Entry 13: Go West
Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurty (1985) Pultizer Prize - 946 pages
Long Book, Long Review
Larry McMurty’s Lonesome Dove is an epic journey through the American West following the Civil War. Augustus McRae and Woodrow Call, two former Texas Rangers easing into their twilight years, run a cattle and horse operation in the hardscrabble town of Lonesome Dove, Texas, near the Mexican border. Gus is loquacious, good-humored, and generous, full of the zest and joy of living. Call is essentially a loner, a withholding man who is a foil to Gus’s expansive nature; an introvert to his extrovert, personifying the rigidness of frontier justice. Call and Gus are respected by their men, having honed their skills and burnished their reputations during the exploits of their Rangering days. When we meet them, Gus still hungers for adventure, whereas Call seems to have worn his way into a joyless rut, beholden to his dutiful, overly-conscientious work ethic, devoid of purpose.
When Jake Spoon, a young, ne’er do well, returns to Lonesome Dove, he inspires Gus and Call to drive their cattle to Montana to establish a ranch. And so the epic journey begins, as the men and their band of green ranch-hands maneuver cattle and horses through Texas, Kansas, Nevada, Wyoming and into Montana. They encounter natural dangers as well as human perfidy. We meet colorful characters: Lorena, a young prostitute; July Johnston, a sheriff in pursuit of Jake; and Clara Allen, the woman who declined to marry Gus sixteen years previously, and who now lives in Nebraska with her husband and children. Among the party is young Newt, a seventeen-year-old boy who doesn’t realize Captain Call is his father. Call, who expects honesty in others, is unable to admit the truth to himself about the boy’s paternity, and so he fails Newt in this most essential way, by not claiming him.
With a deft touch and remarkable insight, McMurty has created layered, singular female characters. Writing about the past can be tricky: prejudices, and acceptable words, change over time. McMurty’s novel holds up astonishingly well, likely because he avoids stereotypes, revealing the humanity in everyone. One quibble: the people depicted here are diverse, but POV characters are all White. Diverse characters are often “sacrifice characters” — they’re decent, skilled, honest — then they perish. But many of McMurty’s characters perish; that’s the realism here. Conditions in the West are harsh, its people are brutal. Over 900 pages, McMurty’s characters make bad choices, commit atrocities, try to do the right thing but fail. Characters clash not just with horse thieves and Indians, but with themselves; in fact, more often it’s their own flaws which augur their downfall.
The West is scarcely populated, but men’s reputations precede them. Restless characters drift, like tumbleweed, from town to town. The premonitions of fortune tellers help prepare the reader for certain events, and chance plays a major role here — innocents may be killed by stray bullets and bad luck; criminals are apprehended the same way. Heroes die and reputations are built, often due to luck more than skill. Speech and silence are major themes; Gus and Clara excel at verbal sparring while others are numb, or else hoard silence intentionally, or, like Call, they’re simply wired that way. Characters lie to themselves about what they want, but not Clara; her honesty and self knowledge are refreshing. Families aren’t always a benefit, but those without families seem to fare far worse. Only willful, stubborn people survive these conditions.
McMurty writes with humor and his language sings. His American Western vernacular is colorful; the easy bantering between the men is so natural it’s as though we’re hunched around the campfire with them, spooning warm beans from a tin cup after a weary day on the range.
“You’re like a starving person whose stomach is shrunk up from not having any food. You’re shrunk up from not wanting nothing,” Gus tells Lorena.
“Here we are in a rock fight with a girl no bigger than a minute, and she’s winning. If news gets out about this, we’ll have to retire…. Our reputations as desperadoes will be ruint forever.”
Jake, “the world’s child”
Lorena has “a distance in her such as he had never met in a woman.”
The book’s conclusion echoes the journey undertaken in Dee Alexander Brown’s Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee. When McMurty’s epic concludes, it’s satisfying. The story wraps up, but not every end is cauterized. This ending is believable and true. Like Gus’s heart. *****Highest Recommendation
ROUND UP: Epic Tales and Western Tales: The Heroic Quest
Madeline Miller’s Circe tells of Odysseus, the guy who unleashed the hero’s journey in our western canon; in Larry McMurty’s Lonesome Dove, as in Circe, characters try to dodge Fate, but it trips them up, with an ironic twist, in the end. In Neal Stephenson’s Termination Shock, characters retrace the same ground as McMurty’s Call and McRae, on boats and jeeps rather than horses. The discussion of performative masculinity, and what it can devolve into, is a theme in both novels. Power of the Dog is also concerned with the pitfalls inherent in rigid codes of masculinity. In Lonesome Dove, encounters with Indians are fraught: the Comanche Blue Duck is a psychopath, while other Indians are driven to desperation because they’re starving. As buffalo herds thin out, a way of life is ending. Captain Call reflects that “Gus had always been one to preach diplomacy with the red man and over the years had engaged in many councils that Call himself thought pointless. Gus had talked to many a warrior that Call would merely have shot….” Gus does not revere individualism; he seeks harmony with others, and in so doing, he is the heart and conscience of McMurty’s novel.
Tommy Orange’s There, There depicts contemporary Indians in Oakland, California, a people divested of their ancestral lands for generations, and adrift. We see in There There how the stark history of the past ripples through our present moment. With the standoff in 2014 between Cliven and Ammon Bundy and their followers over their “rights” to graze cattle on federal lands, we see what Didion refers to in her 1993 essay, “The Golden Land,” how there is an “extreme reliance… on federal money, so seemingly at odds with the emphasis on unfettered individualism…” Orange’s Indians elevate community and pride in shared heritage. However several of Orange’s young men fall into the trap of violence as a way to assert their masculinity. This performative masculinity is a trap, it leads, inevitably, to death rather than to regeneration. But then there’s Tony, who, as a boy, had been accustomed to re-enacting standard Western tropes in his childhood play with Terminators figurines: “There is a battle, then a betrayal, then a sacrifice. The good guys end up winning, but one of them dies…” When the time comes for Tony to make that sacrifice, he will do so. Tony, an Indian boy born with Fetal Alcohol Syndrome, becomes the archetypal Western hero we need today — someone willing to sacrifice for others.