Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry

Over the course of his life, McMurtry
managed or owned 26 bookstores.

It certainly took me long enough to get around to reading this one-time bestselling novel from 1985. (I've still never seen the TV miniseries.) I'm glad I finally did read it, though, because it's a wonderful, old-fashioned novel filled with a Dickensian cast of characters, life-and-death perils, and deep emotions. What more could you ask for with your morning coffee?

Review

Prior to reading this, I only knew McMurtry through the movie adaptations of Hud and The Last Picture Show. Those stories were set in modern small-town Texas. By contrast, Lonesome Dove is a full-on Western set in the 1870s. And whereas the movies I mentioned focused on domestic affairs (a failing ranch and failing love affairs), Lonesome Dove follows a Quixotic cattle drive from the Rio Grande to the upper reaches of Montana. Indeed, our main protagonists, Call and Gus, have much in common with the Don and Sancho.

The book features enough hair-raising adventures to keep any fan of traditional genre Westerns entertained for its nearly 900-page length. McMurtry proves to be a masterful conjurer of dramatic confrontations, narrow escapes, and heartbreaking deaths. The book is as male-dominated as you'd expect in a Western about a cattle drive, but two of the novel's most important characters are women. Their stories are hard and unsentimental -- and just as gripping as the men's stories.

As if all that weren't enough, the novel also encompasses a coming-of-age story. While Lonesome Dove is the name of the town where the story begins and ends, the teenaged boy named Newt can also be thought of as the "lonesome dove" at the heart of the tale. The son of a prostitute who died when he was a boy, not knowing who his father is, Newt is offered a place to live on the ranch that belongs to Call and Gus. As he endures the hardships and bitter lessons of the cattle drive to Montana, he is also searching for his place in the world, trying to understand who he is and where he belongs.

I can't imagine anyone reading this book and not enjoying its many twists and turns or appreciating its fully imagined characters. But its mood is elegiac throughout, its affairs all lacerating, its outcomes all tragic. As with life itself, you won't make it through to the end unscarred.