingly simple action. Yea, that description wouldn’t make me want to read this either, but rest assured that there is much more to it. When the book opens, the town of Lonesome Dove itself feels like a strong character which really sucks you in.

I am not sure why, but the way this book did not provide its characters with plot armor really impressed me. I was very surprised as to what extent this story discarded characters I had just assumed would have lived. Not that I am all too familiar with the genre, but it felt like a refreshing take to see that life was as cheap in this story as it likely was in the actual wild west it is meant to describe. There was perhaps one exception to this, but we can forgive the novel that single flourish. What did seem strange to me was the way some characters lives intertwined. It kind of made the setting seem smaller than it was, despite the fact that, geographically, going from Texas to Montana is pretty god damned massive.

I often tell people that Toni Morrison does a William Faulkner better than William Faulkner. I feel like Larry McMurty does a Cormac McCarthy as well as Cormac himself, and certainly this book is better than many of Cormac’s own. I often get lost in Cormac’s prose. Here, I never did. But McMurty never reaches the prose highs that Cormac does. This isn’t to say that the prose was bad, but Cormac really has a way of putting words together. But I was struck as to how frequently reading this reminded me of certain moments from Cormac’s All the Pretty Horses, a book that I had to read twice in high school and once in University.