Book Report: Lonesome Dove

16. Larry McMurtry, Lonesome Dove (1985) (10/5/24)

One day on the way home from doing trail work in the Ventana Wilderness, my companions and I got to talking about books. I'm not sure how Lonesome Dove came up, but the other two had read it and said it was great—maybe even one of the best books they'd ever read. Now, that's a mighty good recommendation. So I ordered it. And then, unusually for me, I picked it up and started to read, almost immediately. (Usually, the 857-page books get shelved and glare at me, making me feel guilty, for years on end.) I did have to put it down briefly for the last book I read, but for the last couple of months I've been immersed in Lonesome Dove. 

And man oh man, what a book—what a story—what a cast of characters. It definitely deserved its Pulitzer Prize.

What to say about it, really? The book is basically a road trip on horseback, surrounded by cows. It's a restlessness on the American frontier, a quest to satisfy a dream. One of the two Hat Creek head honchos, Augustus McCrae, is bigger than life (though I cannot picture Robert Duvall playing him in the TV series—for me, he was Sam Elliott all the way; though Duvall could easily be the other head honcho, Call... maybe I will adjust my take once I've seen the series, which I definitely intend to do... as for Tommy Lee Jones as Call, ditto, but again: I'll check it out, maybe it works). Though it does have the grace of a few women's stories as well. And Sheriff July Johnson's story. And the brief appearances of random other characters. So much life!

But it's a sad story. Although it begins in optimism and high spirits, it ends up, well, yes, sad. Sad in the way life can be sad, with its losses and missed opportunities and wrong turns and hardness. There is the satisfaction of actually finishing the drive of the cattle from Texas to Montana near the Canadian border and the establishment of a ranch. And some of the characters find their way to a place of stability and safety, at least, if not necessarily happiness. But there are so many lost opportunities, missed connections. So much loneliness.

I flagged the book like crazy. Here's a passage from chapter 2 (of 102), when the mood was playful and optimistic. The chapter begins by describing Woodrow Call's habit of seeking alone time:

Of course, real scouting skills were superfluous in a place as tame as Lonesome Dove, but Call still liked to get out at night, sniff the breeze and let the country talk. The country talked quiet; one human voice could drown it out, particularly if it was a voice as loud as Augustus McCrae's. Augustus was notorious all over Texas for the strength of his voice. On a still night he could be heard at least a mile, even if he was more or less whispering. Call did his best to get out of range of Augustus's voice so that he could relax and pay attention to other sounds. If nothing else, he might get a clue as to what weather was coming—not that there was much mystery about the weather around Lonesome Dove. If a man looked straight up at the stars he was apt to get dizzy, the night was so clear. Clouds were scarcer than cash money, and cash money was scarce enough. 

And here's a passage from chapter 92, a hundred pages from the end, featuring Gus's true love, Clara—though they were both too independent to be able to come together—and her helping hand, Cholo. Clara's husband has just died, after lying in a sort of coma for three months having been kicked in the head by a horse. And years earlier, she lost three sons to sickness, who continue to haunt her thoughts.

They sat quietly for a while, drinking coffee. Watching Clara, Cholo felt sad. He did not believe she had ever been happy. Always her eyes seemed to be looking for something that wasn't there. She might look pleased for a time, watching her daughters or watching some young horse, but then the rolling would start inside her again and the pleased look would give way to one that was sad.
     "What do you think happens when you die?" she asked, surprising him. Cholo shrugged. He had seen much death, but had not thought much about it. Time enough to think about it when it happened.
     "Not too much," he said. "You're just dead."
     "Maybe it ain't as big a change as we think," Clara said. "Maybe you just stay around near where you lived. Near your family or wherever you was happiest. Only you're just a spirit, and you don't have the troubles the living have."
     A minute later she shook her head, and stood up. "I guess that's silly," she said, and started back to the house.

I've got death on my mind lately anyway, and most of the deaths that happen in this book were, yes, sad—unnecessary, in a way, though of course the only "necessity" about death is that it happen, at some point. Many, or maybe all, of these deaths come from violence, whether natural—a swarming mass of cottonmouth snakes—or human-caused—being gunshot or lanced or arrowshot or hanged. You want to see the bad guys get their dues, but not the good, innocent ones. The ones still trying to figure out, understand, just what they really want from life.

This is apparently the third book in a tetralogy. I'm content to inhabit only this slice of that reality. I don't want to see any more death (McMurtry, in a 2010 preface to LD, indicates that a main character who ends up alive in this book does eventually meet his end, and honestly, I'd rather just remember him alive), and I don't need to experience the Texas Rangering past of Gus and Woodrow. This book gave me an entire world, and I am grateful, if sadly so, for that.